Tag Archives: rss

Fav.or.it Shuts Down

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fav.or.it | fav.or.it is Dead, Long live favorit.

I remember when fav.or.it was just getting started, and thinking about the ways that it would make my life easier. I didn’t hear this until today, but it’s being shut down, and their efforts are going towards TweetMeme.

Particularly interesting are the reasons Nick Halstead (CEO) list for having not succeeded in their endeavor. I love learning from people’s successes and in this case, failures.

1) The commenting market shifted to what I call ’surface comments’ – these are comments that appear inside other networks, i.e. Facebook, Google Connect, Twitter, FriendFeed (to name just a few) and although some of these have open platforms from which to aggregate from, the problems of context and also a rapidly shifting market soon made it extremely difficult for a small team to continue to compete (for which whole companies have dedicated their resources to notably backtype + ubervue).

I’m not all that knowledgeable on the subject of handling comments across multiple platforms, but I do know that Backtype is awesome. I’m using it right now for the blog.

As a sidenote, what I believe to be much more interesting are the comments made privately. Private and exportable comments are what I feel like is missing. I guess you could email or IM or Direct Message a link to someone with some commentary, but it seems like there would be a better way to do it. And if you do share a link that way, a lot of metadata is lost.

And I love me some metadata.

2) RSS is DEAD – back in early 2008 I presented at thenextweb conference in Amsterdam, and said that RSS was dead for the mainstream market. It was clear to me that as a technology it worked, but that adoption was never going to go mainstream. We attempted with fav.or.it to remove the need to know what feeds you needed to read (you created ’slices’ of content), but it became clear this intention was ahead of it’s time but also poorly implemented, and I doff my hat to the people at lazyfeed for getting it right.

Maybe for the mainstream, “RSS” is dead. (And I hope he meant “feeds”, unless he’s saying that Atom is alive and well. Oh dear, I think I just played into the “correcting Internet geek” stereotype. [Cue Conan O'Brien adjusting his fake glasses]) But since I’m mainly focusing on the power feed users who know what’s going on with feeds in general, I think I have a better chance. This is also why I can get away with not caring about IE 6… and maybe even 7 or 8.

I do agree that feeds are dirty. The implementation is a hack. You know what else is a huge hack? The Internet. When did the ARPANET become a tool for commerce and entertainment? Okay, did I just stretch it a bit there? Ahem.

In any case, I personally use feeds nonstop, even in the midst of this world of Twitter/FriendFeed… uh… yeah, in the midst of the world of Twitter. As long as I’m designing an experience for people like me, I’m sure I’ll be okay.

3) The site has also not been without controversy for re-use of content (through public RSS feeds), and although we put massive effort into support of licensing models (such as auto-detection of creative commons) our approach to aggregation of content for which we could not detect a license, and that required the publisher to opt-out (rather than opt-in) was in hindsight misguided.

Was it for the money? I don’t know… but it’s a bit shady, in any case.I stopped tinkering with fav.or.it when the site became more of a public aggregator, which is why the news of their closing got to me a couple days after the fact. How could I become a supporter of your dream if you take some very interesting routes to becoming awesome?

What Have We Learned Here

It’s hard, starting a company. And knowing when to quit is probably harder. Well, easier in my case, because it’ll be when I run out of money and have to find a job.

Oh, to be young and foolish… maybe I’ll eat these words later.

PHP and RSS

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Why is it that the top two searches for the string “php rss” shows up as this:

php rss search on google

If you take some time to actually look at Magpie RSS and LastRSS (which I didn’t… silly me), you’ll see that they haven’t been updated since 2005 and 2004, respectively. For some silly reason, I didn’t think about PHP actually having an xml_rss function built into it, and it was only after out of frustration at these libraries not doing what I wanted that I stumbled onto the third link, the IBM article.

This just points out the fact that I’m still living in PHP4 land. Hooray for PEAR.

Google Reader "Plug-in" for *ANY* Website

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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.

Google RSS Reader Shared Links

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.

Meet Your New App: HanMeta

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I woke up today, fixated on picking a name. I had racked my brain trying to figure out clever metaphors in nature (everything from tree trunks to rivers to pollinating flowers)… clever mashing of two words… sticking “han” in front of everything, trying to go with the naming scheme I’ve devised a couple of years back. (No, I’m not going back to slapping “jk” in front of everything)

There was a domain name I had before this one that would fit in perfectly with what the application will do. But sadly, I gave it up and now it’s in the hands of some spammers.

Regardless, let it be known:

HanMeta.com: the social web 2.0 blah rounded corners blah starburst blah tags blah rss feed reader. Now with more Rails! Ugh.

Let’s see how far I can take this with a ragtag team of awesome coding ninjas, present company included. Looks like, at the beginning, it’ll be Derek Remund, Amir Manji (This guy needs a blog!), and me. I must call upon the help of the sweet coding ninjas of Alex Argo, Dan Janosik, and, of course, the venerable Raj “Taco HTML Edit” Doshi.

All I’ve got is a running list of great features I’d like to implement, and lots of time to do it. (Oh, please please please let me have less time to work on this, if you catch my drift, potential employers?) I’ll try to chronicle this crazy journey. Like… startup.com or the DVD that fogcreek put out. Just in text form.

I just hope it’s more like the latter than the former.

07.07.07: Here we come!

More details as I get time to write them down.

Lessons From Yet Another Reformat

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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.

  • Email

    • Gmail: I think I’m going to start using Gmail as my sole email application. It seems like for some reason, this time around, SMTP doesn’t want to work in Mail.app. Also, since I’ve already gone Google for RSS feeds as well as my budgeting/documenting/spreadsheet-ing, might as well commit to… er… submit to the Google overlords.
    • I have to go and somehow find a way to match the folder structure I have on my desktop to Gmail’s labeling structure.
    • Is there a way to move all your mail from one service provider to another? Is Yahoo really going to provide unlimited storage? This really isn’t a selling point, though, since I don’t think I’m even hitting 10% of my storage space yet.
      • But, of course, through the wonders of gDisk, I’ve begun backing up my most important documents, like blog post rough drafts and such.

  • Contact Information

    • Plaxo: I love it. It’s free for us normal users… plus, there’s a little bit of the social magic built into the app: you can send “eCards” to people with their information and such.
    • I don’t use Plaxo much, but I do use the synchronization tool with Address Book, and you know how I love to think that syncing is going to be one of the many killer web apps.

  • Calendar

    • This is next… to go with Google Calendar? How about Plaxo? How about something completely new?

  • Bookmarks

    • What? Delicious? The only thing I needed to reinstall to get back into bookmarking was the bookmarking extension for Firefox and Safari.
    • I’m satisfied with delicious to even think about moving to ma.gnolia.

  • Feeds

    • Google Reader: I love it. I think I might start integrating the “Starred Items” on the blog like Alex Argo has done.

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…

Relient K and Shutdown Day? More like… Shutdown 1.5 Days

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Chicago. Ah.

Inadvertantly, I kinda celebrated Shutdown Day a half day early. Supposedly, today was supposed to be a day without using the computer, at all.

For me, this happened because I was without Internet. You see, without Internet, my computer ceases to be a computer in a lot of ways. I can’t check my email, talk online, check my feeds… I need my data!

I finally drove over to Panera near Woodfield for some lovely wireless bits.

Now I probably have like 300 stories I have to wade through (Google Reader, why don’t you tell me the exact number and NOT “100+”… what, is it that CPU intensive to give me the right number?) I have about 10 emails I have to reply to (lengthy… ahhhh!). Posts upon posts to write…

Here are some post ideas I have right now, sitting at Panera.

Mae at House of Blues

  • Relient K Concert (with Sherwood and Mae) at House of Blues
    • The Actual Event: Whoo hoo! First non-classical concert ever!
    • RIAA and Music: I thought this topic through while they were playing their new songs, the ones that I didn’t know.
    • City of Chicago: How INSANE it is to drive in the city
    • 14 Year Old Girls: DAH. “Sadie Hawkins Dance! Mood Rings!” still rings in my ear…
      • I always thought Relient K was more geared towards college kids… huh.
  • Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
    • How incredibly awesome it is
    • How amazingly the author Jessica Livingston could have easily been Josh Kim
      • She writes… the Intro. The rest of the book is basically her asking questions at the founders of each respective company covered in the book. I could have asked those questions, and typed out 450 pages. Heck, I’d probably type that sucker faster…
      • Meh, maybe she asked the right questions… we’ll see as I keep on reading
    • How much I want to write a review PER CHAPTER
  • Consulting
    • How I keep mistyping “consulting” as “consluting”… ew…
    • Things I’ve learned with the clients I’ve had in the past
    • How I want to grow it: How to create an effective portfolio
  • Blog
    • Categorizing vs Tagging: I think I’m getting it…
    • Redesign process: How to effectively design a WordPress Theme

Yeah, insanity.

I have a feeling, April is going to be insane.

Are you guys wondering “I mean… dang, Josh Kim… how much more insane can it get”?

You’ll see.

Lesson of the Day: Just DO IT.

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Not trying to sell shoes or anything, but seriously… if you’re in doubt, if you’re in pain, if you’re depressed, if you’re not wanting to, if you’re lazy, if you’re bored, if you’re sick and tired, if you’re actually “sick” sick, if you’re unable to…

Just do it. You’ll feel better. I know I’m feeling better.

My motivational speech to myself for the day. Huzzah.

And man… there goes the feed subscribers because of my mistake…

Couple More Things About Google Reader

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A few more things about Google Reader.

Shortcut Keys: Space and Shift+Space

I think the best way to use Google reader is to use space and shift+space to go through stories.

I thought that the space button went through one post each at the time, but I found out that it either does one post at a time OR if the post is longer than a screen’s height, then the behavior of the space key changes to a “page down”. It’s ingenious. I can go through all my feeds with one hand… kinda… which leads me to my next point.

Need a Shortcut Key for: Opening up Links

Currently, I’m having to command+click a title of a story to open up in a tab. There needs to be another key that opens up the story I’ve selected in a target=”_new” window.

I tried the enter key but all that the enter key does is open up the story in “list view”, and it does nothing in “expanded view”. Blah.

Another Feature Request: Sort Options

I like to read my posts backwards than how Google has set it up. I like to read the posts that were posted earlier than those posted later. I’d much rather go directly to the post: I don’t want to hear some garbage summary on the original post. (I love posts that add thoughtful and meaningful content to the original post… but that rarely happens in this digg world.)

So going back to the first point: I have to use shift+space rather than space to scroll through my stories… Kinda clunky, but it works.

Overall: Satisfied

It’s quick. It’s painless, to a certain extent. It’s not as clunky as Vienna…

Plus, it’s a web application. Half-minus, it’s Google. (Google is neither on my list of companies I love nor on my list of companies I hate…)

Wow… WoW?

I swear. Sometimes, writing on this blog turns out to be something like leveling in World of Warcraft: I can’t stop it. I gotta level up just once more or turn in one more quest.

Time to Change the RSS Reader: Google Reader

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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.

Short-cut keys for Google Reader

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:

  • s: Star an item
  • n: Navigate to next item without opening it
  • p: Navigate to previous item without opening it
  • j: Open next item
  • k: Open previous item
    • Oh sweet vi keys…
  • o: Open / Close item (In list view, doesn’t do anything in expanded view)
  • r: Refresh
  • t: Tag it

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.