Sunday, January 04, 2004

Coffee Mug Prefs: "Since many aggregators have unique ways to link to their coffee-mug functions, we give you a place to enter a string that tells feeds.scripting.com what to link to from its mugs." 

Changes to coffee mug prefs. 

Jake Savin: "Update Manila.root to get the new feature." 

Nick Bradbury: "Shareware developers are losing enormous amounts of money to piracy." 

ComputerWorld: "Director for a very long time has had a proprietary scripting language called Lingo," said Miriam Geller, Macromedia director of product management for Director. "With this release, we're adding JavaScript. It's important because now people who are coming to Director don't have to learn a proprietary scripting language. They can use the skills they already have." 

Will bloggers cover the Iowa caucuses? 

Joshua Marshall: "I'm gearing up to go to New Hampshire later this month." 

A solution to a long-standing, vexing problem? 

How to get OPML from aggregators. Specific howto's for 12 popular aggregators, I can easily add more, if people post instructions. 

Susan Kitchens is blogging yesterday's Mars landing. 

The latest pictures from Mars.  

Early Sunday morning on WBUR is spectacularly great. BBC and Morning Edition. None of the inane stuff like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me or Car Talk, or the sports show with the Charles Osgood imitator. But Sunday morning BBC is very nice with coffee and aggregator. Like a trip to Britain and its commonwealth, with an intelligent friend, with a British accent.  

It's nice to be moving in RSS-land again. I have another goodie to roll out shortly, and then a few more tomorrow.  

Scoble explains why RSS kicks butt. I totally agree about full vs excerpts. If you're going to do excerpts, please write summaries and publish those in your feed descriptions. It sucks when a summary ends in mid-sentence just as I'm beginning to get interested.  

Another pet peeve is a low-level programming issue. There's no need to say isPermaLink="true" on the guid element in RSS 2.0 because true is its default value. In a typical feed this wastes about 2.2 percent of the bandwidth used by the feed.