I love the way the Twitter devs joined up and respectfully documented a problem they were having with the Twitter API. No powerlessness. Just facts. And I love that Twitter read what they wrote, and said they'd work with them. Everyone involved deserves maximum credit.#
BTW lost in all the Trump hooplah, there was a successful teacher's march in West Virginia and Oklahoma, and one on the way in Arizona. The Open Source podcast covers it, as always, in a thoughtful and exciting way. #
The rule of links: "Linking is an art. It's a choice. You don't link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence. But when a reader reasonably would want to know more about the subject, the Rule of Links says you should link to it." #
UX tip. I clicked on a wrong link in my bank website. I wanted to quickly get out. I clicked the Cancel button. A dialog appeared asking if I really want to cancel. Yes or no. This is dissonant. I do not want to click YES when I'm saying get me the fcuk out of here now.#
I have a new credit card. This morning I paid for a Starbuck's using Apple Pay. I expected it to fail because I hadn't updated the number. It worked. When I looked it already had the new number. Before I did.#
I generally don't like to look at how mailbox-type readers render this site. The best I've seen are ones that ignore titleless posts. At least they don't show the reader a mangled version of my writing. Then there's the ones that repeat the body of titleless posts in the title. So you see my writing twice, as if I had a stutter. It's not my stutter, the text only appears once in my feed. Readers that get on board with titleless posts are helping to open the door for new kinds of blogging. I've chosen to ignore their ignoring and just plow ahead. BTW, when I say "new way" I really mean "old way." My blog, the original one, esp for RSS support, had titleless posts years before RSS existed. And the format allows titleless posts. So those that don't support them can't really claim to support RSS. #BTW, here's an archive page from this blog in 1996. Look at how the format is evolving. Lots of title-less posts. It's a good format. A lot like Twitter, btw. 💥#
- Michael Uffer had a great idea. Link the orange feed icon next to every feed title to the user's favorite reader's page for that feed. #
- I added the feature, and was immediately able to get it to work with Feedly. Here's an example of a URL that we generate, to view the items it has for the Daring Fireball blog. #
- Then we got it to work with Inoreader. Same idea, here's a link to an Inoreader page for Kottke.#
- I haven't been able to find the equivalent URL for Old Reader, but if it's there, we'll find it. #
- Here's the thread.#
If you've been reading this blog for the last week or so, it must be very confusing. The result of my confusion. I finally had to understand encoding on the web. I wanted feedBase to work for feeds in all languages. The web went through a transition to make it work that way. At UserLand, Jake and Brent did the encoding stuff. I hoped that my new app, feedBase, would "just work." Didn't happen.#- There were two problems:#
- My connection to the feedparser package was not encoding-aware. This, btw, is also true in River5. Rather than do a solution just for feedBase, I did a general solution, coming up with the API that I wanted on Node, basically the same API that we have in Frontier. I will use that package in River5. Hopefully that will make the transition much easier than it otherwise would be. #
- My SQL database wasn't set up for Unicode. So I had to figure out the magic incantations to make it work that way. As with feed parsing, I had hoped it would just work. But I had some excellent help from the newly assembled MySQL mentorship group, again mostly consisting, of course, of JY. He's a real life-saver. #
- Anyway, I'm keeping my eye on it, but I'm hoping now to be able to move on. 💥#