May 1st, 2006
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February 27th, 2006
Craigslist offers RSS feeds on their searches. So if you are in the market for a new car, and want to put RSS to work for you, just make a search and subscribe to the feed link provided in the bottom right corner.
For example:
Now watch for the ads to roll in.
Craigslist even stays true to their minimalist style by using simple text with an orange background rather than the RSS icon!
I noticed that my local Buy and Sell is also doing this but their search interface isn’t as friendly, plus I don’t want to limit myself to just Vancouver.
Technorati Tags: cars, rss, craigslist
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February 1st, 2006
Guy Kawasaki posted some stats on his 1 month blogging anniversary. There are some interesting site stats and some potentially dangerous points since he posted his AdSense earnings which is apparently a no-no. But these two points stick out the most for me:
8. Traffic to my web site, www.guykawasaki.com, increased from about 400 page views/day to 800-1,200 page views/day.
9. My Amazon sales rank for The Art of the Start (go ahead, I dare you to click on this link) hovered between #1,500 and #2,000 prior to the start of my blog. Currently, the sales rank hovers between #500 and #750.
Another interesting tidbit is that he uses SnipURL to track how many people click on the links. I always thought that these services were only good for getting past mail readers breaking up lines, but I may have to start thinking about how else they can be used.
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January 19th, 2006
There is a problem with Thunderbird 1.5 and Wordpress RSS feeds. If you are having problems getting the full text feeds, try a nightly build of Thunderbird. That fixed my problems.
Posted in Computers | 1 Comment »
January 16th, 2006
I recently upgraded to Thunderbird 1.5 and it looks like other people are in the same situation in regards to the full text feeds. The data is hidden in the content:encoded section.
Some thoughts about Scoble – wakeless.net
His feed has changed and it doesn’t appear to be a fulltext feed in Thunderbird I’ve looked at the feed and I know the data is there, but I can’t see it. I wonder how many other people this is happening to.
Posted in Blogging, Computers | No Comments »
January 9th, 2006
Dave Winer’s idea for improving search:
Scripting News: 1/9/2006
Let me tell you where my weblog is. Then it knows what my interests are. Give me search results relevant to who I am.
That is a very cool idea, and I’d like to see the results from that search! It would also encourage people to start blogging, or blog more if they could improve their search results. If Google implemented this, I hope that they would allow you to use any URL as your identity, and not just a page in their blog network.
It’s somewhat related to the Outfoxed extension, but that only sorts the results from a Google search on a single page, ie it will move something to the top of page 1 only if it appeared on page 1 in the first place.
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December 21st, 2005
I’ve just installed the Performancing for Firefox plugin, and it is great! It’s not as polished as Flock, but the editor is quite nice, and the setup was easy. Hopefully we’ll see more features coming soon, like Drag and Drop quoting, and automatic Technorati tags.
Technorati tags: firefox, flock, performancing
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November 30th, 2005
After much effort, we’ve finally released our official Firefox extension which supports Firefox 1.0.7+ and up.
del.icio.us: extend your firefox 581%
The del.icio.us team has released a Firefox plugin to integrate their bookmarks with the Firefox browser. I’m glad to see their venture capital money has been put to good use. 
technorati tags: firefox, delicious
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November 1st, 2005
scobelizer talks about why people don’t trust Microsoft for Web 2.0 Applications:
1) Startup costs. Linux is free. Ruby on Rails is free. MySQL is free.
2) Performance per dollar. They perceive that a Linux server running Apache has more performance than IIS running .NET.
3) Finding tech staff is easier. There are a whole new raft of young, highly skilled people willing to work long hours at startups who can build sites using Ruby on Rails.
4) Perception of scalability. The geeks who run these new businesses perceive that they can scale up their data centers with Linux and not with Windows (the old “Google runs on Linux” argument).
5) That Microsoft doesn’t care about small businesses. After all, Microsoft is an evil borg, but Ruby on Rails comes from a single guy: David Heinemeier Hansson. He has a blog and answers questions fast.
6) That open source makes it easier to fix problems and/or build custom solutions. A variant of the old “Google or Amazon couldn’t be built on Windows” argument.
7) On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms. That doesn’t mean a Windows app. Or even an app that runs only in IE. It must run on every variant of Linux and Macintosh too.
They don’t want to take shit from their friends (or, even, their Venture Capitalist). Most of this is just pure cost-control. I can hear the conversation now: “OK, you wanna go with Windows as your platform, but is the extra feature worth the licensing fees for Windows?”
9) No lockin. These new businesses don’t want to be locked into a specific vendor’s problems, er products. Why? Because that way they can’t shop for the best price among tools (or move to something else if the architecture changes).
10) More security. The new businesses perceive Linux, Apache, Firefox, and other open source stuff to have higher security than stuff built on Windows.
11) More agility. I’ve had entrepreneurs tell me they need to be able to buy a server and have it totally up and running in less than 30 minutes and that they say that Linux is better at that.
12) The working set is smaller. Because Linux can be stripped down, the entrepreneurs are telling me that they can make their server-side stuff run faster and with less memory usage.
Even though he uses some weasel words (I see the word perceive occurs quite frequently), I think he gets it right.
Posted in Web design | No Comments »
November 1st, 2005
Very cool, I didn’t know del.icio.us had private bookmarks! Alex Bosworth has a script that generates a ‘bookmarklet’ that you can use to create bookmarks that only you can see.
A while back I made a bookmarklet for del.icio.us that lets you save bookmarks for yourself that no one else can see are in your bookmarks.
Unfortunately in the move to the new and improved servers that now host LiveMarks, I forgot about the bookmarklet and this week it hasn’t been working.
If you are using the del.icio.us bookmarklet, I’m sorry but you’ll have to generate a new bookmarklet on this page, so you can continue posting bookmarks for yourself.
I hope this gets integrated into flock soon, because I have some bookmarks that I’m not using yet in flock because I can’t let the general public see them yet!
Posted in Blogging | 2 Comments »