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RSS vs. the 24 hour news cycle
Bruce Schneier posted his response to a call for the media to pipe down about terrorist attacks. The argument goes that by publicizing terror attacks the media is creating terror, so why not short-circuit the terrorists’ goal? Mr. Schneier explains that the consequence of doing so would cause worse things than terrorism. He also discusses…
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Blogs and wikis in space
Scott Trudeau and I were talking about the intersection of blogs and wikis, which I realize everyone else talked about two years ago. Maybe next I’ll start blogging about how I’m sorry that I haven’t blogged more, or pull post ideas from Anil’s list of clichés. I also had an insightful conversation with Mark Dilley…
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Drupal modules in RSS
One of the hard things about searching the web by keyword is that sometimes you want to find things with a specific relationship. Take Drupal’s module list for example. I want to know when there are new modules available, which is perfect for RSS. There’s plenty of information about Drupal modules that make RSS, but…
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Happy Snow-On-Tulips Day!
+ It snowed a lot on Sunday. While this isn’t unheard of in April, a lot of people thought that winter was over because on Tuesday it was 81°. A lot of people write it off as “LOL it’s just Michigan weather” but I think that’s a cop-out and that plenty of other places have…
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What’s in your Firefox?
I’ve got a bunch of Firefox extensions installed so I thought I’d take the old “what’s on your dock” meme and apply it to the browser. So here’s my extension menu:
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Does blogging mean a return to hard news?
Blogging routinely gets called out for credibility problems, and instead of admitting them bloggers usually just deflect by saying “CBS! Memogate!” But blogging does have a credibility problem; a lot of it is speculative and inflammatory. The naysayers think that rumor and innuendo will replace the New York Times, while both sides pretend that there’s…
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Drupal Atom Aggregator
One of the big problems with using the Drupal Aggregator for ArborBlogs was that it doesn’t support Atom out of the box. My initial fix was to create an Atom -> RSS converter using Magpie but this weekend I was able to set up Drupal to use Magpie for RSS and Atom parsing without the…
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I am the smartest del.icio.us user in the world!
[Update: no need for my tool anymore, it’s built in] A friend was talking about my del.icio.us inbox and I realized that he was under the impression that people put stuff in there, instead of me pulling stuff from other people. I told him I had heard that Joshua was planning to implement for:username tags…
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nofollow
"nofollow" seems to be the name people are giving for the new anti-PageRank tool, it’s been pretty well received but there has been some criticism. nofollow is not a panacea. Large-scale social problem don’t have easy answers, like stopping the spread of STDs (which I’ve heard comment spammers have plenty of). One person implementing it…
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Interrobang
Just so you know, the punctuation on TiVo walked away from Comcast‽ isn’t a rendering error, it’s an interrobang. Invented in 1962, it’s a way to ask a surprised question, such as "He said what‽". People generally use ‘!?’ or even ‘!?!?!?!?’ where the interrobang would fit. If you find yourself needing an interrobang you…