Useful little tool for seeing what people are searching for: Keyword Selector Tool

Just dumping it here so I can find it later.

Tim O’Reilly makes some interesting remarks about how to make advertising more useful.  I have to wonder though how much damage has been done by the constant attempts to grab people’s attention with advertising using cheap gimmicks and generally annoying people (popups, flashing images, distracting animations etc).  A huge number of people have become accustomed to just totally ignoring advertising.  I know that I don’t care how good an offer an ad puts in front of me anymore or what the ad does to get my attention I ignore it.  The only message I get out of web advertising these days is that I hate web advertising.

I wanted to be able to have all my RSS feeds combined in the cool (looking but totally impractical) RSS screen saver but sadly it only allows you to select one source feed.

I tried two approaches to solve this:

1. Set up a personal planet planet instance that aggregates all my feeds and point the screen saver at that.
2. Create a combined RSS feed using AppleScript.

Item one I got working but didn’t like the fact that I was then downloading all my RSS feeds twice, so I scrapped the idea.  If however you ever want to create a planet instance that stays in sync with your RSS feeds, use something along the lines of the AppleScript below and execute it periodically.  I’ve snipped most of the paths involved to try to avoid making the lines too long.  A bunch of lines have also been wrapped – the compiler should find them.  It reads the configuration file from config.ini.tmpl, adds the RSS feeds to the end and writes it out to config.ini

Straight from the webblog of The Fat Man, Viva La Resolution.  Funny, funny stuff.  Read the story, listen to the song, live the moment…

There’s been a bunch of long term planning going on at work recently – lots of good stuff has come out of it but I’m going to skip most of it here.  Most of the responsibility fell to the managers in the company which leaves me to actually get some work done and push our products forward.  One thing I did pick up though is the responsibility to ensure that Ephox eats it’s own dogfood.  Henceforth I am on a mission to cram our products into every conceivable place and by any available means (we use a number of hosted solutions which we can’t directly integrate our products into but JavaScript hacks are a fun pass-time so I’m sure I’ll find a way).

For some reason this morning I felt compelled to publish the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to.  Thus, on the right hand side over there (or over here if you’re reading via my RSS feed) is a blogroll.  There’s currently no process to keep it up to date and it might still contain a couple of internal URLs that won’t work for everyone but it should give the morbidly curious a pretty good idea of what sources I’m following.

So this CEO walks into an engineering department and asks about setting up the news section of the company’s website to use a blogging system instead of updating it by hand.  Great idea.  Now given that the company’s website is hosted on an IIS server with MS SQL 7, ASP, ASP.Net and PHP available – what software does the intelligent engineer recommend?

If there was a very significant benefit, a subdomain could be used for news and pointed to a Linux server with MySQL, Apache and PHP (and for which root access is available) but that’s a lousy option due to the extra overhead of having to maintain that server entirely ourselves and the difficulty caused by splitting our website over multiple servers etc.  It would have to be one heck of a big advantage to make it worth the trouble.

While the buzz surrounding the release of OS X 10.4 continues to build I’ve found it amusing how Microsoft have been desperately pushing Longhorn in the last couple of weeks only to receive criticism about it and then desperately try to point out that all the cool stuff just isn’t there yet, but it will come soon – honest!

I’d say more but I think Crazy Apple Rumours summed it up perfectly.

So apparently Safari now passes the Acid 2 test (or at least the CVS version does).  Excellent work.  What’s more impressive though is that the patches needed are all available so the KHTML developers should be able to integrate the fixes themselves reasonably quickly.  I have however heard reports that the KHTML team refused to accept a large amount of Apple’s patches for various reasons so the code bases may be far enough diverged now that merging is problematic – anyone know for sure?

So now there’s adsense for RSS feeds (or at least an early beta of such).  It raises some interesting issues.  I hate ads so I’ll quite happily unsubscribe from any feed that has ads in it, but what about the various planets that I subscribe to?  What if one person who’s syndicated through those planets adds advertising to their RSS feeds, would I unsubscribe from the whole planet?  Possibly.  What if a few people did?  Probably.

I have to give another congratulations to the NetNewsWire team – I just realized I’d been taking advantage of a very simple but very clever piece of user interface design.  The contextual menu in the NetNewsWire browser has two “Reload” menu items in it, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Regardless of where you click on the page and whether or not the contextual menu pops up or pops down from your mouse cursor, the reload item is always right next to your cursor so it’s easy to hit.  Now you might think that it would be better to just detect which way the contextual menu popped and move the refresh menu item to that end, or even flip the entire menu so that the distance to all the items is unaffected by how the menu pops.  The downside of doing that though is that it makes it much harder to find the items because they keep moving around.  With the duplicated item, the menu is always the same so it’s very quick to identify which way it popped and then move to the item while still keeping the most commonly used item close at hand.

The engineers at work are starting to find reasons to have an news feed aggregator running on their machines at work, mostly so they can keep track of changes being made to the wiki, but it provides a convenient mechanism to push content out to the entire team without being too intrusive.  For some reason RSS feeds seem to be able to handle more information flowing past before it all becomes to much to sort through.  As we get more of the engineers with RSS aggregators running, there’s a much lower barrier to entry for new information feeds and a much higher pay-off for developing them.  For instance, when I get a few free moments I’d like to set up an RSS feed for CVS commits (this is harder than it seems since somehow we wound up using CVSNT instead of just putting the CVS repository on one of our Solaris boxes).  If I’m the only one subscribing to that feed it’s probably not worth setting up, but if half the engineering team is subscribed then it can really start to increase the chances of stupid mistakes or missed scenarios being picked up.