Winer Watcher is a great tool… It probably has a better use than Scripting News, but it’s powerful nonetheless. It reminds me of a teacher/boss hovering over you while you work, but since I let people know when I update a post, it wouldn’t bother me.
I’d like to see Mark aim this beast at something like the New York Times or the Washington Post. From doing my fair share of scraping, I see that they change stuff all the time. It would be interesting to see what. Of course, a fair share of their content is either from the AP or from the paper so you’d have to pick your battles wisely. I’m sure there is enough original work to make it fun.
The problem with taking WW to the Times is that the RSS feed isn’t full posts. You’d either have to create one (not that hard) or just write WW to work on normal .html documents and then make sure to identify content areas (don’t want ads messing things up).
So Mark, how about it?
Update: Mark has password protected the site. Sorry if you missed out on the party.
As smart people, I’m sure you all realize today is free slurpee day. For those of lesser intellect, it’s 7-11-03 which is a great date for a clever marketing ploy for the crack PR team over at 7-Eleven.
If you get one let me know… I want to start a movement and cost 7-Eleven at least $4.
Update: I got mine. It’s a mere 7.11 ounces (told you it was a marketing ploy), but it’s 7.11 ounces of sugary frozen Pepsi. You can’t beat that.
Oh, and welcome to all the Kottke readers. Hope everyone hearts Mena!
Got the Nokia 5100 in for review today (for MobileTracker). Very nifty. It’s the first of a new class of phone that I am dubbing SUP’s (Sport Utility Phone).
It’s not for corporate whore’s, but it’s not for poor kids. The waterproof exterior that lets you chat in the rain is a nice touch. As is the built in LED flashlight. It’s not all gadgets though, it’s got a 4,096 color display and all the trimmings (XHTML browser, MMS, Java, polyphonic, speakerphone).
The unexpected feature is an FM radio. You need to have the hands free plugged in (works as an antenna), and it works quite well. You can even make it go through the speaker phone for those times where you just gotta have something going on.
PS: It’s also got a thermometer and now I know I’m not crazy… It IS hot in here!
In the latest MacAddict (came today, I’m guessing it is the July edition) there is a “how-to” article for publishing RSS feeds. Of course, being the geek I am, I flipped past the saucy editorials and went directly to the piece on RSS. The only decent bit in the whole thing is the screen shot of NetNewsWire (it featured an appearance by MacMerc).
It never really explained why RSS is handy, how it builds your traffic or really what it even does. It basically just said “here’s how”. Furthermore, it made it sound like the only way to author a feed is by hand! Personally, if you have to do it by hand, I don’t think your site should have a feed. If you are making enough updates to warrent a feed and you still do it by hand, look into installing a CMS.
I could not believe there was a whole article on using TextEdit to write out cryptic XML. I’m sure it impressed no one. At least they didn’t try to tackle RDF :). It also never mentioned the pissing contest that is RSS. Probably a good thing though.
Update: She told readers to use Userland’s validator which is known to be… umm… crap. Use this one. Also as readers have pointed out, MacAddict.com doesn’t even have a feed. Come on.
You can subscribe to this site’s feed which is located here. The benefit is you can read the posts right in your news reader (complete with sexy photos) and can easily see when updates are made.
Looking through all the new TypePad weblogs, you find a lot of people that have never been under an NDA before. You can always tell because they start off by saying one of the following:
- “I can’t say much”
- “Well, did I mention that I can’t say much?”
- “So I’m under an NDA”
- “I’d love to share how cool TypePad is, but I can’t say much”
I’m only half exagerating with the “I can’t say much” stuff.
More references will be added as I find more TypePad blogs… It’s now limited to a selection of 10 20. If you’ve got one, comment baby. (Ed. note – thanks for all the comments… If you have a TypePad, please drop your URL off at the door stop)
Over at NewsIsCrappy.com, almost all the search engine hits (most of the traffic) are for crazy things. I’m starting to get scared. For example, we’re the #4 hit for “Katie Couric boobs” which is quite frankly disturbing.
First, she’s old. Second, I didn’t even know she had boobs. I guess that’s a given since she is a female, but it wasn’t one of those things I actually sat down and thought about. Evidently a lot of other people have thought about it… At least enough to query Google for it.
Every once in a while a real odd story of corporate policy comes along… Today is that day. InfoSync says that AT&T Wireless will be hiring “faux grannies” to tell rude mobile phone users to be quiet and give polite users candy. This is too hokey to not be true.
If you want to meet these grannies, try yacking in NYC at Grand Central and Penn Central.
I set up some .htaccess trickery to forward n3rd.net‘s RSS feed over here for the time being. If you have the feed in your reader still, that’s why you see all the new posts. Enjoy!
Woot! Raena has a TypePad. I wonder if it will be like Slashdot–early accounts will fetch high prices on eBay. For example, my weblog is number 771 (there is a centralized ID system). That’s pretty close to the start of things if it grows to the size of blogger, which has 1,000,000+ users.
Welcome aboard Raena!
Update: This is post number 46,328 in the TypePad system as well (all imported posts get an ID). Neat!
I can even post photos from my phone! No, I don’t have a camera phone, but I loaded some pictures via Bluetooth. This is my friend Rachel.
