January 6, 2003

Outlook RSS News Feed Aggregator

Greg Reinacker says that an Outlook News Aggregator will “…possibly coming soon to a weblog near you.”

I say, Cool! However, I kind of have this functionality already using Aaron’s RSS to Email Aggregator, which BTW was just reviewed on OSDir.

Note to self: Clean up and post mods to the script.

January 5, 2003

Blog Archiving and Metadata

sbraford over at Popdex added a LazyWeb post about looking for a way to index Blog content.

I was thinking that perhaps a way to accomplish this would be to upstream rss feeds into Usenet newsgroups, which then get distributed via NNTP to servers around the world.

I believe the RSS / NNTP convergence is already happening with the likes of nntp//rss and Genecast.

As for historical archiving and searching, Google Groups is ideally suited for this purpose.

January 5, 2003

Blog Time Graph

I received a cool script from Sanjay, which graphs what time of day my blog posts were made for the past 30 days.

Thanks Sanjay!

January 4, 2003

PHP with Google API and B2 Blog

I just added a Google related links query to individual post on hatch.org (If you’re viewing this as an individual post you should see it below the weblog related links. If not, just click on the title of this post).

It was fairly easy to implement, thanks to Sebastian Bergmann PHP Google SOAP class, which provides an interface to Google’s Web Services API. The class also requires PEAR::SOAP package, which puts it all together.

January 3, 2003

Cringely’s 2003 Weblog prediction

From Cringely’s 2003 predictions: “And finally, with the continued (and to me totally inexplicable) rise of web logs, someone — maybe Google — will come up with an effective blog search engine to read all that junk for us and extract what we really care about. ”

I would have to agree that “an effective blog search engine” doesn’t necessarily exist yet. Yeah, Yeah, there’s Blogdex, Daypop, etc … and of course the feed aggregators, but perhaps we need something more like Google News, but hive based like Technorati’s Watchlists.

January 2, 2003

Star Trek fan site get Slashdot’d

Star Trek fans of the original series spent seven years, creating an all-new episode in the 1960s style. Unfortunately, the met up with the Wrath of Slashdot in battle.

January 2, 2003

Mod Foosball

Dennis Crowley: “Take a standard foosball table and make it a little bit smarter.” (via Slashdot)

January 1, 2003

Dave Winer is looking for a new job

From Scripting News: “I’m going to get a new job with a new title, and it’s going to be quite different from being the CEO of a commercial software company.”

Good luck Dave! Hope you have better luck than most these days!

January 1, 2003

Have a beer with those steamed vegetables

From: NY Times: “Thirty years of research has convinced many experts of the health benefits of moderate drinking for some people. A drink or two a day of wine, beer or liquor is, experts say, often the single best nonprescription way to prevent heart attacks — better than a low-fat diet or weight loss, better even than vigorous exercise. Moderate drinking can help prevent strokes, amputated limbs and dementia.”

December 31, 2002

LazyWeb recursion

Ben Hammersly creates the fodder feed for the LazyWeb, which IMHO is one of those clever “windshield wiper” ideas that once you see it you’re think, “Man! it’s so obvious, why didn’t someone implement this sooner!” Very ingenious! I hope to contribute!