Ideas are not fucking worthless

To a certain extent it’s true that ideas are fucking worthless, but only in the original sense, that rather than talking and talking about the design of a project, you should just code it. But the flipside is that if you never mention your ideas or code them, the world is vastly worse off. If it’s a choice of code or talk, choose code, but if it’s a choice of talk or nothing, by all means talk.

While I apparently missed the target with my five dollar bookmarklet, among the ideas that PapaScott really had was to check if the links have RSS feeds, and if so allow me to add them to my aggregator, which is a fantastic idea. As long as your hypothetical integrated weblog and aggregator app has to fetch the page you are bookmarkleting from, to look for TrackBack and PingBack metadata, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t also grab the RSS autodiscovery metadata, check your subscriptions, and offer you a checkbox to start a trial subscription (I’m really looking forward to having an aggregator that will ask me after a week, and again after a month, whether I’m still happy with a new subscription). Thanks for the idea, friend.

3 Comments

Comment by PapaScott #
2003-01-03 13:10:57

There probably would be a way to hook MT and, say, Amphetadesk together. I don’t think I’d want to muck about with HTTP requests to localhost:8888, but if there were a remote copy of myChannels.opml, we could parse that. And didn’t somebody just mention using myChannels.opml to render a blogroll?

I’ve looked a little at the code in Amphetadesk. It seems to be good perl (but not as sweet as MT).

 
Comment by Morten Frederiksen #
2003-01-03 15:21:43

Re: the rendering of a blogroll using myChannels.opml, the Syndication Subscription Service has just been updated to handle the AmphetaDesk OPML format as well.

 
Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2003-01-03 19:51:58

How did I miss noticing or forget that AmphetaDesk (and probably the other myChannels.opml users, too) can do mass imports? That’s really cool, and I wonder why it hasn’t caught on more. Other than the ”you say http://www, I’m already subscribed without a www” problem, I’d love to see people’s opml files, especially categorized: ”my favorite MT-tech feeds, the best five PHP feeds.” Have to add that to the idea bucket: some way of trying out a bunch of feeds as a block, keeping them easy to dump as a block, and maybe even displaying them as a block (”here are the new posts in your feeds” and then below ”here are the new posts in feeds you are trying on for size”).

MT+Amphy: I’m pretty sure your myChannels.opml doesn’t have to be local – seems to me that you can just throw a URL in there (and that there are people running it completely on the server, with a bit of hacking, too). So MT certainly ought to be able to grab your subscription list to check without having to go to localhost. Persuading it to do the subscription’s a different matter, though: not sure how AmphetaDesk feels about having other programs just add something to myChannels.opml while it’s not watching. I think it might not mind, since it seems like I used a single file shared between Aggie and Amphy for a while. Not sure. I am sure that’s a bigger Perl hack than I’m capable of, though. I’d have an easier time of it writing (well, stealing parts and lashing them together) a whole weblog app and an aggregator in PHP than I’d have doing a little grafting in Perl.

 
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