Category Archives: Internet

RSS: Either publish in full, or gimme a meaningful summary!

I’ve become a big fan of RSS. Using an aggregator means I can catch up with way more web sites than before.

If web sites are interested in eyeballs for their content, they should be sure to publish a full RSS feed. Not doing so is a very bad idea — why do you think I have the time to come click on your web site every day? I don’t. I’ll read from within my aggregator, and if I want to comment, then I’ll click.

I’m a little more forgiving than Scoble. Okay, so some sites want you to visit so they get the advertising revenue, so they don’t do a full feed. But for heaven’s sake, if you’re not going to publish a full feed, then please get your headlines and summaries in order. Don’t make me guess what the article’s about, because I won’t bother — I’ll just skip to the next thing.

ArsTechnica does okay on theirs: An article entitled “EA brand ‘tarnished’ according to analyst“ and with the summary “A game industry analyst has issued a report stating that poor ratings and low-quality games are starting to diminish the EA brand. We’ll delve into the challenges the gaming giant may be facing” sums up everything the article is about, so I can make an informed decision about whether it’s worth clicking through.

The brilliant Daniel Rutter does absolutely crap at this on his blog: An article entitled “Saving the environment without looking stupid: A primer“ with a summary of “There’s something to be said for dog-sleds, too” gives me absolutely no clue that it’s a very good, detailed look at the qualities of the Toyota Prius.

No clues. Should I click, not knowing if it’ll be worth the X seconds to decide if it’s worth reading? If I’m at all stretched for time, I won’t bother. It’s not like there’s nothing else to read out there.

PS. Interesting article on full feeds vs partial.

Broadband for prosperity

Hot on the heels of a report that fast broadband was driving population and economic growth in Victorian regional cities (and conversely, those without good IT infrastructure are missing out), the government of New South Wales has announced plans to run free wifi in the Sydney CBD, North Sydney, Liverpool, Parramatta, Wollongong, Newcastle and Gosford.

So, obviously the NSW govt has finally figured out that they can boost IT activity and investment by providing such services. One would hope other city, regional and state governments aren’t far behind. Viva the Information Age!

(Oh, boy am I out of date. Apparently the Information Age finished in 1991, taken over by the Knowledge Economy, which lasted until 2002. Now we’ve got the Intangible Economy.)

Fastest browser in the west

I’ve been pondering if I should downgrade the web browser on my slower machine. This two-year old page rates the various browsers on an old 800 Mhz XP SP2 machine, and from their results, it looks to me like Opera 9 is the fastest of the current browsers out there.

So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for Windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice. However, it is still not as fast as Opera, and Opera also offers a high level of standards support, security and features.

Opera is of course now free for desktops, and includes tabbed browsing. And IE7 and Firefox have indirectly helped it, by forcing developers (well, most of them) to consider how their sites work and look in browsers other than IE6, so maybe I’ll give it a go.

Google and MS Custom Search

Just a few days after Google released its new Custom Search Engine, allowing web site owners to use Google search, Microsoft have done the same, with the Live Search Box. I guess this means byebye to older engines such as Atomz/WebSideStory (though they appear to have bowed out of free hosting anyway, or at least have stopped offering it to any new customers).

I’ve installed the Google offering on one site, and it really is very easy to use. Happily it also includes an option to not display (or make money from) adverts.

Israeli Brokerage Services spam

I’m glad I’m not the only one getting endless offers of jobs from Israeli Brokerage Services Limited.

Spam from Israeli Brokerage Services

Apart from anything else I find it puzzling that they think their scam will work better if they bombard email address many dozens of times every day. Like getting ten of the same offer isn’t going to make me suspicious?

Update 10-Nov-2006: Information on this scam at the Western Australian government ScamNet.

Firefox 3 ideas

With Firefox 2.0 almost out, Mozilla are asking for suggestions for version 3 via a Wiki page. But it looks like they still don’t “get” the corporate world — at one stage one subheading read: “More Bullshit vs. Less Bullshit”. Is that likely to convince any CIO that they should migrate their X thousand users over to Firefox?

Anyway, I wonder if this means they’ll look at my favourite 5 year old Title bug… Ah. Nope. Not before Firefox 3.0 (May 2007), would you believe. Hey, I’m not holding my breath.

(via Ars Technica)

Broken links

A major web site of my acquaintance just got a makeover.

I’m not going to deny it was due for a revamp. Or that (eventually, when it’s all working) the new functionality will be worthwhile.

But apart from the list of data errors (which is as long as your arm), and the functionality they should be providing in this day and age but aren’t, they’ve also changed every single page address, apart from the home page, and so they’re writing to people who link to them to ask them to change hyperlinks.

I’m really trying not to lose my temper and say to them:

“Well WTF did you let your programmers change your URLs in the first place?”

and

“WTF don’t you get your programmers to set up page forwarding so all the old links work?”

I mean really… it’s like changing all the internal phone numbers and telling everybody to ring the switchboard.

Oh, I should mention that this is a public transport information site, with timetables… they have partially-numeric URLs that bear no resemblance to the route numbers.