A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
I’ve just finished half of the technical side of an OPML-based application. It will have tags, and support for either Grazr or Optimal or possibly both.
Okay, I’d launch but my damn ISP is inaccessible. I’ll explain what I’m doing though. I’m setting up a site called opmlpop. Think of it as a digg and del.icio.us for OPML. You find a reading list or link directory, you submit it to opmlpop with all the relevant tags and people then bump it up like they do with digg.
What’s going to be really cool is that it’s going to have an outline built right in to the page - I’ve chosen Optimal (because it has the most outline-like display, while Grazr has the super cool iPod-like interface).
I’ve got lots to do - finish customising various parts, change the CSS up quite a bit, customise how the outline displays and fix up a logo. And I’m going to be out and about most of the day in (not so) sunny London, so it’ll have to wait a while until I launch.
What’s the purpose? Well, I thought that what we need is a place to post about OPML files that isn’t an OPML file. That way people can simply subscribe to the feed of items which reach the homepage (or if they want to see more, the feed for everything that is submitted) and they can then choose which files that come in over the feed they want to include in their own directories.
We’re ready to go. Have a look at opmlpop.bbcity.co.uk and, the important bit, submit your OPML! I’ll be adding other OPML renderers to the list, but I’ve only set up Optimal so far. I’ll add Grazr next, but the homepage didn’t want to load on my crappy mobile dialup.
I’m in London and a short while ago, I thought I saw John Prescott, Britain’s iracisble and workshy Deputy Prime Minister. I sat there almost transfixed - is this the blubbering bastard or not? Then I realised that I was on a number 91 bus, and Prescott’s aversion to public transport is well known.
If you’ve farked up your opmlpop account by switching themes, just click here to reset to the default template. Sorry about that, and thank you to jtintle for beta testing. “;->” Seriously, I put this up at about 1am and haven’t had much of a chance to work on it. I literally just thought last night “that’s a cool idea, lets blog about it” then thought “that’s a cool idea, let’s build it”.
In the British Library, (re-)reading various texts in preparation for really getting my head down and writing my undergraduate dissertation. And boy is Michael Behe a dishonest son-of-a-bitch. Want to see what I mean? See §4.10 and and §4.11 from the Quote Mine Project Part 4. Disgusting.
Just hit 2,500 words on my first draft - only 7,500 more to go. Not too shabby, especially considering how I only had it approved about two weeks ago.
Goddamn, they’ve changed the date of SitP. Fuck. I’m in London to go to an event and the event’s not happening. Shit. Bugger it. I’m off to get some food. I wonder why I didn’t get an email about the date change. That’s so annoying.
This is what we’re paying for football. Actually, I’m not sure. How is the FA funded?
Advertisers say they prefer MySpace to blogs.
What does that tell you about MySpace? Could it be that advertisers go to the most gullible?
So, I’ve tried Flock. It’s nice, but lacks a key feature. Fortunately, they’re on the ball to it:
OK, so we got a little carried away last Fall when we threw out the old model of folders and nested folders in favor of tags, collections and storing your favorites online. The “click, share, search” part of our favorites model works quite nicely, but we know we need to support nested folders so that when you import your favorites from other browsers, they appear where you’d expect to find them.
Okay, so, here’s the closest I can find to a NewsRiver-compatible Instapundit feed. I did see that Dave hacked up xml.rss.compileService specially to fix the Instapundit feed. Why is it so thoroughly screwed up? Another go. I imported the best feed I could find in to Feedburner and fiddled with the settings somewhat. Here’s the result. It should now display, albeit a little strangely, in NewsRiver. It’s Atom 0.3 if you’re interested. Not perfect, but it displays okay and the permalinks work, so I won’t fiddle with it.
