You’re probably going to see this post as soon as I hit publish. I’m almost certain PubSubHubbub went live today on Google Reader.
There was a period of some weird instability with Google Reader earlier today, and I think there was something more than recommendation that hit.
Well, this changes my plans a tiny bit.
No. But I’m pretty sure I can do something awesome in the world of feeds.
FeedSt, as an idea, has been in the back of my head, ever since I started using feed readers. (I actually need to sit down and piece together some history.) From the get go, I knew the dangers of creating a me-too company, a situation where the basic features of the original company are copied plus some additional feature set.
It’s been many months since I started thinking about FeedSt, but I still feel like there’s enough people out there demanding there is a better experience dealing with feeds. I hope to show these issues through blog posts and code.
Them: A seven person engineering team from Google, with stacks of cash and years of dev time. (I’m assuming that the number of contributors on the Google Reader Blog maps directly to the people who are working on it.) The majority of this team is probably incredibly smart and experienced.
Me: A single dev, with very little runway left and a couple months of time left. Not so experienced, and actually is lacking in a huge chunk of the skillset needed to pull this off.
And it’s not just Google Reader. With the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, Streamy.com is probably going to become the darling “social feed reader”. And I’m sure those people are extremely smart.
Regardless, yes, the odds are tremendously against me. But it’s never been this clear to me that I should be doing this. Foolish? Probably. But I only live once. I definitely want to make what seems to be my last chance count.
So with this post, I hope to kick off a series of posts pertaining to this project. Hope to keep you updated as stuff gets done.
Four weeks. I can have something awesome in four weeks, right? Most definitely.
I’m getting busy with so much stuff with FeedSt. As last post would suggest, I’m still very much stuck in the “process” phase. I feel like after I’m out of this swamp, I will actually be able to write something decent.
While that’s happening, I’m seeing how frustrated I am with Google Reader in general. I’m seeing why I wanted to do this project in the first place every time I open up Reader. I’m seeing features I want to implement left and right. The question is what is the most important… and what would make someone use FeedSt over Google’s fine RSS reader in the first place?
But, in any case, 10 days remain. I have no clue what that means, because I truly am my own project manager on this one… is 10.10 the day of the closed testing? Is that when I actually start coding?
After pretty much loving MarsEdit, I have continued the long tradition of creating blank drafts of post ideas; I would just jot down the title, copy and paste a couple links here and write a couple paragraphs there. This is getting to the point where I may have to do a flush of random bits and pieces of posts and start over again.
There’s this post on where I want to take the blog… again. But this time, it’s another retrospective on how far I’ve come. I’ve still got that Ecto vs MarsEdit review (guess who won that one). Confluence… I’m still vexed enough at the code to want to write on it. Holy crap, the ION Drum Rocker… maybe after I get my 3rd cymbal? (No, I haven’t ordered it… yet.) “14.2857% Time”, “The Wart”, “How Braid Changed My Life”, blah blah blah.
So yes, will these get posted? Maybe when I find the FeedSt thing to be boring, I’ll go back to blogging. The reason why I’m blogging tonight is because of what happened with… yeah, if you read the post before this one, you’ll see why I’m trying to take my mind off of stuff.
Is it just me, or is something going on with Reddit or Google Reader? I tested it with Camino and Firefox on a Mac.
Reddit isn’t acting wonky… nor is Google Reader in any other aspect… weird.
Anyone else having issues with the heading for each item not being a link?
Leaked Google Video Discusses Google Reader, Social Efforts
Yes, I know. I would be planning the same exact thing had I been working on Google Reader.
Lots of these things came up while I was talking with Amir on the features we needed to implement to make this social feed reader work. Of course, they are indeed still missing some of the key features that will make Cowbell shine.
One of the more interesting things was:
Google will work on a standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed (’this post has been deleted’ etc.). Such a standard doesn’t exist yet. They will be working with blog tools like Blogger and MovableType.
This is the awesome thing about having the resources as Google does. I was wondering how Cowbell would work around the way RSS and Atom behaved with deletions and updates to an item (by the way, I hate such occurences… they happen quite a bit). Google’s solution: create a new standard. Awesome!
Competition’s heating up before nothing’s been released. But the advantage here is that Cowbell is able to change faster, without any of this legacy code. And yes, for the 80th time, I cannot stand legacy code, even though about 95% of my career will be spent on it. (I hope less, if not less.)
In other news, I’ve decided to buckle down and start back on some client work. I feel like I’m going to put aside freelancing after I’m done with these two projects for a while, seeing as how I really really really want to get back to Rails land.
On a lighter note, remind me to avoid Vietnamese food; at least, from this one place in Minneapolis. Their rolls were amazing when going down, but for some reason, it didn’t want to get digested at all. I had problems going to sleep because my stomach was going insane.
This post has been brought to you by deliriousness.
You know, it took me long enough… seeing as how much I read the feeds on a daily basis:
From your 179 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 13,522 items, starred 296 items, and shared 0 items.
Finally, the site has list of the most recent starred items I found to be interesting. I’ve always wanted to share my recent feed links with the rest of the world. Think of it as a JK filter.
I thought that this was available through a WordPress Plug-in (I think it was called “hacks” back in the day), but actually, it’s just two script tags that you can add to any page on the Internet.
Just go to settings, and click on “add a clip to your site”. Whoo hoo!
Now, get to reading all those lovely posts on the iPhone and Facebook’s platform.
Where the heck did my feeds go?
I was reading through all these posts on the Apple announcement (including the AAPL dip)… and then suddenly, when I logged back on, all my feeds were gone. Just… bampf. Gone.
Is this a sign? Let’s wait and see if my feeds do come back…
EDIT: Thank goodness… they’re back. That really scared me.
*Back-Ups A WEB APP*
As I’ve discussed earlier, I love reformatting my computer… At face value, it might seem like a waste of time, but in the end, lots of lessons are learned. That, and, you get faster every single time… and you get a squeaky clean computer.
Let me just go through where my data lives, and how it made my life so much easier to get back on track after my reformat.
Contact Information
Calendar
Bookmarks
Feeds
After all… they’re all bits and bytes. It’s the application that brings that information to life. With web apps, though, you get a handy method of not having to deal with keeping track of your own data: the system does it for you.
Actually, more like… the system administrators of the web applications are doing that management of data for you.
Hey, it’s less work for me! But… alas, advertising revenue for them…
I’ve decided to ditch Vienna for my RSS feeds. It’s been getting on my nerves with a lot of little bugs (double downloading, “recent post” count problems), and I decided it’s time I should make the web app jump for this type of application.
I’ve written before on how a problem encourages me to move and try something new. Here’s what’s relevant from that post.
Feeds
- I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
- I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
- I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…
Looks like I’m going to be going against my own words. I still don’t like online apps for certain things, but for feeds, google reader is quickly becoming something that… just works.
Only a subset of the advertised short-cut keys work for me, since I turned on “start searching when I type” feature in Firefox (BonEcho for the mac users). But these seem to work:
I think there might be more, but this is more than enough, I think.
What would be really nice is if I had the ability to scroll down an article using a shortcut key also. For example, if the post I’m reading is longer in height than the window it’s in, I want to be able to scroll down on just that story. I’d much rather have j and k be the “scroll key” and have l and ; be the “next/previous post”… thereby solidifying Google’s love for vi. I’m probably asking too much.