July 27th, 2007 Scott
AideRSS is a new web service designed to help you manage your RSS and ATOM feeds. The service takes your favorite blog feeds and filters out the best articles for you to read. It is like having a personal assistant who reads your feeds for you and sends you the best stuff. Each feed can be filtered at one of five levels; all articles, good articles, great articls, best articles or top 20 articles. Each level reduces the number of articles that it presents to the reader. You can read the feeds using the AideRSS web reader, or add their filtered feeds to your favorite feed reader.
I am using it right now to filter out all the Planet feeds I subscribe to. So far it has managed to eliminate roughy half the articles from each of the feeds I have added to it. Most of these are articles I would not have read anyway. I plan to keep using it for the time being and it continues to do a good job of filtering my feeds I will start filtering all of my high-traffic feeds through this service.
Posted in Technology, Web | Comments Off
July 26th, 2007 Scott
Yesterday, 37signals released a new version of their Backpack application. They have added a number of new features and a revamped user interface. I have not had a chance to check out all of the new features yet, but I really like the two that I have played around with. First, you place items (notes, lists, files) on your pages in any order you want. Reordering items on the page is a simple matter of dragging and dropping the item on the page. The second new feature I really like is the addition of page dividers. This allows you to group related items on a page under a labeled divider. I will try and do a more in depth review once I have a chance to fully explore the new stuff.
Posted in Technology, Web | Comments Off
July 25th, 2007 Scott
After trying out some of the social networking services I mentioned previously, I have chosen a few that I think will be useful. I already have my blog, of course, and I have been using del.icio.us for a couple of years. To that I will be adding Twitter, Facebook and Mugshot. Twitter should be useful as status / presence update tool, Facebook looks like a promising way to network with other people and Mugshot is there to aggregate all of my social networks into one data stream. Out of the services I wanted to try, these seem to have a good set of features and momentum. I am also thinking about starting a tumble log at some point, but I have not figured out how that would work with my current setup. If you are interested, the links in this post lead to my profiles on the services mentioned. Maybe I will see some my readers out there in the social.
Posted in Technology | Comments Off
July 23rd, 2007 Scott
I have had my trusty IBM Thinkpad T22 laptop for a litte over six years now. In fact, I am typing this post on it. During that time, it has been a rock solid piece of hardware. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and I figure it is only a matter of time until something fails. I am not ready to purchase a new laptop just yet, but I have been doing a little shopping around so I can be prepared. Since I have had such a good experience with this Thinkpad, I figure I would replace it with a newer model.
After examining the options, I have settled on the Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with the 15.4″ widescreen display. I want to add a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, Intel graphics processor, 4GB of RAM, 160GB disk and a DVD burner. There are “better” graphics options available, but this machine will primarily run Fedora Core Linux and Intel has solid Linux support and an open source driver. I think this machine would make a fabulous development machine.
Now I just need to improve the WAF so I can purchase it.
Posted in Technology | Comments Off
July 21st, 2007 Scott
It seems like every couple of weeks a new social networking site appears on the net. You have Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, Mugshot, LinkedIn and probably a dozen more I have never even heard of. The latest is a service called Pownce, but it is still in closed beta. If I were to try and manage a profile on every on of these services, I would not have time to do anything else. With that in mind, I want to try out some of these services and pick a few to actively use.
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
July 12th, 2007 Scott
Posted in Links | Comments Off
