Xagronaut

iTunes decreases my blog consumption

After all this time, I’m finally blogging again. I think the issue has been the lack of time (other things are more important?) and the lack of motivation (i.e., burning desire).

Oddly enough, I think podcasts have taken me away from blogging. Since I no longer use and to download podcasts (I use instead), I spend less time in my news aggregator. Oh, I still consume blogs, and I think that they’re still a great innovation, but I’m not using them like I used to.

A twist on blog consumption: Text-to-Speech conversion

One new product that puts a twist on consuming blogs is . It’s software that will “audify” RSS content to create MP3 audio consumable by your media player or portable audio device.

This is similar in concept to a combination of products I saw a while back: mixing , an RSS publisher, with from . This combo allows you to create a “podcast” version of your blog. TextAloud also has other uses for text-to-speech conversion as a stand-alone product.

Odiogo, on the other hand, combines an RSS aggregator

with a text-to-speech converter in one product

. The price is fairly accessible at $29.99. I may try it. There are some available.

One thing I noticed is that Odiogo seems to offer only one voice (male). TextAloud, on the other hand, offers multiple voice options with a range of sampling rates from vendors including , , , and . TextAloud comes only in a Windows version and costs $29.95.

FeedForAll costs $39.95 and is available for Windows and Mac. They have offering complimentary products related to RSS feed consumption, RSS-friendly web hosting, and podcast creation.

Conclusion

I may try the audio blog content option. Unfortunately, most of my podcast solutions involve a lot of manual labor to put it onto my player (my Palm Zire 72 with an SD card). The other downside is that the text-to-speech output can sound somewhat bland, causing me to zone out instead of actively listening. I’ll put it on my Someday/Maybe list ().

. An anonymous reader writes “PHP and SQL Security are being proven more weak every day. Uberhacker.Com is running a PHP and SQL security research project to … []

RSSify was pretty cool. It could turn a non-RSSing blog into RSS for consumption by aggregators. But here’s the catch–it caught on so much that it was hogging precious bandwidth (see below). Successful grass roots services (not necessarily limited to XML-RPC/SOAP) face the same problem–becoming the victim of their own success.

. Unfortunately I can no longer bear the bandwidth cost of running this service so I’m turning it off. There’s a mirror at . There may be others.

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RSSify is a rather horrible hack that shouldn’t be needed any more. Please ask the owner of the site you’re reading () to change to a system that generates RSS natively such as or . Alternatively consider hosting yourself rather than using my bandwidth. []

Oh, and by the way, note the mention of the Blogger Pro subscription. It’s not that expensive for the year. That’s why it surprises me so much that Dave Barry’s weblog doesn’t use the pro version. Come on Dave, if you don’t want to fork over the cash, have somebody pay for it. Your readers will thank you.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 is out and available for use.

…By the way, I notice there’s an RSS feed on . That’s a good one to subscribe to.

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Anyone know if it would be possible to create a bookmarklet that emulates an style application: as you move it around the page it shows you the hex colour code for the pixel directly under the mouse pointer? I’m pretty sure it can’t be done but I’d love to be proved wrong.

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I’m thinking that the document.onmousemove would have to be set to a function handler that interrogated the event object to determine the underlying target. Once the target was acquired, a simple query on the background color and a message to the statusbar and voila! There you have it.

Of course, this does not directly answer the question. What’s missing here is the code. I’ve pieced together a bookmarklet that inserts a div and/or form into the current document and allows drag and drop capability. I imagine there would be some similarities however.

Oh, and by the way, I’m only making these assumptions on an IE platform. I can’t and won’t make guarantees for other browsers.

Update:

After more thought, I agree with Simon on his assessment of the possibility of an EyeDropper style application. That is, I agree that a pixel-based bookmarklet is not doable–only a page element-based bookmarklet. That would exclude any images used in the page, so such a bookmarklet would be of limited use.

Microsoft Excel is a widely used tool in American business. For that matter, the computer spreadsheet category, in all its incarnations, is one of the primary business tools period, next to the word processor.

I happen to use Excel frequently for data analysis and general business math (add, subtract, multiply and divide!). Nothing fancy really. However, I do consider myself to be a power user, relatively speaking. Now, I haven’t mastered statistical formulas, pivot tables, or every feature of the graphs and charts, but I believe that I have mastered the 20% of functionality that yields the 80% of results, and then some (maybe 35/90).

I believe that one of the most overlooked and powerful features of Excel is the conditional formatting feature. This allows things like changing the background color of a cell based on cell values or formulas–simple but very powerful. In fact, with a few simple techniques, you can find data mismatches, unused data, duplicate data, or matching data–all visually so the opportunity for error is greatly diminished.

Amazingly, I’ve found that very few (actually none) of the people to whom I have mentioned this feature have ever heard of it, much less used it. That is why I feel it to be my personal duty to extol the virtues of this feature to the few that read this blog.

The conditional formatting dialog can be found under the Format menu. Note that it does not appear when you right-click on a cell. I believe that this is an unfortunate omission on Microsoft’s part, not only as a missing convenience, but also as an opportunity to advertise this useful feature.

A cell is allowed to have up to three conditional formats. For example, a number value could have three different colors if it was positive, zero, or negative, respectively. Or a cell could be specially colored if its value was the same as the cell preceeding or following it. This can be helpful for spotting duplicates, although there are more effective ways to do this without using conditional formatting.

I just used this feature today to compare values that were supposed to match but didn’t. Rather than using the error prone technique of manually inspecting and formatting the data, I used conditional formatting and a formula to highlight mismatched values. The result was a professional-looking spreadsheet that I presented to management to visually illustrate a scenario that needed remedied. And of course, since I was the one who did the analysis, I will likely get credit for the proposed remedy. Bonus!–not $$$, just brownie points. And I did it with very little manual work on my part: just a couple of database queries, some conditional formatting, and some headings finish it off–oh, and repeating rows for page headers too. Fun stuff!

So, without giving a complete tutorial on conditional formatting, I urge you to check it out in the Excel help documentation. I admit, I’m probably being negligent in my responsibilities by leading you this far only to leave you without detailed instructions, but time is short, and I’ve at least wet your appetite. But, just to provide some degree of assistance, here are a few links to learn more:

Once you master the conditional formatting technique, you will likely find multiple uses for it that will make your life (if only slightly) easier. Enjoy, and here’s to the 80/20 rule!

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The next version of Microsoft Office is, among other things, a family of XML editors. I have discussed the XML modes of Word and Excel (see and ), and described the newest member of this family, InfoPath 2003, a tool for gathering XML data (see ). Now that I’ve had a chance to work with InfoPath, its role and value are becoming clearer. [Full story at ] … []

Cool!!!  I’m getting pretty stoked about the new products in the Office family.  I’ve been drawn back to Office recently as a worthwhile development platform for small personal solutions like web publishing (not FrontPage, either–we’re talking Word-to-XML conversion), mail filtering, Outlook add-ons, Excel XML export, and more.

But as for the new stuff, XML is a major part of the strategy.  OneNote is a different kind of product and fills in the other gap that I see in the personal productivity suite for the power user.  Note taking made natural.

Maybe by summer of 2003, I will find that the combination of products in Office 2003 will make my Notebase idea somewhat unnecessary.

I’ll try to post some links to product info pages later.

CNET News: Group Claims Linux Advance on Xbox [Linux Today]

My about seems to have been brought on by me, unwittingly of course. It seems that during my site customization, I removed the Radio UserLand web bug that is used to track referers. I could be getting a thousand hits a day (not) and be unaware. Doh! I found at , while searching for .

led me to a few more that give a pretty thorough . I found a long time ago that might hold the key.

I will have to try this out.

Here are some details on how the COM interface works. The when I check it, but the was available.

There are some that have already been discussed at UserLand, including and .

Based on some (namely a Radio database path) from more than a year ago, I was able to discover some database entries that contain cached settings from the magic #upstream.xml files. Strangely enough, the backup file I had made (you’re supposed to do that, right?) was an entry in the table. I don’t know if that’s because I kept the same base filename, but added an additional chunk to the exension (#upstream.xml.bak). Even so, the changes I had made to my regular #upstream.xml did not actually affect any system response until I actually deleted both entries in the database (regular and backup) AND removed the .bak file from the www folder. I almost wonder if Radio even detects file renaming. It seems to pick up pretty well on every other file event that wanders through the upstream folder.

Shew! OK, now Radio’s going hog wild upstreaming files like it never had a problem to begin with. [Raspberry sound!]

Thanks, Roland. I know you’ve long since moved on to cooler topics, but archives are occasionally VERY handy.