I’m still using Bloglines as my aggregator and have found it quite useful. Yesterday they released Bloglines for Connected PDAs which is a version optimized for small devices. If you connect to the main page (www.bloglines.com), it will automatically redirect to the mobile page if it detects a PDA browser. I tried it on my Tungsten C (802.11) and Tungsten T3 (Bluetooth) and it worked well in both cases. The PDA-optimized pages are really fast, in part because the icon for each channel has been removed, meaning there are practically no graphics to download. Sample screenshots are shown below. …
When providing feeds for a web site (RSS, for example), there tend to be two camps: those who provide full entries and those who provide just an excerpt or summary. In the latter case, the rationale is often to drive readers to the web site to read the actual article. However, that can be inconvenient for people who follow hundreds of web sites through their http://www.buyantibioticshere.com/ feeds. In fact, it can have a negative effect if people don't follow the summary at all. Decaffeinated has a good discussion of the issue and an argument for including the full entries in…
Portable USB drives (loaded with flash memory from 64MB, 256MB, and up) have become quite popular and are really handy for carrying files or data around. What I really needed was a way to synchronize my files, so I turned to an open-source package called Unison for the answer.
I just added an Atom 0.3 feed to this site (in addition to the RSS 2.0 feed which I'll keep as well). Following the example template from Mark Pilgrim, it was quite simple. The template uses a couple of MovableType plugins (UTCDate and MTEntryModified, both from Staggernation.com). For now, I didn't take the additional step of serving the file up as MIME type “application/atom+xml”, instead just sticking with xml type until aggregators better support the subscription model. My current news reader of choice (Bloglines) now reads Atom 0.3 feeds without a problem. So does the latest Feed Validator. It will…
Today's San Jose Mercury had a story describing the Bay Area's contributions to aviation in conjunction with the 100 year anniversary of the Wright Brother's first flight. I was surprised to see connections to my alma matter (Santa Clara University: John J. Montgomery, a Santa Clara University professor, gets credit for the first controlled piloted flight, in a glider he called the Gull, off the bluffs near San Diego 20 years before the Wright brothers' first powered flight. There was also mention of the founding of Lockheed (Lockheed History): So Allen Loughead, a Santa Clara University student, and his brother…