Don't Back Down

Today I am releasing a new version of the Bloglines Toolkit for Mozilla. This version was created after receiving some great input from those who downloaded the initial release.

Read "Bloglines Toolkit 0.9.0" »

I was just reading how kottke.org is down to a single RSS feed. There's another feed for remaindered links, so it's not actually a single feed, but that doesn't matter. It got me thinking anyway.

Some time ago, I did the same thing. I don't know if anyone noticed or not. Traffic didn't ever seem to drop considerably, and if anything, it went up, so I'm guessing that there was little, if any, effect on readers. Of course, I'm sure I don't have even a tiny fraction of the readers of Kottke, so that could be an issue too.

In any case, I don't even remember how long ago it was, but I stopped producing my RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed and simply redirected the old location (index.rdf) to the new location (index.xml), which just so happened to be RSS 2.0. I think the main idea is that very few people reading actually cared which format they were viewing, they just wanted to get at the data. Once it's aggregated, it doesn't really matter much.

As to those who make the argument for the semantic web, well, there may be a point there. There may not. In the case of a syndication feed, you're generally talking about data that changes pretty regularly. Very rarely will you see a feed that contains every post ever made. It's typically the last 6-15 or so. Which means you need someone to collect all that data before it would be useful, because it's not going to be sitting around at some point in the future. So why bother, unless someone is collecting it?

It turns out that at least one person is collecting it. The database at Bloglines just keeps getting bigger. As to the semantic web part of it? Tell Bloglines what you're looking for and it'll find it. The feed may be in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or even Atom. The version of the feed just doesn't seem to matter much anymore. Maybe it never did.

Update: There are actually loads of feeds here - you can subscribe to categories or even to individual entries. But there is only one format for feeds. Hope that didn't confuse anyone.

After nearly three months, I'm still using Mozilla's Firefox as my default browser. It's just too good not to do so. Since I recently switched hosts, I decided to take a better look at my stats. It seems that somewhere around 5% of you agree with my decision - at least to the extent that you also use a Mozilla-based browser (though that is not necessarily Firefox).

Read "Extending Mozilla" »

Not only are moose large and lovable, those thousand-pound beauties from Maine attain their size without eating meat. So I don't want to hear from any more vegetarians about how I can lose weight by cutting it out of my diet. Okay, I haven't really heard that from any vegetarians, but I wanted to be proactive.

In any case, it seems that the moose - and the plural of "moose" is indeed "moose", and not "mooses" or even "meese" - have another trick up their sleeve. Er, snout.

Ohio University professor Lawrence Witmer and a graduate student have determined that the evolutionary process of the moose has left them with the rather unique ability to close their nostrils underwater. Especially important when they go bobbing for underwater plant life, and even more impressive when you realize that moose nostrils can be up to four inches wide!

It turns out that it was surprisingly easy to move from one host to another. I'd love to think it's simply my own brilliance, but let's be honest here. Much of the work was easy because I had a copy of the data on my own PC. It was a bit out-of-date, but the general structure was in place. That saved a load of time, especially as I couldn't get FTP access to my prior host.

Read "Moving Movable Type" »

My apologies for the last week or so. My former host was, well, not very good at what they did. The past few days have been spent trying to figure out some alternatives. After some careful consideration and some advice from a friend, I decided to go with Total Choice Hosting. So far, so good. Access is generally quick and things are working. Not too bad for the first 12 hours or so. Much of that was actually me sleeping to try and get rid of the pounding headache I'd had all week. I'll keep you posted. At least, I'll try to keep you posted. And I suspect that I'll be much more successful at that in the very near future.