RSS, Browsing and Email

November 20th, 2004 • Rants

I just can’t understand why Firefox team decided to stuff RSS feeds in bookmarks folder. Is it because it’s easier to find there? Is it to blend the news reading experience with browsing? Or is it just because it looks cooler? I tried to like it, but to no avail; news just aren’t bookmarks, period.

For some reason, developers are confused, they don’t know whether news belongs to browsing or to email, although “regular” news aggregators seem to work (and sell) just fine.

Opera tries to be a bit more sophisticated, since it’s not just a browser, but a full package stuffed with an email client, RSS reader, IRC chat, and whole lot more. To some extent, RSS integrates nicely with both browsing and email. When Opera discovers an RSS feed it displays an icon, but you add the subscription to the mail client. Not the best work I saw, but still works.

For Firefox fans out there. Yes, I’m aware of Sage and Aggreg8. But for God’s sake, have you tried using a real news reader? Sage still gets confused once in a while by “Live” bookmarks, it doesn’t really know whether to treat them like a file or a folder, it downloads a site’s feed everytime its title is clicked! Weren’t we trying to solve RSS consumption issues earlier? Because that’s not the way a well-behaved aggregator works.

For now, I think I’m going to stick with stand-alone aggregators, and read my news my way.

Wasabi using Subversion

November 12th, 2004 • General

For all the CVS geeks out there, here’s a cool reason to switch to Subversion, cool guys are using it too!

Firefox 1.0

November 9th, 2004 • Mozilla

Firefox 1.0 is here, download it now and enjoy, there are a lot of bug-fixes, lots of improvements, and it’s now in 14 languages.

Think like a Genius

November 7th, 2004 • General

Hmmm…. now this is interesting:

1. Look at problems in many different ways, and find new perspectives that no one else has taken (or no one else has publicized!)
2. Visualize!
3. Produce!
4. Make novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.
5. Form relationships; make connections between dissimilar subjects.
6. Think in opposites.
7. Think metaphorically.
8. Prepare yourself for chance.

Probably Do NOT use Windows was left out intentionally :)