Fri Mar 05, 2023

Review of email clients

An comprehensive review and feature comparison of a few popular email clients. Eudora is significantly missing from this list.

http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/reviews/nextgen-mua/

Thu Mar 04, 2023

Workout software

I'm testing out this work out an online software that I found on Sourceforge. Now that I'm going back to the gym, I have to get a routine set. This was the ONLY one available. There is a serious market for this, folks.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtfo/

Sell your domain

If you, like me, have tonnes of sad-ass domains from half-assed ideas, then it's time to off-load them at Sedo -- a free domain marketplace.

http://sedo.com/

Sun Feb 22, 2023

Pmachine RSS hack

With some help from the Pmachine Pro forum, I managed to hack Pmachine so it can display the whole entry in the RSS file. Now my RSS feed is more useful.

You have to edit http://yourblog.com/pm/cp/rss.cp.php and edit lines 230 and 232 to the amount you want it to be. I made it a large number like 500000.

Fri Feb 20, 2023

Wasarrested.com

Wasarrested.com is a really cool ASP site that uses templates to dynamically create content based on additional information that you type into the url. Right now its templates create prank stories about people who (horrors!) were arrested for everything from masturbating to dealing crack.

Check this out

Thu Feb 19, 2023

Measurements in IT need re-looking

An interesting article from CIO magazine on the problems with the way many companies measure things like productivity and the linkage to results.

In recent years, how have most IT organizations measured—and rewarded—programmer productivity? LOCs—lines of code—per unit time. And then we're surprised that we end up with bloated, inefficient and poorly documented systems? Who are we kidding?

http://www.cio.com/archive/021504/work.html

Adforum.com switches movie format

Adforum.com, a free TV commercial library with the latest from around the world, within the last days switched its movie format from Quicktime to Windows Media Player for all its TV commercials.

The evil hand of Bill Gates reaches far. Too far.

http://adforum.com/

UPDATE

I was wrong. It hasn't switched format. I had switched the user agent on my browser. Doh! When Adforum detects a Windows based browser, it will switch to a Windows Media Player window automatically.

Build your own Jerk City

The PHP code that is used to power Jerk-It (and possibly the Red Meat Construction Set) is now GPLed. Cool. Now you can make your own favourite comic strips by applying it to any famous comic.

http://netninja.com/jerkit/index.php?code=1
http://netninja.com/jerkit/
http://www.monkeydyne.com/rmcs/buildmeat.html

Tue Feb 17, 2023

Why I hate RSS feeds

1. RSS feeds by default have a word limit on them. All entries are truncated to that limit. You might as well go visit the site if it tends to have lengthy entries which a lot of worthwhile sites have. But having said that, you can hack your feed to include all words in the entry like Boing Boing has.


2. RSS feeds are sans design. The poor bastard web designer spent ages creating the look of the site and you want to rob him of satisfaction? What kind of bastard masochist are you?


3. RSS feeds don't include a great deal of content of the site. Visual data and important photo images often go missing, especially on news sites like BBC's RSS feeds.


4. Not everything on the site has an RSS feed. And not everything on the site will be included in the same RSS feed. Sometimes you have to grab three or four RSS feeds to get the full scope of a multi-varied site. Kind of defeats the purpose of aggregation, doesn't it?


5. Website layouts are often better for usability than RSS feeds. Take the CNN RSS feed for instance. The original pages manage to cram virtually all the important stuff so you can see it all at a glance. The RSS feed however doesn't. You have to scroll down twice (for most feed readers) to get view all the data.


6. RSS feeds don't have interactivity. Your RSS feed will not have things like the ability to leave comments or participate in polls.


7. Javascript is not included in RSS feeds. Important ways of viewing sites such as the use of image scrollers and news ticker tapes that BBC has will not be included in RSS feeds.


8. Most sites still don't have RSS feeds. Half the time you'll be using your feed reader to grab RSS feeds, half the time you have to go to the website to view the content. The ultimate heaven for RSS readers is for everything on the web to have an RSS feed so you need only use one client. How likely is that to happen? Is Osama still in hiding?


9. RSS feeds have no standard. You'd think with the proliferation of feed reading and parsing services that they'd get that right first. No way. Mark Pilgrim counts nine different versions, not counting Atom. Which is why many sites still offer a choice of three or four different types of feeds for you to take. Confused? You shouldn't be. It's these idiots who make these feeds who are.

Sun Feb 15, 2023

Firefox extensions

Now that extensions are working again...

Firefox has some really nice extensions.

• Adblock removes any banner and image ads you tell it to by applying the display: none CSS tag to them. It allows the use of URL wild cards to ban all ads from a site.


• RSS Reader turns your browser into an RSS reader client too.


• Quicknote lets you save texts and notes using right-click

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