Notes

Well, if your bandwidth bill from you RSS feeds is starting to eat your income, then you should thank Bloglines and some desktop aggregation software companies.

Check out the new service from Bloglines. Basically they will develop a new Web service API so that applications can pull the feeds from them, instead of pooling your site directly. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot will have support (apparently there is a beta of FeedDemon already out with support for it).

See also Mark excitement over the new service :).

Although I don't like pooling (see a previous post regarding mod_speedyfeed), I see this one as a necessary step towards a real pub-sub network. Bloglines, as others who already have a lot of feeds locally, are the best players to start, or to feed a pub-sub network.

Update: there is a Perl module already!
Update 2: some comments from Brent give you some idea about the possibilities of this setup.

Very good stuff, congrats to Bloglines.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Before you say anything, yes I know that Quicksilver has a plugin for del.icio.us, but this is different.

Quicksilver can be configured to do web searches. You can use that feature to jump directly to a tag-filtered URL like this.

To do that, follow this steps:

1. bookmark in Safari the following URL: http://del.icio.us/melo/***. Change melo to your username or to tag if you want to search globally. Give a short name to the bookmark (I use del). You'll use this name in Quicksilver;
2. activate Quicksilver (CMD-Space in my setup);
3. rescan the Catalog (CMD-R) so that he finds your new bookmark;
4. type the bookmark name, press Enter and type your tag query: css or css+ie_bugs or whatever. Type Enter to execute.

From now on, you can use this by just doing step 4.

Simple and efficient. I love Quicksilver.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

It took me some time to figure this out, so to those of you who are as dumb as me, here is how you do it:

1. First, go to your blog setup, and make sure Markdown is the default formatting option. In Moveable Type, you need to select Edit Configuration > Preferences > Default Text Formatting for New Entries;
2. go back to ecto, and choose Window > Accounts, select the blog you want, and click Update cache in the toolbar.
3. In my case, I also changed the ecto preferences, in Editing, the default mode to HTML. If you are going to use Markdown, you might as well change all the HTML Text colors in that pane to black.

That's it.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I think that this Dilbert strip is the best one I've seen in a long time.

Anyway, Dilbert and bash.org are my morning kicks to start coding.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

There is a new version of ecto ready to be released. I've been using the betas for some weeks now, and I'm very happy with it.

Check out the latest features. The main one seems to be WYSIWYSG editing, but I started using Markdown a couple of days ago so I cannot say if it works or not. For me, having multiple posts at the same time, and a improved entries & drafts window are welcome additions.

My remaining problem is the trackback interface: it seems that I cannot add trackbacks with the keyboard only.

Anyway, it's a very good release, and if you are looking for a Mac OS X app to blog (Windoze version also available), highly recommended.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The latest band-aid solution for the increase bandwidth taken with syndication feeds seems to be mod_speedyfeed. Although a Atom-only solution, I'm sure someone will adapt it to RSS in no time. Client-side support will follow, I suppose.

Yet, it still is another attempt to improve a broken model and ignore the real problem (syndication is still pooling), and this keeps us from having a decent solution (IMHO pubsub of some sort, with near-by nodes).

I wonder when we will see a global pubsub solution that scales, with multicast distribution of changed feeds to interested nodes.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Now that the JPEG bug has a public exploit, the last step is to crack a widely used site and replace a JPEG image.

Imagine what you could do if you where able to replace the Windows Update site logo :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

... calling Quicksilver “just an application launcher” is a little like calling the Ten Commandments “two stones some dude found on a hill.”

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Flickr is really great. I joined a couple of weeks ago, but I only got a chance of doing some serious setup with it.

I'm using the following tools:

• iPhoto plugin for flicker: really really simple way of uploading you photos directly from iPhoto. It lets you choose the title, tags and even resizes the photo before uploading. The current version (0.7) has a small bug: it strips the EXIF information, so it's not really ready yet, but the author is looking into it;
• Flickr Screensaver: really nice, but could be better: I would like to be able to choose to see all my contacts photos instead of my own only. You can choose to see favourites, which is nice;
• Keyword Assistant: not really Flickr related, but if you use iPhoto, this will help you tag all your photos and that makes it easy to upload them to Flickr.
• Don't forget that you can upload photos via email, and even better, you can also post a photo to your weblog via flickr by email. It's twisted but it works: just setup you blog in Flickr, and add a email address to it.

And now the wishlist: open the Pro Accounts soon, 10Mb upload per month is not enough :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

If you to choose a single blog to follow, what would be your choice?

My choice varies with time. During august I would probably had chosen a XMPP-related blog, before that anything perl related, but the blog of the month must be 43 Folders. It's without a doubt the most signal-to-noise ratio blog I'm currently following (out of 150 RSS subscriptions, probably half of those are blogs, the others news sources).

What's your choice? Trackback or comment your choice.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I have a iSight camera for some months now, and except for the occasional video chat, it pretty much stays there at the top of my TiBook.

Today I came across this article talking about a software that's been developed by Delicious Monster Software (great site, btw) called Delicious Library 3.0.

The software is in close beta right now, but you can check the ThinkSecret review of a beta, and it looks very very good.

The killer feature for me is that they support scanning the barcodes of CDs, DVDs and books with your iSight. The ThinkSecret article mentions another app with the same capability, Booxter, but a not-as-perfect implementation as Library 3.0.

The screenshots of this app seem very nice. Just hope they deliver it soon. I need to catalogue my growing 300-plus DVDs collection.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Amazing what you can do with Javascript. Checkout this Javascript library by Dean Edward that you can include in your pages that makes IE actually support standart web stuff like CSS2.

Very cool. Via The Lunatic Fringe

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I confess that I'm a bit scared at all those operators, but the arrangement is just perfect. I'm now a proud owner of a A3 copy of it, thanks to a co-worker with access to a large format printer.

Now I only need a A3 Color Printer... Any one? :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

...is coming to a speaker set near you. I wonder If I will be able to put this in my iPod...

It starts Tuesday, September 21, BBC Radio 4. You should be able to find the episodes in their site.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)