Water and information shortage
There was a water cut in Sandy yesterday. I thought the shower had just conked out. We had some water in the tanks for the bath and so forth so I didn't think much of it and went to work. It was then interesting to see how far I could follow developments at work. I first found out about the cut, and could tell my wife about it, as the RSS feed I have set up for Biggleswade Today had the information in my feed reader when I came into work. Hurrah.
To follow developments, I looked up the Anglian Water site. A search for Sandy gave me an incident page which, although grammatically awful and low on detail, at least had the main points and was time-stamped. I had a meeting from about 2 till 4. When I got out, Biggleswade Today had triumphantly added another news item saying that the water came back at 3 (again, I could tell my wife at home and she could start actually using the water); the Anglian Water page just disappeared: there was nothing to say there ever was a problem and had that been my only source of information, I wouldn't have known what that meant. A bit rubbish. As for the BBC, they had eventually put an article via RSS saying that there was a water cut. It still says so now and they haven't issued any updates yet.
Conclusion: hurrah for Biggleswade Today; almost good but boo for Anglian Water; ho hum for the BBC.
A.D. III NON. APR. MMVII
Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
001 with a good excuse.
001. To be fair, I have acquired a daughter since my last post.
PRID. NON. MART. MMVII
Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
Comment me do
Please comment on this post. My previous attempts at comments rss seemed sluggish to appear in feed readers if they did at all. I guessed this was because my makeshift rss feed lacked guids. I have rectified this, which was fun. So please comment so I can see what happens. For once, a moderate quantity of spam wouldn't be totally unwelcome.
You can even follow along by subscribing to the comments feed and tell me when nothing happens.
A.D. VII ID. FEB. MMVII
Permanent link | Comments (7) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
Bunch of RSS
The CILIP RSS feed threw up a training session from UKeiG which, untypically for the CILIP RSS feed, amused me. It said:
Don't know your RSS from your elbow? Haven't a clue where to hang the blogroll?
That's the stuff. It was however sad to see one of their reasons compelling people to come as:
Awareness of them [RSS, blogs, and wikis] amongst users will increase as Microsoft incorporates RSS and blogging into Office 2007, Outlook and IE 7 so don't get left behind.
Do we all have to wait for Microsoft to integrate everything before we jump in? Isn't half the point of all this that the platform shouldn't matter?. Never mind.
A.D. X KAL. FEB. MMVII
Permanent link | Comments (2) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
RSS feeds for Blosxom writeback-based comments on Aurlog (at least for individual posts)
After finding some of Sil's RSS feeds for comments on particular posts extremely useful and galvanised by his recent comments that
It really massively annoys me when I post a comment to someone's site and then have to keep checking back to see if anyone's followed it up
I decided to do something about it. Sil mentions co.mments which sadly doesn't work for Blosxom weblogs, definitely not those using the now rather dated writeback plugin as mine does. I also don't like the idea of using what is essentially another aggregator if, for example, I wanted to monitor one of my own posts. I wouldn't want anyone else to have to either, although having tried co.mments out on a few other sites I think it is very good.
In the true spirit of Perl-based Blosxom, the script that produces the comments RSS is written in PHP. This was originally obvious until I discovered Google Reader doesn't like .php on the end of the RSS feeds (Bloglines, which I use, doesn't care either way and I haven't checked any others). Anyway, this is no longer a problem. I have also included a Subscribe link which, like the one on the left for the weblog as a whole, uses Aquarion's SubscribeMe service. It doesn't yet use Sil's idea implementing one button for submitting a comment and subscribing to a feed, although I shall review that when he releases his promised generic version.
I haven't yet thought of a way to produce an RSS feed for all comments but am not sure I'm really bothered anyway. It would generally get bogged down in spam, this not being a high traffic site for comments and would be hideous to produce with writeback's data structure, lack of timestamping, and lack of unique identifiers for individual comments. I could (further) hack the writeback plugin, as I have already done to implement spam filtering, but then I wouldn't have time to write needlessly long posts such as this one.
Do, gently, let me know of the inevitable problems I have missed.
A.D. XV KAL. FEB. MMVII
Permanent link | Comments (4) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
Salve munde
As a way of practising writing in Latin, I have started Aurentius Urus, a weblog written entirely in Latin, except for the bumf down the side and so on. If you really want to read a weblog in Latin with scintillating content, you are probably better off reading something like Mea Vita Fabulosa or Vir Cum Pluteo Pleno. I suspect they know more than two declensions and one and a half conjugations.
The main problem I foresee is writing about the modern world in an ancient language. Not having a Vatican Latin dictionary to hand, I will have to fall back on diligent research (e.g. this site suggests that ephemeris would be the Latin for weblog), sites like this list of computer terminology, and my own appalling sense of humour.
The site has been set up using WordPress so I only have to really think about the Latin rather than the Perl or MySQL and so I can have a go at a web-hosted weblogging system.
A.D. VI ID. NOV. MMVI
Permanent link | Comments (10) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
Friend has weblog
Simon, the lyrical and vocal half of the highly influential band Territorial Mercenaries and his wife Alex have started a weblog: A Travers Adventure.
A.D. IV KAL. OCT. MMVI
Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
Aurlog left out again
Aurlog has been left out of the Time Magazine 50 coolest websites again. I think it is because of Time's American bias. Out of the fifty, I think I've only visited Myspace and YouTube. That's how cool I am.
A.D. XVIII KAL. SEPT. MMVI
Permanent link | Comments (62) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
Big Brother RSS feed yet again again
A little late as the final is this Friday, but I ought to mention that I noticed a week or two ago that the Big Brother site now has an RSS feed, part of a family of Channel 4 RSS feeds. The feed looks to be exactly the same (in output, I haven't checked the XML code) as mine except that a picture is added, something that I was loath to do anyway, thinking that republishing pictures is one step too many beyond screenscraping.
The other major difference is that the official feed already has 28 subscribers, on Bloglines anyway, despite its relative youth compared to the 2 subscribers (including myself, goodness knows who the other person was) that I generated.
I have to say I am actually quite vague about what happened in Big Brother this year as I have so many feeds set up in Bloglines that I have to filter my way through the same thing happening three or four times, on my feed, on Channel 4's, and on the Sun's feed (15 subscribers), which is independent as to content and is in many ways better than the official news. Next year should be easier.
A.D. XIX KAL. SEPT. MMVI
Permanent link | Comments (4) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
004
004, barring a thousand tweaks and additions. Now my weblog looks like everyone else's.
A.D. VI KAL. AUG. MMVI
Permanent link | Comments (3) | Comments RSS (subscribe)
Tom