if that doesn’t work i’m moving on to molotov cocktails

Cas is currently

WARNING: the following post was written under influence of jaffa cakes, extreme stress, tiredness, and more cups of tea than are probably healthy.

A housekeeping post before I get back to the business of serious blogging sometime later in the millennium.

People just keep on commenting. Really, I hadn’t realised how much it was true in the blogosphere *1*, but link, and they will come. Welcome Paul and assorted others, whoever you might be.

This blog is such a fricking ego boost! Loving it.

In a kind of weird and roundabout way in my head, this leads me onto the next point I have to make:

An open call to all you out there who have blogs/sites/whatever that generate RSS feeds. First off, feeds are great, I love feeds, they make my life a joy, and… I’ll stop now because my inner-geek is threatening to become an outer-geek. But, can you please make it clear what the URI of that feed is. Flashing neon signs saying “THIS IS A FEED” are always good. There are few things *2* that are more annoying than have Firefox tell you a page has a feed, but then be unable to get that feed into your aggregator.

I am surely missing some simple trick in Firefox, and I am going to feel so blonde when someone tells it to me, but right now that feeling is an old old friend. So, on the off chance there is at least one certified geek reading this blog, or even someone who uses Firefox with enough regularity to know the tips and tricks, is there any way of finding out the URI of a given feed? I can subscribe to feeds on a page, which puts them into my ‘rss blogs’ bookmark folder, but I don’t want to read them in Firefox. It’s an irrational thing of mine I am sure, but… I don’t wanna, and it was my birthday on Saturday, and I can apparently play that card for a few more days, so 😛

In happy and semi-related news, I have found the new love of my life. We’ve been on a couple of dates now, and things are hotting up, moving onto third base… *3*

Yes, I am of course talking of aggregators. Thanks to Google, I found Vienna, an opensource, sadly Mac-only, aggregator. It does all I want it to, has a beautifully elegant and clean UI, and (most importantly) doesn’t flash “GIVE US MONEY NOW” messages every five minutes like Newsfire used to. There is one small fly in the ointment (it’s late, and they’re cliches for a reason) and it is that Vienna has taken an irrational dislike to feeds from the NYT. It will collect them, and display them, but refuses to respond to the ‘open in browser’ hotkey, which then forces me to break my workflow and reach for the RSI inducing mouse every couple of seconds. Still, a very small bug, and one that might even get fixed in a new build of the project. It’s more likely to be the NYTs fault anyway. And Vienna also doesn’t like the feeds of a couple of the blogs I sometimes read when very very bored. It likes things to be all nice and validated and some people are lazy…

All things I can live with. It’s that stage in the relationship where such quirks are endearing. Only time will tell if they are going to become annoying as hell.

Last thing before I give in and go crawl into the bed which is looking so good to me right now – if you are one of the wonderful people who has their site generate an RSS/Atom/whatever feed, can you be a honey and make it generate a full feed, not just the first couple of lines of a post? When I have time, or it is looking like it is going to be a link-heavy post, or something I want to take time over, then I do open a given page in the browser. But mostly I just lack the time, and find it easier (and less CPU hogging) to view the post in the aggregator.

I still love your content, enjoy reading your content, and frequently go to your site to read the same content again in the original context, but times are, I’d prefer the choice. And I am staring a dial-up connection in the face from the end of the week, so logging on, getting the RSS feeds, logging off, and reading at my leisure sure sounds nicer (and cheaper) than logging on, getting the RSS feeds, opening and waiting to download upwards of 50 different pages (often with images), then logging off, trying to read at my leisure, but find you’ve gone onto a second page or something…

Ok, I’m admitting defeat now. There was an argument in there somewhere, but if you can find it you’re a better person than me. Just:
1) Make the URI of your feed easy to find
2) Make sure your feed is valid
3) Make sure your feed contains the full content of a given post. Comments I’m not so fussy on. Those I will go to your site to read. But content? Grrr.

Rant over. You can come out from under the desk now.
Night 🙂

Endnotes:
*1**runs out and quietly kills herself for finally succumbing to peer pressure and using that hideous hideous word*Back
*2*Quite a few actually, but nows not the time nor the place.Back
*3*I have no idea what third base entails, but I am guessing it is further than second, but not as far as fourth… Is there even a fourth? It’s one thing that I never did understand watching American movies.Back