:neil_middleton

Crikey

What is it with this current trend with dropping the “e” in web app names such as Flickr and Frappr?

Is there any point to it at all or is it just “cool”?

I just thought I would post a response to Mossy Blog's “RSS Aggregators are a waste of time” post.

Basically, the theme is that due to the sheer amount of content posted to blogs within the Adobe community, shared with the fact that posters are not always strict about what they post and what categories they share it under, that the usefulness of RSS Aggregators such as Feed-Squirrel, MXNA and FullAsAGoog diminishes.

Well, as the author of one of these aggregators I can see exactly where he is coming from (as well as everyone else in the discussion that was originally on the CFAUSSIE list). So, I thought I would jot down a note describing the features that Feed-Squirrel.com has in place to mitigate these problems. All of these features have been in place since launch or soon after, and the feedback I have received from users has helped develop them significantly. So, here we go:

1) Smart Categories – All of the categories within Feed-Squirrel.com (from the links on the left) should be considered smart, i.e they parse the content for keywords and topics and then decide what category the post should go in. Some posts go in more than one category because of this, some don't go in any, but the net effect is that every thing you see in, say, the CF category, has some sort of relevance to CF.

2) Top Items – Whilst the Digg model is very nice, I felt it was too much for feed-squirrel, as I realised people generally vote for items simply by reading the preview text and then clicking the item to take a look at the whole post. Combining this with item age and a couple of other parameters, Feed-squirrel shows you, all the time, the most popular items over the last 24 hours across the entire dataset.

3) Custom Categories – So, if the last two features still don't filter out enough of the rubbish for you, and you know of a few posters that you trust, you can create a “Custom Category”. You can create as many of these as you like, and include in them only the feeds that you find are of interest. So, for instance, you think Ray Camden and Sean Corfield always say the right things? Then create a custom category for them and filter out everyone else.

As with everything else on feed-squirrel at the moment, none of these features require any sort of registration or login and can be used straight away.

As always though, I am sure that these features do not tick the boxes for every user out there, and never will, but if you think you have an idea which might help this, let me know and I'll see what we can do…

If you hear yourself saying that a lot, then you might be interested in what I have planned.

In my head (a crazy crazy place) I have a vision of a tool that users can use to manage their day-to-day tasks, projects and project milestones in a, dare I say it, Web 2.0-y sort of way.

I am aware of a few tools out there already similar to this such as Voo2Do which I blogged about a few days ago, but none of these tools do what I want.

One of the primary reasons for doing this is to get me more involved in open source software. Yup, even though I am intially considering this as only a hosted service, I am also thinking about making this redistributable so people can run this tool on their own Intranets/Networks.

However, I am sure I can't do this alone. I have skills in CF, but my Javascript ain't what it used to be, and I also need at least one other pair of eyes when it comes to funtionality and UI. So, it you are interested in helping, drop me a line and we'll see what we can do together. Also, if you have any ideas for functionality you'd like to see, I'd also like to see you leaving some comments.

Yup, Feed-squirrel was down all day yesterday due to a network outage at our hosts hostmysite.com. It appears some over zealous builders got carried away and cut the datacenter's connection to the internet.

However, we are back now, and firing on all cylinders.

I've just been going through this months stats for feed-squirrel.com and noticed something which hasn't really made itself obvious before, but the majority of users are CF developers or people with a vested interest in CF.

What I want to know is:
1) Do you use Feed-Squirrel (or even MXNA or Goog)?

2) What do you use it for?

3) What features (not purely related to RSS) would you find useful?

For instance, would a forum (to sit as an alternative to adobe.com) be useful to you? Would a move to focus on CF improve the site for you, or are you a closet Flash developer who loves the Flash content? Is there any information that the site could gather that you would find useful? (e.g .NET content)

Let me know, I can only try and make it better for you…

You're probably thinking “well, no suprise there”, but I not meaning what you would initially think.

This morning I received over 100 spam mails in my inbox (a daily occurence) which although on a common theme were promising all sorts of things. For once though, I decided to take a look at a few of these mails and noticed something quite suprising.

These mails are now trying to so hard to get to your inbox that in order to do so they are having to obfuscate their true content so much that they are rendering themselves useless. I have seen examples of spam that contain no contact details at all, some which are so clouded with random characters that they are unreadable, and some with URLs so messed up that clicking them doesn't take you to where the spammer wanted you to go anyway.

So, could we possibly be on the verge of winning the war against email-borne spam? Could the anti-spam devices now be getting so good it is now financially viable for a spammer to use the email medium (which unfortunately means that they resort to something else)?

Oh, and if you know anyone who has ever bought anything from a spammer, please tell them to stop…

I just thought I would post a quick note to “big-up” a site that I have been using today (and collegues for a while) that really rocks my boat in terms of Web 2.0 being useful.

Basically Voo2Do is a task management tool in the same sort of vein as ta-da et al. I won't go into details about how it works and what you can do as thats all on the site, but I can wholeheartedly recommend signing up and trying out.

…and before you ask, No, I'm not being prompted to say this, I'm doing it off my own back…

Yup, the feed-squirrel has been away on his holidays (or vacation to the Americans) and has come back looking fresher than ever.

A few minutes ago the new-look feed-squirrel.com was launched, adding a slightly new layout, and some new functionality designed to make the site better for you, the users.

First off, the sites a little wider now, mainly due to the fact that not many of you seem to use 800×600 anymore, which means I can use the space, and show more at once. To further aid this, and reduce the amount of clicks that a user has to do, we've ditched the item pages, and instead replaced it with an AJAX-y expanding story function. Clicking an item title takes you straight to it, whereas clicking the item text itself pulls in the rest of the item for you to use.

Now, if you are a keen blogger and are aggregated by feed-squirrel.com, you can now get yourself some click reports from the watched feeds page. This will tell you every item feed-squirrel has aggregated, and how many click-throughs each story has had.

So, you're probably thinking that's not much… Well, at the moment you'd be fairly right, unless you look at the back end. Feed-Squirrel.com is now running the latest release of Model-Glue:Unity by Joe Rinehart. This gives us the flexibility to add a whole raft of new features which are waiting in the wings for some free time to come along so I can build them. As these features come along, I'll announce them here.

So, have a play, some bits have changed, most of it's much the same, but now the squirrels wearing a nice new pair of sneakers, and can't wait to try them out….