jerakeen.org

A side-effect of all this Google Social lunacy is that I’m seeing a lot of URLs for people that I wouldn’t normally have put in their Address Book entries. For instance, Simon Wistow’s Vox page links to his gestalt page which in turn links to his use.perl page, so I see all of these URLs in Shelf. It fetches the pages, and discovers that there’s a single RSS feed advertised on the use.perl page - http://use.perl.org/index.rss. But this RSS feed is nothing to do with Simon’s page - it’s the main use.perl article feed. Shelf doesn’t know this, of course, so Simon’s display in my Shelf window contains all recent use.perl articles.

The HTML spec seems to imply to me that rel=”alternate” links are for linking to the same content, but represented in a different way, not some completely unrelated content that happens to be hosted on the same domain. This is very annoying.

I’m picking on use.perl unreasonably here, of course. Lots of people do it. use.perl is just the first one I noticed. Followed by search.cpan.org (author modules pages have an RSS feed of the master module upload list). But there are others.

Web service to convert from one data type to another - RSS to JSON, Triples to RSS, etc, etc. Shiny.

http://triplr.org/

Syndicate RSS feed entries into thunderbird folders. Seems to work better than the built-in thunderbird RSS support (which plain Doesn’t Work for me)

http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/

me. aggregated. How meta.

http://jerakeen.suprglu.com/

So I wanted to see which of my NNW () subscriptions were dead. And I wanted to get the hang of AppleScript. Right.

set errorlog to ""

tell application "NetNewsWire"
  repeat with check in subscriptions
    set err to error string of check as string
    if length of err > 1 then
      set errorlog to errorlog & “Error for ‘” & ((display name of check) as string) & “’ (” & (RSS URL of check as string) & “): ‘” & ((error string of check) as string) & “’\r”
    end if
  end repeat
end tell

tell application “BBEdit”
  make new text window with properties {contents:errorlog}
end tell

Pretty nifty. Course, you have to have BBEdit. But making it use TextEdit shouldn’t be hard.

sharpreader - a windows RSS feed reader. Uses .NET, which is all the rage nowadays, apparently.

It’s beautiful, easily the best RSS reader I’ve ever seen, and that includes the one I wrote :-). Proper OPML export / import (It’s amazing how meny readers get this wrong), the interface, although slightly hard to figure out makes a lot of sense once you get the hang of it, and frankly usability and learning curves can go hang once I can use the thing.

The nicest feature, though, is the threading. I’ll notice which other blogs you read have linked to this one, and will do the litte ‘+’ symbol thing so you can expand them and see all the interlinks. It’s niiiiiiiice. I’m suddenly tempted to go back to “lectern”:/programming/lectern and hack this in somehow, though it’ll be hard. Maybe I’ll write a mac one and steal the niche of NNW. Maybe I’ll write a bad alpha and get distracted by some other project. Yes, that seems to be the best idea.

Software interfaces evolve like this, it’s wonderful to watch. Web browsers are another fairly immature tech that grow “tabs” and other interface things, and that’s nice to watch too, even if they’re stupid. Genuinely new types of apps are rare, I can’t think of many off the top of my head, although obviously once they’re pointed out, it’s obvious…