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An update for FeedZero was launched today, fixing a few bits and pieces and adding some new features. Main fix for me is that Safari is now properly supported, so it works happily on the iPod touch, making portable feedreading a breeze.
We’ve got a new blog with the juicy details; the blog will be updated whenever we make any changes to the site.
Something we’ve been working on for a while here at Mammoth HQ is now in testing: FeedZero.com. FeedZero is a bayesian filter application for RSS feeds; we’ve been chugging away at it on and off for a couple of months now and its finally ready for some real-world user feedback.
Feedzero attempts to make your digital life a lot easier by helping to mitigate the increasingly common problem of information overload. As you try to keep up with more and more websites, you might find yourself subscribed to many different RSS feeds, with hundreds or even thousands of pieces of news coming at you on a daily basis.
Think of it as a spam filter for the Internet. Check it out.
Just an interesting note – it took spammers less than 24 hours to realise I had a WordPress site up – I’ve had 5 spam attempts so far via the comments thing. 48 hours later, Google’s cache still hasn’t noticed it. Not really surprising; I’m sure Google don’t index this that regularly, but I just thought it was funny.
After extensive testing of various alternatives (false: I tried two things, Drupal and WordPress), I’ve migrated trog.qgl.org to using WordPress.
As much fun as it is messing endlessly trying to hack a blog-type thing into shape, there’s just practically no point when a billion of other people – arguably much better at it than me – are working on something the sole purpose of which is to provide blog-like functionality.
I got bored of trying to maintain something that was blog-like and decided to cave and just install the same damn thing everyone else is using. WordPress is, in all honesty, quite a nice piece of software – it looks well maintained, its flexible and functional, and does what it’s supposed to do.
Whether it will prompt me to update more, well, that’s another matter.
I find it continually funny that the Xbox 360 newsletter can’t be read properly in Outlook 2007.
This is because Microsoft have severely limited the HTML rendering component of Outlook 2007’s mail reader. There’s a billion articles about it; Ars Technica have a decent writeup, but the basic problem is that Outlook 2007 users the MS Word HTML viewer.
The practical upshot of all this is that if you’re trying to send HTML emails (like the Xbox newsletter), you’re really, really limited if you actually want Outlook 2007 users to be able to read your newsletter.
I first ran into this problem when subscribers of the GameArena newsletter starting complaining about getting black text on a dark blue background. Eventually I discovered that they were all using the new whiz-bang Outlook 2007.
I assume the Xbox team have decided that there’s more people using non-Outlook 2007 clients to justify giving them a busted-ass newsletter and forcing them to click off to read it online if they want to actually see what’s going on.
I just realised that comments were completely broken. Not that I would expect anyone was actually interested in commenting on anything, but anyway, it is fixed now.
Also, I have added an RSS feed. I am planning on updating more.
