Everything that comes out of Dossy, from the strange to the banal.
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since January 7, 2008 at 09:00 AM:
Well, that didn’t take long. I have a reproducible crash bug in FeedDemon 2.6, already–what was that, in my first 10 minutes of use?
I simply go to a folder that has more than 10 items in it, thus having more than one “page” in the newspaper view. I read some items, hit Ctrl-D to go to the next page, then Ctrl-M to mark the items as read, then I get the error popup you see in the screenshot above. I’ve restarted FeedDemon several times and each time I can reproduce the crash with the same exact steps.
Of course, the customary advice of “well, don’t do that, then” isn’t very useful here, as this is exactly the kind of reading workflow I prefer. It’s going to be hard to make it through the week-long trial …
I hope FeedDemon 2.6.1 isn’t too far away from being released. And, I hope it includes a fix for this crash bug.
Tags: FeedDemon
Two days ago, widespread announcement was made that all of the consumer NewsGator products are now available for free. I’m not surprised that it happened, just that it took so long to happen.
One of my requirements for a desktop feed reader is that it sync. and integrate with a web-based reader, which FeedDemon does thanks to NewsGator Online. Since the price is right (free, as in beer!) I decided to give FeedDemon 2.6 another look.
Right off the bat, the use of MSIE for rendering HTML inside the application makes me very uneasy: there’s a reason why I haven’t used IE in over a year, in favor of Firefox 2. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone figures out how to exploit the embedded IE inside FeedDemon through a specially crafted feed entry. Perhaps it’ll involve a prefetched link or malicious image file enclosure. Now that it’s free, and a lot more people start using it, it’ll eventually become a target.
Importing my current feed subscriptions OPML from Google Reader into FeedDemon worked perfectly. All the items I’d already read in Google Reader showed up as unread in FeedDemon, naturally, and I dreaded having to go through and mark them all read again. However, one awesome feature of FeedDemon is the Panic Button: it lets you mark things as read in bulk across all your subscriptions. It’s not very flexible–after all, it is a panic button–but it’s convenient. Nice job, Nick.
As far as feed reading goes, FeedDemon does an adequate job. The newspaper styles that ship with it aren’t going to wow you, but they work. I’m glad that the typical vi-style keyboard shortcuts are mapped (e.g., “j” and “k” for next and previous item, respectively). It’s great that Ctrl-K brings up a dialogue that lets you customize your keyboard shortcuts. However, I would make a usability improvement change and add the keyboard shortcut to the tooltip in the newspaper view:
Sure, I can hit Ctrl-K and see that the keyboard shortcut is “c” to clip an item. I might even be brave enough to guess at it and mash a few buttons. Or, it could just display it in the tooltip, like: “Add to clippings folder [c]”–there, no guesswork and it saves me a step from having to look for it in the keyboard shortcut list. Of course, this assumes you can find it in the keyboard shortcut list–in this particular case, “Add to clippings folder” doesn’t even appear in the list, while “Clip item” and “Clip item to default clippings folder” do. Want to take a guess as to which one the “Add to clippings folder” button invokes? Heh. (It happens to invoke the “Cliip item” function. Would you have known that without experimenting?)
Another nice feature of FeedDemon is the “Dinosaurs” report, which gives you a list of your subscribed feeds that haven’t updated in “X” days, where X is either 10, 30, 60 or 120. This is really handy for feed management when you have lots of subscriptions like I do.
I’m going to try to use FeedDemon exclusively for a week and see if it doesn’t drive me crazy. I might have to hack on my own newspaper style (which seem to be pre-processed XSLT files in the FeedDemon\Data\Styles directory, yay!) because all of the out-of-the-box styles really suck, IMHO. I’m so glad that Nick implemented the newspaper styles this way; not being able to customize the dispaly style would really suck, unless they were incredibly good to begin with.
Are you a FeedDemon user? Got any tips or tricks to share with a newbie like me? I’d love to hear about them. Help me get through this week!
Since announcing Twitter Karma on December 29th, it became popular pretty quickly in the Twitter community. I watched the traffic come in from various sources and being interested in this sort of thing, I wanted to know exactly what kind of impact it had on my overall traffic.
Using Google Analytics and Site Meter, I’m able to keep an eye on my traffic and get some useful metrics about it. Lets start with a graph of the past 7 days worth of visits (yellow) and page views (orange) from Site Meter:
What’s immediately interesting to me about this graph is that, previously, my weekend traffic was usually lower than my weekday traffic. However, the Twitter Karma traffic peaked on the weekend, which surprised me.
To get an idea of the number of users it brought me, I looked to Google Analytics. Here’s the Absolute Unique Visitors data for 2007-12-28 through 2008-01-08:
5,540 Absolute Unique Visitors
Friday, December 28, 2007 2.73% (164) Saturday, December 29, 2007 3.36% (202) Sunday, December 30, 2007 2.36% (142) Monday, December 31, 2007 5.72% (344) Tuesday, January 1, 2008 4.66% (280) Wednesday, January 2, 2008 6.92% (416) Thursday, January 3, 2008 11.84% (712) Friday, January 4, 2008 9.68% (582) Saturday, January 5, 2008 21.75% (1,308) Sunday, January 6, 2008 16.58% (997) Monday, January 7, 2008 9.06% (545) Tuesday, January 8, 2008 5.35% (322)
To separate out my regular blog traffic, I pulled the Top Content report for the same timeframe:
291 URLs were viewed a total of 10,159 times
Page Title Pageviews Unique Pageviews Time on Page Your Twitter Karma 5,653 4,494 00:03:13
So, of those 5,540 visitors, 4,494 of them went to the Twitter Karma page, or close to 81%.
To be honest, ~4,500 visitors isn’t a big number at all. What makes me really curious is finding out how many “active” users the Twitter service has. What percentage of that total does 4,500 users represent over that time period? Less than 1%? 5%? 10%? 50%?
I’m sure the Twitter guys aren’t going to open their kimonos that wide and share that kind of information with us, but I wonder if there’s any way to collect that information anyway. I guess I could sample the public timeline every few seconds for a few weeks, then compute the uniques and update frequency to come up with an estimate. This won’t take into account those who have their updates protected, but I’m willing to bet fewer than 20% of Twitter’s active users have done that.
Still, this was a fun application to hack together and it seems to be well-received amongst the Twitter community, so I’m really happy with it. I hope someone can come up with another great tiny app. idea for Twitter that I can hack on, next.
Tags: Twitter Karma, Google Analytics, Site Meter
The weekly Hackfest took a bit of a break due to the winter holiday and resumed this past Monday. The goal for this session was to turn the visual design created last time into actual FBML that would render inside a profile box.
The first step was to create the database schema, which was mostly outlined in the design document. I went ahead and created actual DDL scripts for MySQL based on what was described in the design doc. I’m expecting these to change as development progresses, but this represents the minimum required to implement our current visual design.
The general approach for the profile box implementation is to use profile.setFBML to set the FBML of the profile box to simply “<fb:ref handle="profile_box"/>“. We want to do this because every day when the profile box needs to be updated for every single Facebook user who has added our application, we don’t want to have to invoke profile.setFBML with the newest information–that just won’t scale well. Having the profile box simply contain an <fb:ref> means we can effectively update everyone’s profile box with a single call to fbml.setRefHandle, once per day.
I’ve also created a SQL script that can be used to populate the MySQL database with sample data for testing. The only MySQL-specific part of it is the use of “CREATE TABLE ... LIKE ...” which allows us to use the submission_template and votes_template tables to create our individual instances of those tables for each list_id, rather than embedding the DDL for each of those in our code itself.
After all this, here’s a screenshot of the profile box off my own Facebook profile page, pulling the sample data out of the database and rendering it via FBML:
The rating widgets–the “thumbs up” and “x” icons–don’t actually work yet, but that’s going to be next week’s challenge, getting the Facebook “mock AJAX” working.
Tags: Hackfest, New Jersey, Facebook, MySQL
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since December 31, 2007 at 09:19 AM:
For the most part, I really don’t care who’s President in America. None have really moved the needle with respect to issues I particularly care about, as far as I can tell.
However, I was curious to see if any of the potential candidates really lined up with what I care about, so I decided to take the quiz that’s been going around. Here are my results:
63% Ron Paul
60% Mike Gravel
59% Bill Richardson
54% Dennis Kucinich
53% Mitt Romney
49% Chris Dodd
49% Fred Thompson
48% Tom Tancredo
48% Rudy Giuliani
46% Hillary Clinton
45% Barack Obama
44% John Edwards
44% Joe Biden
42% Mike Huckabee
42% John McCain
2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz
I was hoping to find a 80% or better match, but even a 63% match with Ron Paul is interesting. After reading up on his political position, I definitely think I like him … but, so what? Even if he gets elected, how much can he possibly change?
To give you an idea of where I stand politically, here’s the results of another quiz:
Your Result: Libertarian (63%)
This quiz has defined you as a Libertarian. Keep in mind, this ideology can be applied to the right or left in the social sense. You believe in a minimal role of the government in solving problems and believe that the “Free market” can handle almost all economic situations.
Conservative: 42%
Liberal: 33%
Social Democrat: 24%
Fascist/Radical Right: 2%
Communist/Radical Left: 0%
I definitely think money exerts a lot of force–say, much more than a single person, like the President–and when choosing a candidate for President to support, we need to focus on two things:
When considering these two, reflect on their ethics of how they make and spend money. Determine the level of ingenuity they display when faced with these two tasks. Understand how they balance the two activities to remain fiscally healthy.
Maybe I’ll have to do some more digging on this Ron Paul guy. I might even get out and vote in November, who knows.
Do you have any interesting facts about him? Please share links to stuff with me in the comments.
“Is there some way to ask TwitterKarma to look at a second account once you’ve input the details for one account?”
The simplest answer is to close your browser completely, and the next time Twitter Karma tries to access Twitter, it will prompt you to re-authenticate. Of course, that’s no fun–I’d hate to close my browser and lose all my tabs, so I looked for another way.
In the Twitter API, there’s a “verify_credentials” method that, coincidentally, seems to change the effective user of the browser session if authentication is successful. You would invoke it by navigating to an URL like this:
http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@twitter.com/account/verify_credentials
Replace the USERNAME and PASSWORD with your Twitter.com account information. You should get a plain page back that just says “Authorized.” After that, reload the Twitter Karma page and click the “Whack!” button again. It should now load your friends and followers for the other account.
Tags: HOWTO, Twitter Karma
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