Archive for March, 2006
My Least Favorite Thing About Netvibes
Mar 27th
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
Mar 22nd
WordPress 2.0.2 is out, with some security and bug fixes. Read about it here.
New Links/JSS Feeds
Mar 21st
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
Mar 6th
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
Mar 5th
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
Mar 5th
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.