When The Neal Pollack Invasion made it all the way to Washington D.C.,
Neal thought it was the appropriate time to play some sort of weird elite, awkward, house party, book/cd selling event.
Peter Bergen was there; that guy up there was there. Neal even said, "CNN Terrorism Expert Peter Bergen is
doing The Ostrich!" (I'll warn you, that link leads to a video of The Pseudo Neal Pollack Invasion playing The Ostrich at a reading for Neal's new book,
Alternadad. It's the most authentic clip of the band, ever.
WHAT?
Taking feeds (
what is a web feed?) from
Flickr,
Del.icio.us, and
YouTube, I was able to make the
/recent/ section, thanks to a web-app called
FeedDigest. Likewise, FeedDigest provides the most recent posts from my
Blogger powered blog and
Twitter on the front page.
WHO?
Flickr - The fantastic, Yahoo-owned photo sharing site. It lets you organize your photos
with tags! If you have a digital camera and want to share pictures, the pro account is well worth the $25 they charge.
Just don't be
Chinese. And if you take pictures of a Nintendo Wii, they will steal them and put them
here.
YouTube - Google Video 2.0. Upload a video or record it right from within your browser window. Don't expect any of it to
make sense.
del.icio.us - A web-based social bookmarking service. Allows bookmarks to be
sorted with
tags, which can make things less (or more) complicated than using folders.
You can also
send links directly to friends, and
see what your friends are linking to.
Blogger - I've been using Blogger for about 100 years. Easily the simplest setup, especially if you have no idea what you are doing and don't want to customize it too much.
Clearly that is not my problem.
I think Blogger is the best web publishing platform
on the market. It was the start of my man crush on
Ev.
Twitter - Lets you share a 160 word status with the world, or just your friends. Can be updated via IM or from your mobile phone.
Practically pointless, but I have a crush on Ev, who
Obviously runs Twitter.
Odeo - Odeo is ... well, it WAS a podcast creation and sharing web-app, which even let you leave voicemails from your cell phone and later release them to the world. Now I use it to
let people leave me a voice mail. New users cannot even upload audio at the time of this writing. I've been a member of Odeo since it started, but I've never uploaded anything. Mostly joined out of obligation to my man-crush on Ev. Odeo is another
Obvious product.
Feeddigest - Feed processor which no longer allows new user sign ups. Which is a shame since not only is it easy to use and understand, the support staff was terribly responsive, and even implemented a feature at my request.
HOW?
As they come in, each post is placed in a div; the div is given an id based on the name of the source. This allows me apply styles depending on the original source, and accommodate links as well as photographs or videos. To accomplish this with FeedDigest, I set the class using the name of the source of the post using the following template:
<div id="%SOURCENAME,3NODOTS%">
<div class="feedcontext">
%SOURCEURL%
</div>
<h3>%TITLE%</h3>
<div class="feedcontent">
<p>
<ifdescription><span class="itemcontent">%DESCRIPTION%</span><br /></ifdescription>
<span class="url"><a href="%URL%">%URL,45%</a></span></p></div>
</div>
Within FeedDigest, %SOURCENAME,3NODOTS% takes the name of the source and truncates it to three characters (see:
TemplateTags). FeedDigest used to truncate and leave
an ellipsis, showing the post had been truncated. The NODOTS option removes the ellipsis and gives each feed a unique id. That was the request the FeedDigest team so eagerly implemented. (Thanks Peter!)
For the front page, the FeedDigest template is simpler:
<div class="%SOURCENAME,3NODOTS%">
%DESCRIPTION,750NODOTS%
<span>...<br /><br /><a href=%URL%>More > > </a><br /><br /></span>
</DIV>
Each div can be styled and positioned on
dakotasmith.org however I choose.
WHY?
I still haven't found exactly what I want, but this can come very close. I've tried using
Reblog, and really loved it, but ultimately it was smarter than I am. I also tried to use
Google Reader, and though it was easier to set up, also fell short of my full expectations.
FeedDigest's team really allowed me to take this tool and run with it, and while it still isn't as open ended as I would hope, it's obvious they are suffering under the weight of their own success. They have not been accepting new users for quite some time now.
CAVEATS
FeedDigest isn't perfect. It lacks the ability to just have 1 post from each feed. To get around this for the front page, I had to create three feeds: one of only
the most recent Twitter status, one of only
the most recent Blogger update, and one
combining the two. Since user accounts are limited in number of feed digests you can create, this trick eats 3 digests, which wouldn't happen with a "limit 1 post per feed" option.
Updates from FeedDigest seem to have a lag of between 10 and 30 minutes. Which, I'm in no rush, but you might want your digests UPDATED NOW ALREADY!
FeedDigest does take a while to set up and modify, and unless you have a clear goal in mind, it could be rather confusing as to why you would want to use it. I've found some of their default templates are lacking as well, and have only been well-served using my own custom templates.
Likewise, since I cannot program, I have to use a Javascript include to put Feeddigest's output on an html page. This seems like overkill, since Javascript is slower to render than HTML. It also does not allow the text to be searched by the
GOOG.
LOOKING AHEAD
There might be some utility in sharing a feed of
starred items in Google Reader,
favorited videos on YouTube, or
favorited photos on Flickr. Unfortunately, neither Flickr nor YouTube provide feeds for their (your? my?) favorites. A greatest hits type page could be very interesting, though.
InstantFeed will instant message you as a feed is updated. With FeedDigest's delay, this is less reliable than I like. In situations where a fifteen-plus minute delay is acceptable, this could be very useful with combined feeds which require responses and attention, such as
a Basecamp project and a collaborative
Google notebook.
RSS2PDF seems nearly useless, too, but at the very least can give a feed a nice, unified look when printed.
CONCLUSION
What I've created is purely ephemeral. You cannot have an archive of
/recent/ but I hope I am creating a window into all of the photos I take, movies I make, or links I save. The rate at which I add to it means if someone returns to find something, they will probably be forced to go to my bookmarks on del.icio.us or photos on Flickr.
This might be a problem if I had some interest in keeping people at my website, but I would rather they join Flickr and add me as a contact, or stalk me and try to steal my ideas from reading links posted to del.icio.us, or make their own crazy movies on YouTube and show them to me and the Internet at large.
As sign-ups are closed, I guess this is useless for anyone who hasn't already signed up for FeedDigest, but perhaps you can put your noodle to it, and use these as a springboard to your own solution. I hope someone buys FeedDigest soon, so they can have more horsepower and really cut loose. It seems like such an
obvious move.
If I forgot and left this sitting around, I guess I could get in trouble. Especially once it has some Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED OH WAIT THIS JUST IN !!!
Boston went on high alert, closing bridges and roads, after 38 battery-powered devices were discovered around the city on Wednesday.
Source: Boston ad stunt scare duo charged, 1 February 2007.
Anyway, this was plastered all over CNN. Which made it really funny, when it turned out more
Turner (
Ted Turner) owned property. Seems like a round about way of advertising
the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie.
The media continues to refer to them as hoax devices. What's a hoax device?
For the purposes of this section, the term “hoax device” shall mean any device that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such device is an infernal machine. For the purposes of this section, the term “infernal machine” shall mean any device for endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire or explosion, whether or not contrived to ignite or explode automatically. For the purposes of this section, the words “hoax substance” shall mean any substance that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such substance is a harmful chemical or biological agent, a poison, a harmful radioactive substance or any other substance for causing serious bodily injury, endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both.
Source: General Laws of Massachusetts,
Chapter 226. CRIMES AGAINST PROPERTY Section 102A1/2
The law goes on to make the point that, if convicted the defendant is liable for restitution to the government for any financial losses incurred in responding to the hoax. The city's overreaction and ignorance cost about
five to seven minutes of Iraq war.
Cartoon Network issued an
apology because their lawyers told them to. The youths charged gave a
fantastic press conference, because their lawyer told them not to talk about the event (thanks,
Andre).
These artists,
made these things and put them up, and the Norms find them threatening and shut down a whole city. Recovered light boards are selling for up to
$2000 on eBay (thanks,
Andy) which is also presently awash in topical tshirts (none as good as the
ATHF is the bomb shirt at Raplica. (thanks,
Sean).
I have never wanted to be a performance artist more in my life!
