527 Posts from 2005

Blog Pile

5 for BlogDay

Today is Blogday, celebrating an effort to push some folks in the long tail of the blog a little bit up the curve. BlogDay was initiated with the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to know other bloggers, from other countries or areas of interests. In that day Bloggers will […]

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Lovely Design Quote

This morning I was browsing the new Drupal fueled look to evolt, a web developer site I’ve been tapping into for so long I cannot remember, and started reading Isaac Forman’s Usable Forms (for an international audience). It’s a good review of some of the pitfalls in web forms when we are not thinking enough […]

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WordPressed 1.5.2

After running the minor upgrade for WordPress from 1.5.1 to 1.5.2, I can say their process is rather easy. I still smile when you run the upgrade script at it says “Step 1. It may take a while though, so be patient.”, then it completes and says “There’s actually only one step. So if you […]

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Tablet-ing

flickr fotoStranger Things Have Happenedavailable on my flickr I am still bleed Apple colors, but I have a new TabletPC for working with some new pen based applications (see what is on the screen. It’s a strange world indeed I’m still trying to get familiar with the TableTC environment with this new HP tc1100… no […]

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More OSX Cat Quirks

To add to my list of burps in the Panther-Tiger upgrade: I seem unable to print any web page from Firefox… its infinite beach ball spin, and forced quit to escape. I can print fine in other applications. I rarely print web content, but its not too much to ask for. Finder sidebar disappearing icons… […]

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Eating My Own Trackback Crow

It’s only been… what, a few days?… when I insinuated that Trackback was not such a major problem. I just took a look at one of our MovableType 2.66 sites (that will remain nameless, linkless from here) that I’ve not scanned in a while, and saw a whole raft of Trackback spam sitting in the […]

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The Cat Ate My Photos

Ah a bump in the Mac OS X Tiger upgrade — my vopy of iPhoto is toally stuck in spinning beachball land. I’ve tried rebuilding the library, renmaming, extracing photos with iPhoto extractor, etc. It is still hosed. I might have to get a copy of iLife now and start over. I had a huge […]

Blog Pile

BlogSieve: A New RSS Mix and Match

The link came from an actual comment to a blog entry– imagine that, a useful link from a comment! BlogSieve (“Advanced Feed Processing for Atom, RDF, and RSS”) is a new service that is fresh out and has potential for those wanting to mix RSS feed sources and recombine them in new ways:

BlogSieve is a web-based tool that creates new feeds by filtering, merging and sorting existing feeds. The BlogSieve engine accepts virtually every (valid) feed format, processed results are then exported into any feed format you choose

You can enter up to 5 feed sources (RSS URLs) as a starting point. The feature that Blogsieve offers that may maje it stand out from others, is that you can create a series of “filters” or search terms, so you are not getting everything from all 5 sources, but ones that match keyword criteria. It also provides output in 4 flavors of RSS.

As a quick example, I grabbed the URLs from 4 of my Canadian blog authors I read, mixed it with my own, to create the “Four and a Half Canadians” feed: http://feeds.blogsieve.com/5/RSS2.0. The service is new (I had bad luck with my first test of filters, maybe a bad choice), and what it really lacks is a way to go back and make modifications in the settings (like when my sample feed above I forgot to select a category, so we are labeled as “Art”…). It could also stand to append the feed channels in the item titles so you know where it came from.

If you read this full entry, I ran my new BlogSieved feed through Feed2JS to show the output

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Blog Trackbackcorn Must Die

Cue up your 1970 dusty, scratch ridden version of the classic John Barleycorn tune long ago wafted by Traffic: There were three bloggers [1], [2], [3] came out of the West, Their fortunes for to try, And these three bloggers made a solemn vow: Blog Trackback must die. They’ve wrote, they’ve dug, they’ve harrowed it […]

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Conversations: Tree People and Cave Dwellers

It’s been interesting to see how a dis-connected set of blog posts about “distributed conversations” have pretty much emulated the topic. Mine was but one tiny ripple among the tide. With a few iterations of search (lacking an explanation of their syntax), Technorati does a credible job, but is it all the echoes? Just recently, […]