Fixing RSS Feeds

I've had a minor gripe that has been growing for quite some time. I don't like reading blogs via a web browser anymore - RSS is where it's at. I have a small collection of blogs that I didn't have a RSS feed for and I tossed those links into a Bookmark folder called Blogs. Every day or so I'd do an "open in tabs" on the Blogs folder and get as slew of tabs with these archaic blogs in them. However, lately it had been growing and Firefox got slower and slower to handle this operation. Today I declared I was going to "fix" it once and for all. I did so mostly - although I have a handful of blogs that simply don't HAVE a RSS feed. I suspect those are going to wither away though lack of caring on my part.

So, there were three main categories that were a problem.

1) Blogs that had RSS feeds but no visible link to them. In the html of the page they list a feed and Firefox finds that and gives me a cute little "Live Bookmark" icon in the address bar. The thing is I don't read RSS feeds in Firefox, I read them in NetNewsWire. Blogger.com sites seem to do this often. (I should not this is not the feed's fault - it's a design flaw in Firefox.)

SOLUTION: The Firefox Feed Your Reader extension. Now when I click that icon it tosses the feed over to my registered feedreader and life is good.

2) NetNewsWire doesn't like some Atom feeds (particularly only from Blogger.com or LiveJournal). I don't know why, they seem OK when I open them manually in a browser.

SOLUTION: If the url is in the format http://username.blogservice.com/atom try manually editing it to http://username.blogservice.com/rss - seems to work in every case.

3) I have friends who use LiveJournal to "lock" entries so their blog is only visible to authorized friends. I understand the motivation, but it's annoying because now to see them I have to open a web page and log into LiveJournal (which I don't use personally).

SOLUTION: Loosely based on the information here but slightly modified. The mechanism as  described is kinda cruddy, because you have to store your LJ password in a URL, presumably plaintext. In the case of NetNewsWire you can do better. Enter the following URL for the subscription http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss?auth=digest and obviously replace username with the LJ account you want to read. The first time NetNewsWire tries to access the feed it will pop up a dialog for a username and password. Give it your LJ account and it stores the password in the Apple keychain, where it is safely encrypted.

Those three tricks deleted 8 links from my "Blogs" folder - cutting it from 13 to 5 links. One of the cut links was the LJ "friends" page which was 5 other pages rolled together meaning I moved 12 blogs that  annoyed me a little every time I read them into RSS where they belong.

BONUS TIP: I have my feeds organized by topic mainly. So there's a folder for "Writing" a folder for "Games", a folder for "Tech Blogs" and so forth. I realized that this was slowing me down because there are several blogs that I only lightly skim. They are prolific (many entries per day) and low interest (in that I only read a small percentage of the entries on any given day). They still have value to check but I tend to blow through them much quicker than blogs where I want to read each entry. I realized today that this trips me up because one of those skimming blogs is in the Tech Blogs folder and gets mixed in with the other tech blogs so I have to shift back and forth between reading and skimming as I review entries.

No more! I moved all the "Skimmable" feeds into their own group at the bottom of the list. So Tech Blogs now contains tech feeds that I probably want to at least process the subject. Slashdot, Version Tracker, Netflix New Releases and other feeds that I only glance out quickly all go at the bottom and I can review dozens of entries just by scrolling the titles quickly. 

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BSG Season Finale - The Spoiler Talk

The comments on the last entry are turning into a mishmash of discussion of the show in general while trying to avoid spoilers and some tiptoing around the actual season finale discussion. I sent Weezie an email last night with more discussion but after some thought I want to have it as a blog discussion so others can participate. So I'm going to use a cut here and post my email after the cut. Consider this entire post and comment thread to be spoiler marked if haven't watched all of both seasons of Galactica. (Reminder, this was all originally written as an email to Weezie. It's basically a response to Weezie's second comment - about expecting one of the character changes. I also edited a character name misspelling that I didn't catch in my original email) So I'm guessing you're talking about Callie hooking up with Chief Tyrol as the change you'd been waiting for? I was fine with that, was expecting it to happen for a while as well. Ever since Tyrol hashed things out with Helo it's been time for Callie to make a move. Now, it would have been MUCH more interesting to see Tyrol decide whether take a chance on Callie under military hierarchy - after he got busted for messing with a superior officer he would switch gears to a direct report. So in that sense I'm a little disappointed at a missed opportunity, but no big deal. So as for changes I thought were unsupported the absolute biggest one is Starbuck becoming some sort of Russian tent-wife character. It's out of character for her to muster out and become a civilian, it's out of character for her to just tool around the surface, seeming idle except for trying to take care of her man. Ugh. There was some sort of implied fight between her and Apollo, so perhaps they will later explain that, but I generally won't buy it. She wouldn't have gone groundside until forced to, and even if she pissed Lee off, she should be stationed on Galactica. Having her lead the resistance will be interesting - but they could have gotten the exact same thing by having her visiting the surface on leave, and not had any dissonance on her character. I don't think it's in character for Tyrol to be a union organizer. I don't have a major issue with him being on-planet although I'd contend he should be part of Adama's skeleton staff. He's already escaped punishment once because he was too critical to replace, why wasn't that true now? But perhaps Callie's pregnancy forced him dirtside . . . I'd give them benefit of the doubt on this if he was my worst objection. Much of the same is true of Gaeta turning civilian and working for Baltar (he's what - some sort of Chief of Staff now?) He had seemed to be disillusioned with Baltar over recent episodes, and seemed fiercely loyal to Adama. OTOH, he had expressed some dislike of being in the military, so maybe he'd take the out. I think it's impossible that Baltar wouldn't have taken a more substantial revenge on Rosslyn. In general I think they had built a FASCINATING crisis point up with the Rosslyn rigging the election and being caught by Gaeta & Adama. Rosslyn was in the wrong, but at the same time knew the survival of the Fleet was at stake. Dualla and Tigh were both guilty of complicity and betraying everything they fight for - it was a very charged complex situation. Which they then threw away to jump ahead a year. Dualla seemed to escape any sort of censure. That post I linked to described Season 2 BSG as "a show that constantly walks right up to the line, looks at it, looks at the viewer, and backs away again." I think the election is exactly that. They walked up to the line, looked at it, and backed away from addressing what happened in any meaningful way. Exactly the same way they backed away from the line after setting Cain and Adama at each other's throats. Even if they go back and revisit the aftermath next season it won't be as powerful. I like the resistance idea somewhat (although it seems a lot like a rehash of the Caprica storyline), but I think they rushed through a powerful and unique plot to set up boilerplate Sci-Fi plot trope #38 - human resistance versus alien occupation. Hang on, I think Tom Cruise and the Scientologist are on line one with that story. Oh, and don't forget it's fused with pulp boilerplate #15 - Mars Needs Women!
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What. The. Frack.

Battlestar Galactica cannot be trusted, it seems, to actually push the envelope. I was very disappointed by 2.11 and 2.12 (the Resurrection ship episodes); I thought it would push the show into an interesting moral place if the "good guys" actually did "bad" things in pursuit of their goals. The speech about "deserving" to survive from Adama, despite a stellar (as usual) performance by Olmos, rang very hollow. BSG has become, to me, a show that constantly walks right up to the line, looks at it, looks at the viewer, and backs away again.

alg: Hi, interwebs. The problem with my laptop

I've been fighting this analysis for most of season 2, but I give up. I just watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, and it was terrible. Awful. Like "Let's take everything that makes this character who she is and ball it up and throw it away." bad.

I've been unhappy with several episodes in the second season (especially the "second half" of the second season - and what was that about anyway?) - I think they've begun to focus on syndication and making each episode a single capsule that stands on its own - which is very different from season one where each episode was a beat in an overall dramatic arc. But I still thought it was the best TV running right now.  I don't have much confidence in season 3 right now. They can redeem it, but that was just . . . bad. I can't explain what I didn't like without getting into spoilers, but as you watch the finale just ask yourself - is that the same Kara Thrace we've seen for two seasons now? I don't think it is, I don't think the whole episode holds true to the rest of the series.

 Very disappointed.

 

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Snap To It!

Magic's October 2006 large set, code-named "Snap", is called Time Spiral.

Announcing Time Spiral

  Hurrah! For those keeping score, this is not my novel. Time Spiral is the first novel in the block trilogy (codenamed Snap). My novel is the second in the trilogy, and the name has not been announced, thus I will continue to call it Crackle when I'm out with my homies keeping it real, yo.

But this is the beginning of the block, so anybody who plans on reading my novel will want to pick up the corresponding book for Time Spiral. I give it a hearty recommendation anyway, it's a good read!
 

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Well Hello There!

OK, so yeah it's been a while.  Partially because I've just been super-busy on the wordsmithing front, and part of it was once I skipped most of February, it seemed to make sense to skip all of February. Don't ask me why.

But anyway, yeah I'm back. I have a few things to talk about. Buckle in! 

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