Xagronaut

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You know, I’ve realized that the only thing that’s really important to me is meticulous control over my url-space. That’s the only thing that really matters. As long as your URLs stay constant, you can rip out your backend as many times as you want and it doesn’t matter. So, I might just say screw it all, move over to , and set up a simple gateway that’ll translate named URLs into Drupal nodes. Hmmmm…

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Drupal seems to be built PHP, XML, and perhaps other technologies.  Need to read more here.

Thanks to Dean for including this tidbit from one of my favorite sources: Search Engine Watch.

Apparently, nearly all significant search engines ignore the <META  NAME=”keywords”> tag.  It’s a “spam magnet” and has been largely dismissed since the 1997-1998 time frame with regard to its importance in search engine relevance.  I was once badgered by so-called expert when building a site (in mid 2001) because I didn’t include the META keywords tag.  The site won’t be promoted properly, blah, blah, blah.  Well, I think the most important factors are keyword usage in page titles and content, search engine submission, and external links leading to your site.  Except for Inktomi, the major search engines don’t use the META keywords tag.  So it’s virtually dead, unless you have some other purpose for your own Million Dollar Markup.

If you’re interested, here’s a few other things you can do with a META tag.  The article taught me something new today.  Some META tags (the ones that use the HTTP-EQUIV attribute) correspond to headers found in HTTP messages (see IETF RFC 1945, section 4.2).  Some web servers translate the values stored in the META tags (the HTTP-EQUIV kind) into the HTTP headers when they deliver content to the browser.

Dean also noted the arrival of an open source, Windows-based desktop news aggregator called Syndirella by Dmitry Jemerov.  Excellent!  I like the idea of the ability (more research required here) to scrape regular web pages for news.  This means that I might be able to digest the Search Day newsletter from Search Engine Watch without visiting the page directly.  Maybe.

I was using email subscriptions to get most of my news in the past, and I possess many dedicated mail folders for particular sources that fill up with unread messages.  Pretty useless.

So, as I move along in my blogging adventure, RSS collected by a news aggregator seems to be a much be better solution.  If I miss six months worth of news, I don’t have six months worth of news staring me in the face during my next session–only recent, relevant stuff.

Now, Syndirella goes one step better.  Instead of having an extremely long web page to read, Syndirella carves up the news into each feed and allows in-client reading without bouncing all over to other windows.  It still feels a little clumsy and basic, but my hat is off to Dmitry for creating such a useful tool and releasing it as a free, open source product.

Not only that, but it’s written in C# running on the .NET framework.  I was wondering what the most effective way to distribute a .NET desktop application over the web would be.  The Framework is a 20MB+ download for those that don’t already have it.  That’s a long wait for a lot of users.  But Dmitry is doing it.  He warns the user about the size of the download and gives instructions about where to acquire it.  This seems to be the best way I’ve seen so far, short of mailing out a CD.  No, I don’t want to do that.

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Ok, is freaking awesome. It supports categories, has multi-threaded updating of feeds, and the entry threading feature is amazing

. It tells me when someone else I read refers to the post I’m currently reading. Really fantastic. Even more reason to include entire posts in your RSS feeds. People, you listening??

Hopefully I won’t wind up hating SharpReader after using it for a little while with . One good sign is that pieces of SharpReader have grown on me after using it for a little while. For example, the way it keeps old posts around. It works more like an e-mail client, where you have to explicitly delete old items, rather than having them expire in some way. At first I didn’t like this. Syndirella kept a configurable number of old items around (I think it defaulted to 50). NewsDesk only kept items around that were in the current feed. After using it though, I think SharpReader does it the best, because posts simply stay around for as long as you want them to. Seems like the best plan to me, even though you do have to explicitly delete old posts (but there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to help you delete a lot of old posts at once ).

Ooh, cool. It exports feeds in the OPML file in the same order as they appear in your SharpReader window. Makes sense, right? Now I don’t have to before displaying it. In fact, now I shouldn’t!

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Since Keith seems so intent on promoting entire posts in RSS, I hope he doesn’t mind me posting his entire post.

Another problem is feed update error handling…I’ll need to make sure that fatal errors (like 404 errors) are reported as message boxes and not as status bar notiications. []

One thing I noticed is that, behind a proxy server, I couldn’t find a way to specify credentials for background updating.

James Robertson pointed me to - another free news aggregator currently on the market. The interesting part about BottomFeeder is that it is written in Smalltalk, which is not quite a common language nowadays.

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An important achievent today: , the only RSS syndication service in the Russian Internet that I’m aware of (maybe the only one that exists), now exports in the OPML format. This is especially exciting because this finally makes Syndirella useful for Russian users…

So tomorrow I’ll implement my part of the agreement with Yandex - support for importing OPML files from HTTP sites, with the possibility to preview the feeds and select the ones that should be imported. This will, of course, open the doors to other major RSS feed directories like and .

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File under: OPML, Syndirella, RSS News Sources

Yet Another Geek Anniverary - the BBS. The TEXTFILES.COM BBS Timeline: 1978 - Snowed in during the Great Chicago Snowstorm of 1978, Ward Christensen begins preliminary work on what would eventually become CBBS (Computer Bulletin Board System), the first Bulletin Board System Read more about it at… [Heal Your Church Web Site]

Yeah! I got it!  Snowed in…some great creation emerges.  Well, that settles it!  I’m off to code my next great invention.  It may take a year, but it will happen, Lord willing.