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…
I just reconfigured my Movable Type blog to use cruft-free URLs. The basic premise is to clean up your URL scheme by removing non-essential information, thus ensuring that your links will live on in the future as you evolve with different web publishing tools and technologies. In my case, I also wanted to change from my old method of daily archives (one file per calendar day, including one or more posts) to individual archives (one post per file). Among other benefits, this should help with search ability of the site because the entry post will be the same as the…
Google recently launched a beta of the Google Deskbar which “enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard.” This type of utility is quite useful and allows you to quickly do a search without first bringing up a browser window. In fact, there is already an excellent tool that does this: Dave's Quick Search Deskbar. Both apps install into the desktop taskbar, providing a field for search entry. When not in use, Dave's will show the full date/time while Google shows a small Google logo. Dave's can be customized with XML files…
Today Intuit published an Open Letter to TurboTax Users, apologizing for problems caused by their activation (anti-piracy) restrictions that limited TurboTax to run on only one PC. In response to feedback from our customers, I want you to know that we're making an important change to TurboTax software and have removed activation technology. The new TurboTax for Tax Year 2003 Software can be used fully on multiple computers. I wrote about this back in February when I was starting my taxes. I only needed to load it on one PC, but still find this sort of thing extremely annoying. When…
More on the RSS headline viewer for Palm devices that I mentioned over the weekend. Today I tried it on my Tungsten C and it worked pretty well. A couple of minor bugs but overall a pretty nice package. They’ve also written a conduit (Windows only), so you don’t need an internet-capable device to use the software.