Sage Feed Reader for Firefox Saturday 2006-02-18
Ever wanted to have a feed reader integrated in your web browser? I know I do! Remember the combined email and news reader in Netscape Communicator? I liked the idea, but the communicator was a bloated son of .. erm, a resource demanding piece of software. When I installed Firefox, I was happy to discover the concept of “Live bookmarks”. In your bookmarks manager you create a folder and mane it “RSS” or whatever you want, preferably under your Bookmarks field folder. That way it sits easily accessible on your bookmarks toolbar. When you want to subscribe to a feed you simply add it to the RSS bookmarks folder.
With one click you open your live bookmarks and get a list of your subscribed feeds. Clicking on a feed you get a list of feeds, and hovering over a feed you get a list of the latest entries in that stream. Clicking an entry you go to its origin, be it a web page or a blog post.
I like it and have used it frequently.
Comes along theSage Feed Reader extension for Firefox. Now that’s something completely different! At least on the surface. The extension installs itself quietly and easily in your sidebar collection.
When you activate Sage, it shows your subscribed feeds in the upper half, and when you select a certain feed, it presents the current list of entries in the lower part of the sidebar. Nothing extraordinary about that
Wat’s new, useful and beautiful is what happens in the browsers presentation area. The current entries to the selected feed are presented in full and organized as pages in the page and in an easily readable format
I am the kind of creature who has lots of software installed on my computer, and I tend to forget I even have them. If I can reach my subscriptions from the browser, I might even come to read them from time to time. From this moment on, I’ll use the Sage for that purpose, and I sure recommend it to anyone listening.
What’s in a name? Well heres what Dictionary.com has to say about Sage:
n.
One venerated for experience, judgment, and wisdom.adj.
1. Having or exhibiting wisdom and calm judgment.
2. Proceeding from or marked by wisdom and calm judgment: sage advice.
3. Archaic. Serious; solemn.
Getting Rid of Comment Spam Friday 2006-02-17
In a great article “New Comment Spammer on the Loose – Pay Attention” Lorelle strikes at comment spammers and gives some advice on how to fight these ever lasting creatures. She tells us the sad story of the new and inventive ways spammers use to sneak through spam filters, such as Aksimet and Spam Karma. One method is to steel content from the blog post and try to give the impression of giving a real comment to it. The method is usually easy to detect, as it results in very strange wording. Another new method is to impersonate some humble blogger seeking advice from this excellent blogger, and Lorelle gives examples of such spam creeping through. Here is one:
hi! I am Theresa, from Spain, and for my school I am doing a research on blogging on the internet. May I show this to my teacher and class on thursday? Thanks, Theresa, 16 years, Barcelona.
Makes your heart bleed, doesn’t it? That is until you find 17 copies on different posts, all linking to pornography in your blog. There’s a dark side to human nature, no doubt.
Lorelle gives you advice on how to catch comment spam and also how to pass through the spam filters with your legitimate comment. She says:
“If you comment on a blog, make your comment look like a comment and not comment spam. Don’t just say “thanks, this helpedâ€. Say something more specific.”
Be enlightened, read it and contemplate!
Promoting the FeedIcon Thursday 2006-02-16
In an earlier post I wrote about the suggestion for a new icon, signalling the presence of a feed on a web site or blog. Today I got a mail from my subscribed stream at Matt Bretts FeedIcon, stating that “Opera has adopted the feed icon.” That’s confirmed in a post with the happy title “Making love to the new feed icon” at the Opera Dektop Teme’s blog.
Good news!
I think they got it rolling irresistibly towards a standard way of signalling a feed, often referred to as an RSS stream or RSS feed. With Microsoft on board and with Opera on the Bandwagon together with Firefox I believe it will roll.
Much discussion remains of course and in the long list of comments ( 102 as I write ) to Matt’s announcement, not everyone is happy. I think the arguments against the icon are fairly week though.
The oldest protest about new standard is that we already have that little hard to read orange rectangle with RSS on it. The problem is that there are lots of different buttons with as many messages, telling us which type of message encoding is used. There is no standard, even if the RSS button was a nice try – I kind of liked it! The argument is slanted against the not-invented-here syndrome.
The FeedIcon is clear and we’ll be used to see it all over the web, as well as in software and mobile devices. And we will recognize it.
Another argument is that it looks like a symbol for wireless communication, while others associate sound sound. Like one of the commenter I rather saw it as radio waves from an antenna, a broadcast, which comes close to what it is.
Matt suggests the recoloring of the icon to adapt to different web and blog color schemes, and facilitates this by offering multiple image formats and also some advice. He writes:
“Customizing the icon can be done one of 2 ways. If you’re familiar with Illustrator, definitely use it to manual edit the colours. It’s easy enough – there’s 2 strokes and a 3-tone gradient, that’s it. If you’re not an Illustrator user, you can use the PSDs and the “Color Overlay†layer style to add colour to the gray scale versions. As you can see from the examples to the left, the Illustrator method comes out cleaner with more variation in colour. But if you’re going with a smaller version, you can hardly notice a difference. Instructions are included in the readme file.”
Understandably there are arguments against this too. The orange color is easily recognizable and immediately draw attention to the feed, even at small size. Other colors would break the standard ( which isn’t yet ) and possibly stall the proliferation and stall the campaign. Anonymous says:
Why on earth would you encourage people to change the color?!?!?!
And Brian G. goes on to say:
“changing the color doesn’t exactly make it much of a standard…”
The answer to this, is that the graphics itself is so special and significant, that people will recognize it regardless of the color. I think that the possibility to change the color in a fairly simple way, will make it easier to get acceptance for the FeedIcon. Designers and their customers tend to be very picky on what colors go into their designs, and the possibility to make the icon fit in is a good argument to use it.
On this blog the orange doesn’t really match the overall look and feel, but I use it anyway. I’m not that picky (yet 
, and I have still not settled with the design or the colors. Soon as I could lay a hand on the icon I put it on top of my blog feeds.
“Standard is a good thing – everyone should have one”
B wildered!
Oh, by the way – I couldn’t help myself, so if you have an SVG enable browser ( FireFox or any browser with an SVG plugin, you can have a look at my “Shameless Promotion of the FeedIcon“. Don’t forget to resize your browser window!
Flickry Flash on WordPress, part 1 Tuesday 2006-02-14
Oh gee am I tired!
In my effort to redesign the Regulus theme I decided to have all sorts of syndication bunched together in the upper left corner of my site. In other words, I want my feeds, Technorati, del.icio.us and Flickr in my newly built left sidebar. To that end I was googling for a suitable icon to represent my Flickr stream.
For hours I scanned the lots of sites with tips and widgets for using Fickr, and search and behold – it’s everywhere. And it’s exciting!
I couldn’t sleep, so this day will be at least 36 hours long. My eyelids are taped to the bone and my eyes emits a faint glow, as I stumble on.
I’ll be back with some more details on my findings, as soon as I recover from this ordeal. For now I can only offer a demo page showing my hastily mocked up family show or banner.
It is composed by the ticker service at Slide from my Flickr stream, and presents a image set called “family”.
You can study the rather incomplete result on my demo page.
It’s breakfast or sleep now.
Catch you later!
You’ll Love the Banana Phone Monday 2006-02-13
I think you’ll agree that when happiness comes to you, it’s always by chance? You really cannot hunt it down or plan for it. Well, you do, of course, but real joy strikes like a blitz from clear skies, no?
Well this time I wasn’t hunting for happiness, but for clever ways to use my Flickr account.
I found the “Random Photo Browser” at the flagrantdisregard blog, and in minimal font at the very top of the page, I noticed a link that says “The bananaphone will make you smile“.
Happiness stroke!
Standardize the RSS Feed Icon Saturday 2006-02-11
Classic Icons for RSS or Atom feeds has become commonplace and are represented in many different ways on web sites and blogs. Sometimes as a text link, but more often as an icon. To subscribe to a feed you click the icon or copy the URL behind the icon to your feed reader.
Firefox introduced what they call live bookmarks, which means that the browser discovers a link to an RSS feed on the page you are reading. The browser then presents a special icon in the address field, and you can add the URL to your bookmarks. When you hover over a live bookmark, the last few items is listed and you can go directly to the updated page or post.
Microsoft seems to have accepted the new icon as a standard for representing an RSS feed, and the discussion of a standardized symbol for syndication feeds is in full swing. Sitepoint in its ‘ RSS icon “standardized†‘ argues that …
“With this icon currently in Firefox and set to appear in Internet Explorer 7 next year, it will quickly become the standard user experience for feeds on the Web. Web designers would be well advised to begin using it …”
The post is followed by a fairly long discussion laying out the pros and cons for the new button.
Some argue that this is just a fancy Firefox invention, merely indicating the presence of a RSS, RDF or Atom feed, and that it only symbolises a live bookmark.
Others are convinced that a standard button would simplify the subscription to feeds, certainly for people who don’t know what RSS means. Not everybody can tell the difference between RSS, RDF and Atom, and shouldn’t have to. Feed readers should be able to read the most common formats of feeds and it should be transparent to the user.
Another good argument for an icon without text is that it is truly international. There are different explanations of what “RSS” means. “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”? Lately the term “RSS” has in many instances become synonymous with “feed” regardless of format. an internationally recognizable symbol would simplify the subscription to feeds regardless of what technique is used behind the scene.
I think it is time to leave the developer view on feeds, and make them accessible for all to consume. I’m certain that users will be able to subscribe to feeds just by clicking on a button in a web page. The browser will then have the feed reader built in, or will send the subscription to a default reader.
I support Matt Bretts campaign at Feed Icons for standardization of an icon for syndication feeds.
Apart from offering a beautiful site, he offers downloads of the icon in different sizes and image formats, such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, PSD, AI and SVG.
I recommend that you join in, download the all-in-one archive and start using this universal icon now.
If you need more arguments, you can also read a great debate at Bugzilla, some opinions at Digg, or the lamentation leading to Microsoft’s acceptance of the Firefox icon at Microsoft Team RSS Blog
Ugrading to WP 2.01 Friday 2006-02-10
Scary business? My upgrade from WP 1.5.2 to version 2.0 went too smooth. I had no problems at all, so it feels a little scary to jump into the upgrade process again, like jumping into the icy waters of the nearby Baltic See.
I’ll take precautions. Rubber suite on, backup everything, delete all except wp-content, upload the new version, run the upgrade script. If necessary delete the contents of .htaccess and recreate the permalinks.
If I’m not back here by tomorrow, something went really bad. So, goodbye for now – I’ll keep you posted if I can by editing this post.
[Edit] Wow!
Gee!, I’m back on track. I survived. I didn’t even turn off the plugins, just followed the basic rules.
And I got a bonus over the bug fixes. For some reason the premalink for one and only one post suddenly seized to work, giving me the 404 finger. I deleted and re-posted with a new slug, I refreshed the permalink structure. Nothing!
After upgrading I suddenly and unexpectedly got the run away permalink back. Thanks WP developers!
The whole upgrade process, all included took less than five minutes ( on a broadband connection mind you
In the Hot Air
Just a quick note here. I’m in the hot air now. Feeling like my newly born PetitOn has made an impact.
What’s that about, you may ask. Well, Aksimet has caught my first two spammy comments
Should I cry or burst into a loud Hurray!!?
I’ts all about Vi-gra though, so I guess they don’t know me – giggle ( is that ;;)
Reordering the Regulus Theme
YabbaYabba!
Today I have done some reordering of the Regulus 2 theme. It was beautifully crafted by Ben Gillbanks at Binary Moon, but I thought there was enough stuff in the sidebar, and some more I wanted to cram in.
So I decided to make me another sidebar, this time to the left. It’s not only for ads, even if it would’t hurt to get some $$G to get me the Java, that keeps me and this cyberspot going.
It’s my first shot at this business, and I don’t know anything about PHP so far, though it helps to know a few other programming languages. I didn’t have to change the PHP of the theme, other than to add an empty file and add in some html stuff, in this case an AdSense skyscraper. Of course I had to fiddle and tune for position and size in the Stylesheet – I know some CSS.
I’m happy to say that technically it was a success and howl to the Binary Moon, for the excellent structure, that made this change a breeze. ( A few hours of breeze actually
For the rest of the design: the colors, the fonts, the header image, I’ll get back.
Happy for now and goodnight!
Blog Statistics Thursday 2006-02-09
Owen at Asymptomatic has tested quite a few statistics packages in an effort to get some clue of who is reading his blog. And as he was at it, he also kindly has given his view on the pros and cons of the different software and services. The post has already drawn some attention and many comments on the solutions he discusses, as well as suggestions on other software and services.
If you are keen on getting to know your readers a little better, you should read his article and the accompanying discussion.
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