Archive for the 'Web' Category

Sweetcron: Roll Your Own Feed

Published
by
Hung
on August 28, 2008
in Nerd and Web
. 1 Comment

I just found out that the roll your own feed thing called “Sweetcron” has been released. Basically, you install it on your server and it aggregates your activity onto one page. I installed it and stuck my blog, twitter and delicious accounts into it. Oh, and Digg too, I think, but I don’t really Digg stuff much anymore. You can see it here (it should have this post on it by the time you can read this, too).

The initial release is really barebones and somewhat crappy. There’s no commenting system (it just tells you to add one). I like the way that the system formats images within imported blog posts, but everything else seems like an afterthought. The Twitter imports had a picture of some random Asian dude before I changed it to my own picture. Why not use the Twitter user image? Also, when you click through to a blog post, all of the text just pops out, unformatted. It turns everything into one long paragraph.

I’m all about paragraph breaks.

Besides a few supported feeds, Sweetcron kinda just imports RSS generically. Like my delicious bookmarks don’t have anything special. Just the text and a link to the bookmark. At the very least, Sweetcron should have support for all of the things that FriendFeed does. And by support, I mean it should intelligently handle any categorization and formatting of the content.

I guess Sweetcron is strictly for the hardcore such as myself, but I was hoping it’d have a little more going for it upon its first release.

Youtube Slowness

Published
by
Hung
on May 29, 2008
in Web
. 1 Comment

For the past few days, Youtube has been weirdly slow. I don’t think it’s my internet connection, because my home and work locations both result in lots of buffering in Youtube videos. Considering that Google owns them (literally), it seems like they should have all the bandwidth they need. Yet almost every video I try to watch ends up timing out and rebuffering. Maybe people should make more of this crisis than the whole “Twitter is always down” thing.

Because people actually use Youtube!

Blogging Considered Harmful

Published
by
Hung
on April 6, 2008
in Web
. 2 Comments

Via Venture Beat (who knew?), the New York Times thinks that blogging could be hazardous to your health:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

I heard about Om Malik, but I didn’t know two other blogger dudes died of heart attacks. I guess I can imagine how this happens though. When I was starting my Anime Blog I wanted it to be successful, so I did spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to get to that point. After a while though, I just figured that blogging should be for fun, not dollars (even though my blogs actually do make some $$$).

The article mentioned bloggers either gaining or losing weight due to blogging. I wonder if there’s a blogging diet! If anything, I think blogging has had an opposite effect on me…

Of course, obsession to anything can be dangerous. Guys in Korea die of playing WoW all the time! Workaholics die from “Karoshi,” yes, Japan actually has a word from death by overwork!

Me? I try not to stress out too much. In fact, I am writing this blog just so I can procrastinate doing homework for one of three things that are due in the next three days!

Also, Om Malik sounds like the name of some Sith Lord, doesn’t it?

Illustrated HTTP Error Codes

Published
by
Hung
on August 8, 2007
in Web
. 0 Comments

413.jpg

Via Boingboing, I found these awesome Illustrated HTTP Error Codes.

HTTP error codes are inherently funny to me, because of the all the possible double entendre possibilities involved. I mean, there’s 411: Length Required, 402: Payment Required (!), 414: Requested URL Too Long… The crude joke potential is just too high! In fact, Thinkgeek has a line of HTTPanties that exploits this very fact.

But these illustrations don’t pander to the lowest common denominator. Some of them are funny, like the dog that’s too big for his house (Requested Entity too large). Others are just kinda dumb. But the fact that someone drew these means there’s a bigger nerd out there than I. And I, for one, salute Ape Lad.

XPath: Learn It!

Published
by
Hung
on July 24, 2007
in Code and Web
. 0 Comments

So I’ve been trying to do some Facebook App stuff in Ruby on Rails (I already did some in PHP) and the RFacebook Gem uses this wacky XHTML/XML parser called “Hpricot.” The most experience I have with parsing XML is winging it with REXML until I got something that was somewhat correct.

So I tried using Hpricot tonight. Apparently it’s super fast, but the documentation assumes you know a whole lot about the mating habits (internal workings) of HTML and XML. And… I don’t really.

At least, not until I found this handy XPath tutorial! After actually reading the tutorial, rather than trying to wing/hack it again, I think I have a pretty good feel for this Hpricot thing. Basically, there’s a pretty simple vocabulary for describing the nested nature of XML. It’s impossible to figure out from the Hpricot tutorials (which I tried doing for a while), but insanely simple once you just look at the tutorial. Ah well, I guess that’ll teach me a lesson not to hack so much when it’s easier to RTFM…