Disqus - Latest Comments for smilbandit

Re: Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you - Coding 2 Learn

smilbandit — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 19:25:27 -0000

or the less positive version "Build a man a fire and he's warm for the night, Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."

Re: Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you - Coding 2 Learn

smilbandit — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 14:10:22 -0000

My dad made me learn how to change the oil and change the brakes. His reasoning was that there are two important things on a car, the engine to make it go and the brakes to make it stop. The engine is to complicated and unless I had a real desire i'd never really learn it. The brakes though are pretty simple and takes maybe 30 minutes to change them. So if I learn to change the brakes and really put my life in my own hands, all I need then is the desire/desperation to fix something else on the car. I've already continued that with my son and his car and I really should see what the digital analogue for that is with his computer. Because i'm so culpable of "just give it here".

Re: Greg Bowens: Corporate Symbols on Detroit Police Cars? Who Decided That?

smilbandit — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:51:55 -0000

http://web.archive.org/web/...

Re: RSS: let's not do the same mistakes

smilbandit — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 00:02:21 -0000

Polling does suck but it doesn't have to suck so bad. I've always wondered by RSS didn't take on some of the things NNTP "solved" in 1986, like NEWNEWS that would only return new articles since a given time. You could even SLAVE news servers to another and share articles and groups (feeds). NNTP had a well defined push and pull mechanism and RSS could do well to have the same.

RSS does lend itself to being represented in JSON but really having a few different formats isn't bad as long as they identify themselves. Sure it's not ideal but the services we'd want to consume might be less likely to participate if there isn't a way for them to provide their data in the way that works for them.

What the next gen reader needs is to include streams of varied content from social networks so that users can get content that's not part of their feeds with an easy way to subscribe to the originating feed.

Re: If you're doing a new RSS reader...

smilbandit — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:37:22 -0000

I'd like for readers to make use of the item level category element. That was the primary focus when I built my reader. I think some do but I haven't checked out any new readers in years. I'd like to be able to click a "Today" button and get a list of categories on the side organized by number of articles with that category with "All" always being at the top. On clicking a category i'd get a river view of all the articles with that category. Although since category isn't used much it's also not spammed which is nice or i'd have to build a filter for them in my reader.

Re: Scripting News: Why apps are not the future

smilbandit — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:21:05 -0000

A riddle

This thing all things it will smash:
Silverlight, native code and Flash;
Overthrows governments, makes others flail;
Old school business models cause to fail;
Kills print, makes britannica frown;
and beats established markets down.

I'm sure better words smiths can do better.

Re: Scripting News: User-led RSS advocacy

smilbandit — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:12:45 -0000

A thought just popped into my head when reading the format/protocol list. What about using a torrent like approach for distribution? There's RSS feeds for torrents, why not torrents for RSS feeds. Maybe even a feature to view the opml of the users your exchanging content with. Could also help the people in Iran circumvent their countries content blockade.

Re: Scripting News: RSS community wakes up

smilbandit — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:28:18 -0000

Toluu had a good feature set for opml shareing/sych and discoverablity.
http://www.crunchbase.com/c...

Re: Scripting News: RSS community wakes up

smilbandit — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:23:10 -0000

I would love a NEWNEWS equivalent. Also a NEWGROUPS type featue with some additional metadata would be nice.

Re: World's Youngest Leading Social Network Eats World's Last Major RSS Reader: Google Reader Gets Plussed

smilbandit — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 07:47:09 -0000

I was wondering the same thing. Is Google Reader going to be broken for google apps users if profiles aren't available to apps users yet?

Re: Mobile Web: Taiwan, Opera and WebOS

smilbandit — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:09:38 -0000

Why not just have a web app that sms's the phone for the alarm. Then really you could use google calendar and set sms reminders. Though you'd loose precision by side loading the alert. Maybe as part of the WebAPI this could be implemented, http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/...

Re: louisgray.com: Living In the Browser Is No Myth. It's Possible.

smilbandit — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:20:17 -0000

What account are you using G+ with? I have chrome for my work, firefox for personal but since my personal email is a google for domains account I can't use G+ with it yet. So I also have Canary to login to my gmail.com account so I can use G+. I don't think I'd dump firefox cause I need to test things on multiple browsers, so it's convenient. Any idea on when Google domain accounts will get profiles?

Re: Stay N Alive: Twitter is Just The Launch Partner. Will There Be "One More Thing" for iOS 5?

smilbandit — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:05:18 -0000

If this is true then Apple would be remiss in not providing a way to keep the list of share with apps to only your selected few. I don't have ios5 running anywhere, but maybe there's already an option in settings already that lets you manage that. Also i'm thinking if the API is opened for others to use there could be abuse unless it's something they check for upon app submission. I think it would also be cool to have this available to websites in a similar fashion as OpenSearch, maybe called OpenShare. interesting note openshare.org redirects to google.com.

Re: Test Post

smilbandit — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:53:34 -0000

test comment

Re: Developer Creates Tool to Bring RSS Back to Twitter

smilbandit — Sat, 28 May 2011 10:28:15 -0000

Your totally right that those are available and that they've just been removed from the UI. I wrote the original code for my RSS reader because those API's you mention are bland and the urls don't show up as links, plus the avatar's aren't part of it. The twitter search feeds add this and the filtering but it doesn't do lists or favorites. So the code I gisted takes the best of both twitter feed types, adds in the avatar image and makes the item content look more like a twitter post. If I thought it was something big I would have at least attempted to come up with a good name.

Re: Twitter API 2 RSS

smilbandit — Sat, 28 May 2011 09:57:55 -0000

I'm not a rewrite expert but I was getting the same 500 error until I found out about RewriteBase and added that to the mix. Here's an example of the code working, http://tubejumper.com/twitt... I'm using godaddy perhaps mine's working due to there environment setup.

Re: Stay N Alive: Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely

smilbandit — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:42:44 -0000

Personally I don't care if there is a link on the page for RSS or anything else. I really want to see it more in the html as <
link
rel
=
"alternate" />. that way I can just point application x at readwriteweb.com and it can decide the appropriate format to consume or ask me if there are multiple appropriate options. Right now if you point a modern rss reader at a twitter users url it will start consuming their favorites and that's all that is there.

Re: Stay N Alive: Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely

smilbandit — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:31:05 -0000

I was annoyed at the limited information available in the rss feeds twitter uses. They expose a much richer source of data via an open json feed, https://api.twitter.com/1/s... I use it to pump tweets into my "rss" reader formatted more twitter style then just a straight text blurb. http://www.smilbandit.com/r... I was thinking about turning the code into a service but work's been busy.

I'm very much still in love with RSS but I do think that it's time for a evolution to a format more in line with the current an possibly future needs, perhaps even a suite of formats. Preferably designed to be consumed via xml and json and future format x. I've come across a number of things that are made to fit in RSS that might be handled better a different way. I don't know anything about twitters decisions but perhaps they don't use rss because it's just to constraining.

Re: Scripting News: JSONified RSS

smilbandit — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:49:07 -0000

one thing I like about xml for rss is that you can define namespaces for useful but non-core "stuff". I think a namespace object at the same level as channel would do well, "namespace": { "media": "http://someurl" }. That way under item you could have "media:attachments":{"1":"url","2":"url"}

Re: RSS Continued

smilbandit — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 07:41:36 -0000

Got a response to the question posted on quora, http://www.quora.com/Ive-re....

Re: RSS Continued

smilbandit — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:56:50 -0000

I've heard that the utm_source querystring overwrites the referrer in google analytics. I checked on the bit.ly link you created and used on twitter and it does show utm_source as being feedburner. Your stats might be heavy towards feedburner because of this. I don't have many contacts that I could use to run this down but maybe you do. I'll also post on quora.

Re: RSS: Not Dead Yet

smilbandit — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:12:52 -0000

Here's an image from my reader. more like RSS + A little Twitter
http://www.flickr.com/photo...

I've been playing with article look based on the stream/feed. So twitter posts in my reader look more like twitter. plus I made a terse and alert look. terse I use for high volume low signal feeds and alerts are for feeds that are more like action items then for content consumption.

Re: Messiness At Scale

smilbandit — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:08:04 -0000

Meh, flipboard uses RSS just not directly. It's like saying I don't pollute the air because I drive an electric car.

Re: Scripting News: Saving del.icio.us

smilbandit — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:53:31 -0000

For the DIY'er you could throw up a copy of scuttle on your own site. If I remember correctly it supports the del.icio.us api. written in php with mysql backend. http://sourceforge.net/proj... I'd build an import tool if I still used del.icio.us.

Re: Scripting News: Innovation: River of News in JSON

smilbandit — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:32:03 -0000

Here's my entry based off Martin's code.

http://tubejumper.com/winer...