Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

What Should Go in a Default RSS Feed?

So after four or five years of not redesigning this site, I’m finally working up the energy to rearrange the furniture a little. Part of the motivation comes from realizing how much more I like the general design of my construction blog and the other part comes from the admission that a lot of the things I want to update my site with regularly are not articles about web design and development, and in some cases, not articles at all.

The first question to answer in this redesign is: what are the discrete types of content I will be posting once the redesign is complete. So far, this is what I’ve come up with —

Web design and development articles
Other articles
Product Recommendations
Random links of interest, a la what’s in my sidebar right now
Newsvine seeds linking to interesting news stories I’ve read lately
Photos
Videos
Links to latest entries on A House By The Park
Latest Twitter posts

The items are more or less in order of what I think people would be interested in. The first three would be full text posts and the rest would be in some sort of compact form, either inline with the rest of the posts or more likely in a sidebar.

So far so good. I’m pretty confident I can pull all of that off with not too much work. The problem, however, is how that all manifests in an RSS feed. WordPress has a great feature where you can mix and match categories into different RSS feeds — which I fully plan to do — but what goes in the default feed? That is the $64,000 question. With somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers, I don’t want to piss anybody off by shoving a lot more updates in there to relatively meaningless things like Twitter entries. As a reader, I prefer to subscribe to RSS feeds that update once or twice a week max and if one of my favorite blogs shoved the whole kitchen sink into their feed suddenly, I might unsubscribe.

On the other hand, however, I’ve had plenty of people say things to me like “I used to always read your blog… back when you updated it!” — clearly implying that 2 or 3 updates a month isn’t cutting it.

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So the first question to answer is “what should go in the default feed?” If you’re a current Mike Industries RSS subscriber, please vote in the poll to the right.

The second question is not really something I need votes on, but perhaps should be discussed in the comments below: when offering custom RSS feeds, is the best practice to create them by opting out of categories or opting in? Here are the two ways you can custom feeds in WordPress —

http://www.example.com/feed?cat=1,2,3
(Returns a feed with items from categories 1, 2, and 3)

http://www.example.com/feed?cat=-4,-5,-6
(Returns a feed with all items except from categories 4, 5, and 6)

The user interface for creating each style of feed can still be identical (a bunch of checkboxes), but the nature of the subscription is subtly different. Let’s say you’re subscribed to the first feed and I add a 7th category. Say category 7 is links to a third blog that is created at some time in the future. If you’re subscribed to the first feed, you won’t get the new stuff. If you’re subscribed to the second feed, however, you will, because you haven’t specifically excluded category 7. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. If you have any insight into this or any other related issue, I would love to hear your comments below.

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Goodbye Bloglines…

The Bloglines Plumber. Poor guy. He was recently even replaced with balloons.

I wished this day would never come but have suspected for the last couple of years that it probably would. This weekend, I officially said goodbye to the website that changed the way I consume information more than any other site I’ve ever used: Bloglines.

I started using Bloglines in 2003 when it was the only viable web-based RSS Reader and before most people even knew what RSS was. It instantly changed my information consumption routine from pull to push. The thoughtfully designed interface and reliable uptime allowed me, and thousands of others, to quickly and efficiently sift through a lot of information in a short amount of time.

When Ask.com purchased the company from Mark Fletcher in 2005, I applauded the acquisition and just hoped the new company would more or less leave things they way they were. Unfortunately, over the last few years, uptime has gotten progressively worse and there haven’t really been any great features launched to offset the decline in reliability. Sure there’s a Bloglines Beta that’s been out for over a year now, but I don’t even like it as much as Bloglines Classic.

I don’t even mind the planned and unplanned downtime Bloglines occasionally sees. That’s fine. What I mind is that Bloglines has seemingly entered the late stages of Alzheimer’s over the last few months. Often I will read an item only to be reminded once, twice, or ten times in the future that that item is still “unread”. Or, all of the unread counts will rocket up to 200 and then back down a few minutes later.

When software starts to increasingly work against you, it’s time to change software, and so finally, I made the switch to Google Reader this weekend. I applaud Ben Lowery, Eric Engleman, and the Bloglines Team for all of the hard work they’ve put it over the last few years and I realize they are probably swimming against violent tides, but it’s just time to move on.

So far, I’ve found Google Reader to be much more reliable — which is no shock — but I’ve also found some niceties in the interface that I wasn’t expecting. One of the reasons I didn’t switch earlier was that I like Bloglines’ style of marking everything as read as soon as I click a feed and then allowing me to mark all as unread easily if I need to. I also like how Bloglines’ allows you to permanently save items on a feed-by-feed basis and separate them from the actual new items (Google makes you just “Star” them and they go into the big pile of Starred items).

I have to admit, I was extremely skeptical of Google Reader’s option of marking items as read as they pass through the browser’s viewport, but if you confine yourself to scrolling with the space bar, it actually works beautifully. In fact, I would go so far as to say the spacebar is Google Reader’s “killer key”. It just makes everything work better.

Another nice feature is the ability to view all items in a feed you’ve maybe just subscribed to and then quickly spacebar through everything. Google Reader only loads a few of the items and then as you get further down the list, it automatically loads more. Seamless. Great for feeds like Momoy which are image-heavy and text-light.

Finally, Google Reader’s mobile interface is spectacular on the iPhone. It’s really a joy to use.

So anyway, farewell Bloglines. You’re still my favorite website ever. Just not right now.

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The Snuggie

In mocking the Snuggie product/website/commercial with Freckles, I noticed that they actually took the time to put a “Share” link on their online demonstration video. In order to reward SnuggieCorp for their Web 2.0-ness, I thought I’d be the first person in the world to take the bait and embed the video on my own site! Enjoy:

By the way, why is it that the guys in the video look ten times as dorky wearing this thing than the girls do?

Also, why do I still totally want one?

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My Vote for Most Amazing iPhone App: Midomi

The iPhone app universe is getting larger and larger everyday, but much like the blogosphere, tumblrsphere, and twittersphere, it’s mostly crap. Maybe crap is too strong a word. Perhaps “marginally interesting” is a better euphemism. There are thousands of unit convertors, restaurant recommenders, sports scoreboards, and other mind-numbingly obvious utilities that are simply mobile versions of things we’ve had on our desktops for over 10 years.

But then, there are the small handful of special apps that make you intimately aware of the transformative potential of mobile devices. There are probably less than 10 of them. As for as Apple endorsed apps, it’s maybe Google Maps (with GPS) and Remote. That’s about it. Currently, I have 22 third-party apps installed (most of which I rarely use) and only one of them is something I would describe as amazing: Midomi.

For those who haven’t downloaded Midomi yet, it’s a little app that let’s you identify songs in one of five ways:

Holding the phone up while music is playing ambiently somewhere, like in a bar (Amazing)
Singing into the phone (Even more amazing)
Humming into the phone (Mind-numbingly amazing)
Speaking into the phone (Less amazing)
Typing into the phone (Not amazing at all)

I remember when a similar app called Shazam came out, and I tried using it to identify some songs on the radio and it didn’t seem to have too many songs in its database, but now, both Shazam and Midomi seem to have every song on earth cataloged. Being able to instantly identify (and purchase) songs wirelessly whenever and wherever you hear them is — for my money — the most impressive use of the iPhone I’ve seen. It’s simply magic.

But that’s only the beginning…

Where it really starts to get fun is the singing and humming. I’m convinced Midomi is the gateway drug to karaoke. I hate karaoke. I hate doing it myself and I hate watching others do it, unless they are awesome (i.e. fewer than 10% of people) and sing awesome songs (i.e. not Blondie or Gloria Gaynor). All the hate aside, I found myself singing and humming songs into my iPhone for over an hour last night, marveling at how it could magically decipher my awful tone-deaf chirping. Yes there was a little bit of alcohol involved. Don’t judge.

But the fun doesn’t end there! As soon as you belt out “and she’s buying a Stairway to Heaven”, Midomi doesn’t just identify it… it presents you with the same segment of the song, as sung by other anonymous Midomi’ers, so you can listen to how other people recorded it. The results are beyond entertaining.

As you can imagine, this is a diversion best performed outside the earshot of other human beings, and after a few drinks, which makes it a perfect activity for introverted alcoholics. And yet, at the same time, I could see it being turned into an entertaining party game: first person to sing or hum into the phone and not have their song recognized loses.

Anyway, if you haven’t downloaded Midomi yet, I highly recommend it. Are there any other apps out there that you consider truly amazing?

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LazyWeb Request: Date-Based Theme Switcher for WordPress

Jason Santa Maria said something in his last post about art directing blog entries that struck a chord with me:

“I am a huge proponent of preservation on the web. If and when I redesign, I will archive this version like I did with my last. I think it’s important to keep content and design paired together when possible. That’s where the context and meaning live.”

I agree with Jason and his reasoning is part of why I haven’t redesigned Mike Industries since launching it almost five years ago: I don’t like the idea of changing the visual context of past entries or having to make a new design backwards-compatible, especially with with some of the more visually complex entries that have appeared from time to time.

While I like Jason’s idea of archiving entire versions of his old sites at different subdomains, I think I’d actually rather just set a cut-off date whereby every blog post older than that date uses the old theme and every other page or post on the site uses a new theme. In searching around, I can’t find a way to do this in WordPress. It seems like something that could be the basis for a very useful plug-in. Call it “WP Non-Destructive Redesign” maybe.

Any WordPress hotshots out there know how something like this could be accomplished? For the quick and dirty version, ideally you’d first officially switch to a new theme and then there would be one setting in the plug-in’s options which would let you specify a cut-off date and a theme name to apply to the old stuff.

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How the Financial Collapse Actually Occurred

If you want to get really educated and infuriated about the current economic crisis, read this lengthy, entertaining, and highly disturbing piece by Michael Lewis on Portfolio.com. Thanks to kottke for the link.

The article is without a doubt, the best rundown of the hows and whys of almost everything about the crisis that I’ve read (this animated primer not withstanding). Just when you think you understand everything, you read something like this and realize how many layers of misdirection are between average investors and their investments. The key paragraph of the article to me was the explanation of how more bets were made on mortgages than the amount of mortgages that even existed (!):

Whatever rising anger Eisman felt was offset by the man’s genial disposition. Not only did he not mind that Eisman took a dim view of his C.D.O.’s; he saw it as a basis for friendship. “Then he said something that blew my mind,” Eisman tells me. “He says, ‘I love guys like you who short my market. Without you, I don’t have anything to buy.'”

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

The article gives more context and clarity around that, obviously, but it’s shocking enough on its face.

On a related subject, another thing that’s been irking me lately is this notion that’s been appearing on CNBC a lot lately that “buy and hold is officially dead”. What a stupid thing for anyone who knows anything about investing to say. Investing is almost by definition buy and hold. Trading is something entirely different. The notion that people won’t be able to buy stocks in companies they believe in and ride them up over the long term anymore is ridiculous. These people point to charts and say things like “if you held onto X stock from 10 years ago until now, you’d be down 10%”, as if this latest huge crash was just another normal, expected event. Nevermind that before the crash, they would have been up big. Corrections are supposed to happen, but crashes like this are the result of things that should never happen. Things from the above article. The perfect storm of manipulations to the system that should have been illegal and will never be seen again.

Sure, we’ll have more manipulators working on different ways to get ahead of the system in the future, but I don’t think something this big will be seen again in our lifetime. That in mind, buy and hold (with proper asset allocation) would still seem to be not just the best investment strategy, but really, the only one. Anything less is just gambling. And if there’s anything we need to see less of in the economy right now, it’s gambling.

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Two Paper Town

Sometimes people wonder why we have two newspapers in Seattle. The answer, of course, is that some people prefer reversed-out type:

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Electoral Count Prediction: 378-160

Although I’m generally not one to post politically-oriented entries on this blog, I want to go on the record with a prediction of how today’s electoral votes will come down:

(R) Alabama – 9
(R) Alaska – 3
(R) Arizona – 10
(R) Arkansas – 6
(D) California – 55
(D) Colorado – 9
(D) Connecticut – 7
(D) Delaware – 3
(D) Florida – 27
(R) Georgia – 15
(D) Hawaii – 4
(R) Idaho – 4
(D) Illinois – 21
(D) Indiana – 11
(D) Iowa – 7
(R) Kansas – 6
(R) Kentucky – 8
(R) Louisiana – 9
(D) Maine – 4
(D) Maryland – 10
(D) Massachusetts – 12
(D) Michigan – 17
(D) Minnesota – 10
(R) Mississippi – 6
(D) Missouri – 11
(R) Montana – 3
(R) Nebraska – 5
(D) Nevada – 5
(D) New Hampshire – 4
(D) New Jersey – 15
(D) New Mexico – 5
(D) New York – 31
(D) North Carolina – 15
(D) North Dakota – 3
(D) Ohio – 20
(R) Oklahoma – 7
(D) Oregon – 7
(D) Pennsylvania – 21
(D) Rhode Island – 4
(R) South Carolina – 8
(R) South Dakota – 3
(R) Tennessee – 11
(R) Texas – 34
(R) Utah – 5
(D) Vermont – 3
(D) Virginia – 13
(D) Washington – 11
(D) Washington D.C. – 3
(R) West Virginia – 5
(D) Wisconsin – 10
(R) Wyoming – 3

Final Tally

Barack Obama: 378
John McCain: 160

I also think the race will be officially called by the networks within ten minutes of 10:15pm Eastern. This is just my opinion as an observer, of course. Best of luck to both candidates.

UPDATE: Ok, it looks like they just called North Carolina for Barry O., so the final tally is 364-173. Looks like I only got Missouri and North Dakota wrong. And honestly, the only reason I picked Missouri for Obama was that I bought into the hype about how Missouri has picked every single election except for one. Make that two now! :)

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Fresh Bread vs. Good Bread

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Today in the office, we had one of our recurring disagreements about what the most important element of bread is: freshness or “goodness”. In other words, would you rather eat bread that would be judged of Grade C based on ingredients and preparation but came out of the oven within the last hour or two, or bread that would be judged of Grade A based on ingredients and preparation but came out of the oven more like 24 hours ago?

The fresh vs. quality debate arose from another recurring office disagreement about Quiznos vs. Subway. Some have argued that Subway is better because its bread is fresher, while others have argued that Quiznos is better because its bread is of higher quality (both statements, you may of course disagree with).

To help settle these two arguments, please vote in the polls to the right, and leave any brilliant additional insights in the comments below.

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The Only Thing Worse Than Viruses…

Our CTO once said:

“The only thing worse than viruses — is virus protection software. And the only thing worse than virus protection software — is free virus protection software.”

So true. The most frustrating bug reports we get at Newsvine are the seemingly random ones. We’ll get a cluster of reports from people who all of a sudden can’t vote, can’t comment, or can’t perform some other necessary function. And none of the bug reporters seem to share common characteristics like what browser they are using, what proxy they are behind, or anything else. On more than one occasion, the common thread has turned out to be that they had a certain anti-virus or “internet security” product installed on their machine. The havoc that some of these programs wreak on HTML, javascript, and general HTTP connections is astounding to me sometimes.

I remember one instance where one of our image calls was to a file called “poke.gif?ad=whatever”. The image was not a decorative element but a functional element which was necessary for dealing with our transactional logs. It took days to figure out that the mere use of the word “ad” caused Norton to block the request completely. If we changed the word “ad” to “glad” the problem was solved. And even more paradoxically, if you just put an ampersand in front of the word “ad”, that also solved the problem. Simply maddening, although it was a frustrating enough episode to at least plant a little bug in all of our heads about virus “protection” software: if you’re trying to squash a bug that seems illogical or isn’t easily reproducible, always consider that it could be because of a user’s security software.

Last night, I was trying to debug a problem with Newsvine’s new commenting system with a user who was having issues, and it turns out he is using “CA Internet Security Suite” which came free with his RoadRunner broadband service. I downloaded this thing and installed it into my Windows XP instance running inside of VMWare Fusion.

Oh my god is this software bad. The first thing it does after it installs itself is to run a scan on my system. It then gives me an extremely alarmist dialog box telling me my system has been “infected with 36 instances of spyware”. It lists the spyware inside the dialog box. All 36 pieces of “spyware” are actually just harmless (and functional) cookies from places like Newsvine and AT&T. Just for kicks, I hit “Remove” and of course it prompts me to spend $70 for the full version just so it can clear my cookies. Brilliant.

So then I open up a web browser and I notice that the CA software is now checking every single server call the browser makes against its database of “safe” and “unsafe” sites, slowing the browsing experience down to a crawl.

And then, just for kicks, I try to visit my Newsvine page at http://mike.newsvine.com, and here’s the dialog box I get:

Blocked from my own site! Because it’s a “dating site”! Ridiculous.

We haven’t resolved our problem yet with the commenting system, but something tells me it has something to do with this stuff.

Having used a Mac for the last 24 years, I’ve just never really had to use anti-virus software. It’s a rude awakening seeing how the other half lives, in this case. If I used Windows on a daily basis, I think I’d opt not to use anti-virus software at all and instead set up automatic restore points once or twice a week. VMWare Fusion lets you do restore points automatically which is really nice. If I happen to contract a virus one day, I can just roll my machine back a few days and get rid of it.

Much better than having the Norton/CA gestapo stomping on my face every time I try to make a simple HTTP call.

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