Recently I needed to clear off some old PC hard drives and searched for a useful utility. I found SDelete (for deleting individual files and clearing unused disk space) and Darik’s Boot and Nuke (for erasing entire drives).
The recent discussions about how strict aggregators should be when reading invalid or ill formed feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) brought to mind an idea: an automatic service that checks your feed for validity and send e-mail whenever it finds a problem. The service would be an aide to web site authors, alerting them to any problems with their RSS/Atom feeds. Rather than authors manually checking their feeds with the feed validator, the service would do this for them automatically. Rough thoughts on some of the details: Web front-end for sign-up, including feed URL, e-mail address, and frequency of checking…
I’m still using Bloglines as my aggregator and have found it quite useful. Yesterday they released Bloglines for Connected PDAs which is a version optimized for small devices. If you connect to the main page (www.bloglines.com), it will automatically redirect to the mobile page if it detects a PDA browser. I tried it on my Tungsten C (802.11) and Tungsten T3 (Bluetooth) and it worked well in both cases. The PDA-optimized pages are really fast, in part because the icon for each channel has been removed, meaning there are practically no graphics to download. Sample screenshots are shown below. …
When providing feeds for a web site (RSS, for example), there tend to be two camps: those who provide full entries and those who provide just an excerpt or summary. In the latter case, the rationale is often to drive readers to the web site to read the actual article. However, that can be inconvenient for people who follow hundreds of web sites through their http://www.buyantibioticshere.com/ feeds. In fact, it can have a negative effect if people don't follow the summary at all. Decaffeinated has a good discussion of the issue and an argument for including the full entries in…
Portable USB drives (loaded with flash memory from 64MB, 256MB, and up) have become quite popular and are really handy for carrying files or data around. What I really needed was a way to synchronize my files, so I turned to an open-source package called Unison for the answer.