Monthly Archive for March, 2006

My Least Favorite Thing About Netvibes

I’m the type of person who leaves his computer on all the time. For the purpose of this post, I specifically leave it on while I’m at work.

Netvibes, which I have posted about before, is my first homepage. By first, I mean that it occupies the first tab when I launch Firefox. Netvibes pulls down your chosen RSS feeds throughout the day. When it encounters a problem, it pops up a little box like this one.

For the last two or three days, I’ve gotten home to find that same little box. Only, when I click OK, I find another little box just like it, right where the first one used to be. Ten minutes ago I arranged them all over the screen, and took a screenshot, which I have cropped here, but I think you get the basic idea.

That’s a lot of error messages.

I managed to click through all the visible message windows, but after that, a new one appeared when I clicked OK. When this happens (it’s happened more than once), I am forced to call up Task Manager and just kill Firefox.

I estimate that I clicked OK on 100 message boxes before killing Firefox today. I’ve only been gone about eleven hours.

Dear Netvibes: Fix this. If there’s an error, make the whole page crap out to a 404, or something. Anything besides this.

WordPress 2.0.2 Drops

WordPress 2.0.2 is out, with some security and bug fixes.  Read about it here.

New Links/JSS Feeds

I added Newsvine to my sidebar and removed digg. Make your own conclusions.

What I want to talk about is the fact that there are not one but two Newsvine sections over there. They represent two feeds (out of a possible three). See, Newsvine presents news from the AP wire — the Wire — and news that registered users might find interesting and decide to seed to the site — the Vine. The third feed, which I don’t pull onto DP.com, has a lot of crap stories. This would lead one to the logical conclusion that the Vine & Wire feed would be roughly half crap. But somehow, the combined feed seems to be the best of the three. This confuses me, although I can sort of envision a fuzzy logic, neural network, popular is good thing going on here.

Right now both sections to the right are identical. I wonder about browser caches, though, and I’m going to check the site tomorrow to see what the headlines are. Hopefully within a few days I’ll have picked a favorite.

Feel free to comment on your preferred feed.

[UPDATE] Eh, they were always identical.  I went with the Vine & Wire feed.

HTML Humor

I’ve been a fan of HTML humor for some time now, and I couldn’t help but link to this comment on digg.

Google Sidebar - Web Clips

I decided to add Newsvine’s RSS feed to my Google Sidebar’s Web Clips yesterday, and I received a small surprise — ABC News was the only feed. Also surprising was the fact that the “Automatically add commonly viewed clips” option was checked.

When Google Desktop 3.0 beta came out, I downloaded it. Seems like it might have a few bugs.

Oh, and when I move or delete files it doesn’t follow them. WTF? I shouldn’t have to manually index every time I move a single file. That’s sub-par.

[UPDATE] Suddenly Sidebar is adding feeds.  Perhaps it is just trying to vex me.

Still, I complained about how Desktop loses files when I moved them on March 5 … the San Jose Mercury News didn’t write about that until the next day

AJAX Dictionary

I keep reading about Web 2.0. And I keep thinking, “More like Web 1.1.” I mean, I understand the technology behind it — AJAX is the buzzword right now. But check this out:

Web 1.0: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary

Web 2.0: Dictionary.hm

Maybe this really is Web 2.0.

New Theme

Trying out a new theme. It’s called K2. Thoughts?

[UPDATE] Yeah, I only had K2 on the site for like twenty minutes.  I like it … but I haven’t done any investigation into customizing it.  And … I’ve still got that red and black theme tucked away …