fractalnavel : feeds

feeds: not an information promiscuant (huh?)

fractalnavel — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:27:16 GMT

rss: i don't subscribe to much, and most aren't very long term, being related to transient interests, but here's a few that i find useful in various ways. copy / save / import the opml in your favorite feed reader, if you care to.

<opml version="1.1">
    <head>
        <title>fractalnavel feeds</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <outline text="ACME Updates" xmlUrl="http://www.acme.com/updates/updates_rss2.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="AWS  Product Advertising API" xmlUrl="http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/rss/rssmessages.jspa?forumID=9" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Backreaction" xmlUrl="http://backreaction.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="ClubOrlov" xmlUrl="http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google Analytics Blog" xmlUrl="http://analytics.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Blog" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppEngineBlog" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Downtime Notify Google Group" xmlUrl="http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Google Group" xmlUrl="http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml?num=50" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Michigan Tech University Jobs" xmlUrl="http://sowacs.no-ip.com/rss/scraped_rss.aspx?src=mtujobs" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="NCZOnline" xmlUrl="http://feedproxy.google.com/nczonline" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Peter's Blog" xmlUrl="http://peter.michaux.ca/feed/atom.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Planet OLPC" xmlUrl="http://planet.laptop.org/atom.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Predictably Irrational" xmlUrl="http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?feed=rss2" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="The Bottom Feeder" xmlUrl="http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="The Way the Future Blogs" xmlUrl="http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/feed/" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="xkcd.com" xmlUrl="http://xkcd.com/rss.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="_The Alternate View_ columns of John G. Cramer" xmlUrl="http://sowacs.no-ip.com/rss/scraped_rss.aspx?src=altview" type="rss"/>
    </body>
</opml>

i have cleaned a few out that are only useful to me administratively.

no, really - that's pretty much it.

tech notes: fed up ;-)

fractalnavel — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:07:20 GMT

annoying things about google web history rss:

if you spend time visiting pages on one site, the rss contains only the last page visited on that site before another web site page gets recorded;
page titles aren't always recorded; and often a site's homepage title is recorded for all pages in that site;
i can isolate various types of searches, but i can't exclude them to only get "browsing" history;
google books items have unusable links;
using the <guid/> element for non-standard purposes.

looking at the google.com/history list itself, i can understand how the first & third item occur, but that rss needs help. i wonder if it would make sense to populate <description/> with something from a page's meta tags, or something else from within google's infobase.

while i'm picking on google rss feeds, their "my library" feed:

needs item <pubdate/>. it can't be there because they don't record the time when you add an item to your list.
would also be nice to have isbn's someplace, so that these feeds could be mashed up with amazon data, for example.
and this feed's item <guid/>s are funky too.
should add one's notes, personal reviews and tags ("labels" - come on guys, everyone calls them tags).

would be better off just generating my own feed from their book list export xml, since it has some (not all) of the above data.

item & feed authorship is another funky item. i suppose with books it needs to be the book's author(s), but for browsing history there's nothing that makes sense. unless there's item annotations being kept someplace, in which case these could be added to <description/>, and the author is the annotator. as for the feeds themselves, google needs to pull itself out of the attribution besides "generator".

i realize that there's a lot of different ways to go with these things, but some of this seems pretty basic. and they're google, fer chrissakes.

buried in books

fractalnavel — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:02:34 GMT

no, i'm not talking about the avalanche in my living room. i just (re)discovered google book search, and its companion "my library" feature. looks to me like a decent alternative to accumulating interesting book links in my amazon wishlist (beware - 3mb page!). my brother john does a bit of this too.

the main drawback is that amazon is far richer in information, and i can also use their links to generate income. however, the purpose is a better fit with google. google books also has some fairly extensive excerpts of these books online, even some of the ones no longer available from amazon.

i went ahead and tried to import my entire amazon wishlist into "my library", and it reported 4 duplicates and 13 failures (no book found) out of 365 (?) total. not bad. of course, i already had a full extract of my wishlist data, so pulling out all the isbn's was simple.

then i looked at the "my library" rss feed (another nice feature). discovered it was showing the books i had added farthest back. uh-oh - apparently the import feature treats the items farther down in the list as most recent, the opposite of the order i had (most recent first). easy enough to re-sort, and re-import in the other order - but how do i get rid of 348 entries ? there's no way to clear the list.

so i futzed around with automating it, but for the item delete function google is looking for an authentication cookie. rather than messing with making system.net.webrequest have cookies, i just generated a page with a button for each item, in a way that bypassed the item deletion confirmation, and used that. i could have used some client-side script and automated the items on that page, but i can hit "tab-enter" 350 times faster than i could have programmed it, especially since i don't expect to repeat this. sure, something ajax-y would be better. never did figure out how to do posts instead of gets that way (needed in this case to do book deletes without needing confirmation of each deletion).

ok, a lot of fooling around for not much, i admit. still, it's interesting to check out. but what originally caught my eye was their landing page, with its random selection of various items. that's what really sucked me in. i started just refreshing the page and then opening whatever looked interesting (as anyone following my browsing history may have noticed ;-)).

just one more bibliophile resource to add to the list. interesting how books are surviving the electronic information age. i still run into the project gutenberg site now and then, and it looks like they have audio books now.

and another good resource: www.ibiblio.org. man, haven't been around there in ages either.

oh god, i'm swamped - time to start shutting things down.

bummer - noticed that the history rss links google generates for viewing google books don't resolve to anything useful. google books is beta, but google web history is not. they still have lots of details to attend to in their products.

(reminder to self: need to update my website for pointers to the stuff from the last few days. yeah, self gets stuck with all the work.)

tech notes: clickstream

fractalnavel — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:51:52 GMT

way back when, i had in mind some thoughts regarding exposing one's browsing stream, along with other personal io streams. of course, i never did anything about it. but i was playing in google, noticed (again) their web history feature, and figured what the heck, may as well just leverage that. i hadn't been using this to date, so it starts from scratch.

i also figured i'd run it through feedburner so that i could get some minimal stats, just in case. i disabled anything detailed, since that interfered with other stuff i wanted to do.

the only real snag i ran into was that the google feed items have <guid/> elements, and feedburner just assumes that those take precedence over the <link/> elements - not a good assumption in this case. so i had to delete those.

i like those little "headline animator" thingies that feedburner has (above). too bad individual links aren't present. but i've also rendered that feed now in the sidebar here, and that should be good enough. want more ? use your favorite feed reader.

my first shot at this was to send it through newsgator's online reader, then set things up so i could scrape the last 100 links, but what i'm doing now is a lot cleaner, even though google only provides the latest 24 history items in their feed. no, i'm not going to accumulate stuff on the back end. if you want an accumulating history, it'll be up to your feed reader settings.

i've got a five minute cache on this end. that, combined with the feedburner delay, should give me enough time to catch any, uh, "erroneous" clicks. things that stray a bit. you know what i mean.

privacy issues ? well, what was it they say about "character": it's what you do while no one is looking. tell the reality tv folks that. i'll have to keep an eye on my own habits for a while, see if it's as boring as i think, or if anything ~~incriminating~~ interesting crops up.

it's my own personal zeitgeist:

zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

have fun !

speaking of books

fractalnavel — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:47:00 GMT

finally gave in monday and just went & bought the last two books of tad williams' "otherland" series. i was intending to send back the first two to the niece i borrowed them from, along with a prepaid mailer so that she could send me the last two, but after never getting around to it...

anyway, they arrived sometime today, which will give me something else to procrastinate over my resume with.

i thought briefly about getting the last two "wheel of time" books, but apparently a 12th book will be released, so i'll wait for that and then get them all. such a shame, jordan's passing, as there were so many fantastic ideas in that set that unfortunately just got bogged down in their own richness.

you can get your recent amazon purchases as a feed now:

loading my amazon purchases ...

so i've got a good weekend of reading ahead of me. perhaps i'll sit at the local pub and sip on something as i do this. [self: yeah, that sounds good.] cool. since we're all in agreement, then - ~~i'm~~ we're off ...

commentus interruptus

fractalnavel — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:43:29 GMT

i wish craig would start posting his del.icio.us links to his other weblog. why ? because they are "ranty" and need counterpoint commenting. and that blog is dead, of course. he originally said he'd keep one blog for a diary, the other for - other stuff - but it didn't work out that way.

loading craig's del.icio.us links ...

hey, craig, here's some hints on how to set this up.

a good day

fractalnavel — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:52:03 GMT

... more or less. did my usual ranting thing at work today, but it seems i am more able to channel that passion / frustration into constructive stuff, combined with perhaps a but more balanced treatment of whatever topic is at hand.

yeah, ok, that's a bit optimistic ;-) but, although i did not get a lot of programming per se done, a lot of planning and decisions were made for the final stretch, and i got another batch of knowledge and tools transferred to folks there.

that's the ongoing battle. it's not so much the customers of IT that are the issue (although that is sometimes significant), but IT itself getting in its own way.

so much cool stuff on the web today to build community and increase visibility. and i haven't even really looked for it; it's just stuff i just keep bumping into by accident. for example, ran into someone's sig image in a forum that was doing something cool, rotating through the title of his last few blog posts. turns out to be a feedburner.com thing. here, like this:

that only took a minute or two, i swear. less than 100 seconds.

anyway, it seems my constant harassing does seem to eventually take hold, seeding thoughts, words and actions in others, who in turn do the same, and so on. but it's so slow. dammit.

...making the rounds:

fractalnavel — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:24:00 GMT

like all such lists, some items are true & unique, some are true but common to other areas as well, and some aren't really true at all but they're funny anyway. some stuff is true for yoopers only. and one item is specific to downriver detroit - where i grew up!

JEFF FOXWORTHY’S VERSION OF MICHIGAN

   If you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 18 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping that the food will swim by, you might live in Michigan.
   If you're proud that your region makes the national news 96 nights each year because Pellston is the coldest spot in the nation, you might live in Michigan.
   If your local Dairy Queen is closed from November through March, you might live in Michigan.
   If you instinctively walk like a penguin for five months out of the year, you might live in Michigan..
   If someone in a store offers you assistance, and they don't work there, you might live in Michigan..
   If your dad's suntan stops at a line curving around the middle of his forehead, you might live in Michigan.
   If you have worn shorts and a coat at the same time, you might live in Michigan.
   If your town has an equal number of bars and churches, you might live in Michigan.
   If you have had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number, you might live in Michigan.

   You know you're a true MICHIGANDER when....

1. "Vacation" means going up north on I-75.
2. You measure distance in hours.
3. You know several people who have hit a deer more than once.
4. You often switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day.
5. You can drive 65 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard, without flinching.
6. You see people wearing fall formal wear (camouflage) at social events (including weddings).
7. You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.
8. You carry jumper cables in your car and your wife knows how to use them.
9. You design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.
10. Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
11. You know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction.
12. You can identify a southern or eastern accent.
13. Your idea of creative landscaping is a deer "bow target" next to your blue spruce.
14. You were unaware that there is a legal drinking age.
15. "Down South" to you means Ohio
16. A Muskrat is something you can eat.
17. Your neighbor throws a party to celebrate his new pole barn.
18. You go out to fish fry every Friday.
19. Your 4th of July picnic was moved indoors due to frost.
20. You have more miles on your snow blower than your car.
21. You find 0 degrees "a little chilly."
22. You drink pop and bake with soda..
23. Your doctor tells you to drink Vernors and you know it's not medicine.
24. You know what a Yooper is.
25. You think owning a Honda is Un- American.
26. You know that UP is a place, not a direction.
27. You know it's possible to live in a thumb.
28. You understand that when visiting Detroit, the best thing to wear is a Kevlar vest.
29. You actually understand these jokes, and you forward them to all your Michigan friends and relatives. (And those you know who wish to live in Michigan)

of course, this was forwarded on from my uncle while at his northern michigan lady friend's place. yeah, so, ok, a lot of this applies to upstate folks as well as yoopers.

you guys do know that i've been looking for a job at michigan tech in the keweenaw peninsula, right ? as in, here's an rss feed , page scraped from their job postings page.

swat iii

fractalnavel — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:45:00 GMT

a way to track operation of the spam filter via rss:

update: added referral and trackback feeds

"blogs.no-ip.org spam" feed loading...

"blogs.no-ip.org referral" feed loading...

"blogs.no-ip.org trackback" feed loading...

feeds/tech notes: what's that grinding noise...

fractalnavel — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 08:25:00 GMT

this one i page scraped myself, using a slightly strange asp.net approach. needs caching and error handling, but hey, it's there. not bad, considering it's aspx via text editor ;-)

james hogan is a scifi author a few of us partied with at marcon in columbus a few years back. yup, there's pics on the web site (ours, not his).

"james p hogan bb" feed loading...