I’ve taken on a fun little project, a webcomic. I have little-to-no artistic ability but I have a lot of funny material. I’m debating, though, do the comic in MS Paint or draw by hand? Anyway, the comic is called Life With Women and I plan to provide a weekly dose of entertainment. If you just read this thinking I’m sexist or perhaps offensive, that’s fine, it just means you didn’t go visit the site and read my introduction.
If you’re interested in testing out an interesting site here’s a link for an invite to Beta 2.0 of HiveLive. Only 100 people can use the link and it’s first come, first served.
I wanted to get some information on Tourgasm, Dane Cook’s cleverly named comedy tour. When I visited the official website I was greeted with “The official trailer for the brand new HBO Comedy Documentary Series – Tourgasm!” When you hit Play you’re told the video has been removed for, get this, copyright infringement! YouTube, you piece of shit. You removed the official trailier. Look at all these bootleg videos! I’m sorry but I had to go to MySpace to watch the trailers. You know you’re done when MySpace does better than you…
It
I’m listed on 25peeps.com. Click here and help me stay there. I love being popular. PS: Guys, when you click you’ll see a decent cleavage shot. In reality it’s a guy’s ass cheeks.. no, seriously.
MySpace is stupid as hell: “MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old’s friends’ list” (Link). Oh yeah, all those creepy adults can only see partial profiles, now. Mission accomplished, guys. Are you kidding me?! On a website where people are aged 69, 123, 184, and 92 how the fuck was a users ‘age’ determined as the best deterrent? Go look at my profile, I’m suddenly a 14-year old in 30 seconds.
I’ve added the Subscribe To Comments plugin. If you leave a comment you can be notified by email of any follow-ups. So, what are you waiting for? Comment!
There has always been a bit of talk on RSS and whether or not it will be widely accepted. Many people suggest that ‘RSS’ doesn’t seem to flow off the tongue too easily. Why not, though? I don’t think we’re giving people much credit. People can be taught anything. Heck, we’re all still typing www. aren’t we? Does anyone know why? Additionally, I hear people instruct me to visit an .html page all the time. Do they know what HTML means? Most likely not. Do they know what .html pages are? Of course they do. That’s all they need to know.
So why don’t you think people can be trained to subscribe to RSS? People were easily hooked on email. As Brian mentioned, the concept of opting-in is hardly revolutionary. So why couldn’t the same be done for RSS? With browsers (and Vista) integrating RSS don’t you think people will naturally figure out the benefits? I agree, it’s hard to re-train people. But, the way I see it, people are increasingly finding more information online. If they wanted to get an email for every cheap fare and recipe available out there they’d realize thats just too much email (in addition to all the spam that would come along with it). Their friend will then say something to the tune of: ‘oh, you don’t know how to subscribe to that stuff’?
So why don’t we have a .rss file extension? Oh wait, we do, it’s called .xml. When I visit nytimes.com/…/Busines.xml I have a pretty good idea of what I’m about to open. In theory this file extension will open an XML file allow me and my browser/reader/whatever to open the feed the way I want. So why the hell doesn’t it work that way? I open a .html file in Firefox/IE and a website loads. I open a .doc file in Firefox/IE and a document loads. But when I open my .xml file I’m suddenly greeted with the most unfriendly looking collection of symbols, tags and words I’ve ever met. This is exactly why RSS hasn’t taken off yet. It lacks the consistency.
File extentions are there to create a certain level of consistency. In other words, when I open a .doc file I know I’m opening some sort of document. As a typical web user, when I open website.com/feed/atom.xml or something.com/rss/ how am I supposed to know what I’m visiting? When I see a page load with a bunch of nonsense like <channel> do I know what to do next? Of course not! So why isn’t my browser doing that for me? Why can’t I tell my friends to go to somewebsite.com/subscribe.xml (or even better, .rss) and have the computer do what it’s always done: recognize the extension and do something useful with it.
It’s way too hard to visit a website, search for 10 minutes for their ‘RSS’ or ‘Feeds’ or ‘Subscription’ page, copy the location, paste it somewhere, etc. If my friends can tell me to visit a .php or .html page I should be able to ask them (just as easily) to visit my .xml or .rss feed. Feeds will never get past early adopters if we don’t create some sort of consistent way to treat the user. I really don’t think renaming RSS will do the trick.
[tags]rss, xml, feeds, syndication, blogging[/tags]
Anyone interested in testing out Farecast? It’s a very nice (beautiful, functional) website to help predict and find the best fares based on price histories. Right now it only serves Seattle/Boston markets but it’s great to play around with. I have a bunch of invites; just leave a comment.
In light of Father’s Day I figured I’d quickly dedicate a post to my father. Noah always has the good ideas.
My Dad works for McDATA which is, basically, providing big storage solutions for big companies. I remember his earlier days at McDATA; he worked in a big lab full of nerds, big computers and racks bigger than a fridge. I would always go to ‘Take Your Kid to Work Day’. I remember one year I was able to install Windows on a few of their servers. I also had the opportunity to apply some patches to some other boxes. This was the first time I had been exposed to so many cables and computers in one place. Even though I didn’t even understand what it was I got to see fiber optic cables, too. Another year he organized a meeting for me and the web team. I worked on the company’s intranet and checked for errors on the external site. These were certainly important experiences at that time in my life.
Before that my Dad has done a number of things that I’ve always tagged along at. Before McDATA my Dad worked for a small group which I ended up becoming webmaster for. I remember going into work with him for almost an entire summer. I drank coffee a lot too. I couldn’t have been much older than 12. I don’t really drink coffee anymore.
Before that he worked with another group and this is when I was really introduced to the internet. I created my first webpage at his office and called it ‘DWP’ (Devin’s Web Pages). I can vividly remember the black marble texture background I used. This was in the days of Geocities and FortuneCity (when it was cool). Guestbooks were all the rage, oh the memories.
Anyway, I wouldn’t be where I am today (a nerd with a brand new Dell, two LCDs, etc) if it weren’t for Dad and his uncanny ability to rub a little bit of technology off onto me. Sure, I’ve learned a lot on my own but if it weren’t for his patience showing me how to connect a hard drive and go through a BIOS setup I never would have built my last two computers. Funny though, I sometimes feel like the tables have turned and now I’m showing him how to navigate Windows XP installs.
Thanks for everything, Dad. Thanks for taking an interest in everything I do (including this blog). Thanks for sharing your insight, for turning me off to coffee, and for being there to discuss what other people quickly find boring (computers, business, Google). Thanks for also teaching me some important life skills. It’s been fulfilling to say that, for the most part, I’ve been financially independent for the last few years. Although I don’t rely on you for money or ‘Take Your Kid to Work Day’ anymore I value the new dynamic of our relationship.
Thanks for everything, Dad. I love you.