The Starrenburg’s Website

There are times when you read about, or see, disparate (different) pieces of information, which then connect in your mind and lead to a new idea or conclusion.

This, for me, was an example of one of those times.

Firstly - we see reported on the web (on the website of a mainstream media (or “MSM”) organisation) an article about American media vs the blogs. I am more interested in the mechanism and dynamics of what happened rather than the content, sad as it was. The article on the BBC website basically was looking at the differences in ‘reporting’ between mainstream media and bloggers, using the discussion on comments made by Eason Jordan about American military “targetting” (killing) journalists in Iraq as the basis for the article. A blogsite Eastongate.com was quickly put up by one group to air the view of the persons who objected to Mr Jordan’s alleged comments at Davos. Note that I said “the view of the persons” not ‘the views of the bloggers’. The blog was essentially a (very effective one it seems) tool for people, not ‘bloggers’, to express their strong disagreement of Mr Jordan’s comments. They could have picketed the CNN offices, and a few by passers may have noticed; they could have got on American national television, and be quickly forgotten because of television viewer’s typically short attention span; or they could have setup a weblog, they made the weblog. Mr Jordan resigned. Whether as a result of the blog swarm which drove the MSM media crazy or not we don’t know - but resigned he has.

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You know the image… it’s from one of the defining movies of the late twentieth century - Dr. Strangelove. The actor Slim Pickins plays the pilot of a B52 nuclear attack bomber ‘a hoopin’ and ‘a hollerin’ as he rides a nuclear bomb down to blow the hell out of “them Ruskies” as if he’s riding a bucking steer at a Texas rodeo. For those of you not familiar with this North American folk custom Wikipedia can help explain it to you.

You may have been reading in the news recently about the recent exchanges between Iran and America (with Russia getting in on the act also now, but that’s another story…) where Iran Warns U.S. Not to Play with Nuclear ‘Fire’ (Update - Reuters has removed this story from their website). Since then there has been a depressingly predictable unfolding of events - America sending over spy drone planes, Iran threatening to shoot them down, and Bush denying that they intend to attack or invade Iran to stop Iran’s nuclear (weapons) program. However in that very same statement Bush also said “you never want a president to say never.”

I don’t know who scares me more - Bush or the “mad” mullahs et al. Both claim, in their own way, to have that most fervently claimed, but most abused of ‘rights’ - divine right. Most worryingly, both seem equally assured that they know what is ‘right’ for the rest of us. The rest of us, I suspect, just wish they would both go away. They’re like the ‘neighbours from hell’, you know the type.

However back to the picture of Slim Pickins, playing the gung ho Texan waving his ten gallon hat as he rides down to oblivion on the bomb, which prompted me thinking about this in the first place. I just can’t get away from the thought that the person with his ‘finger on the button’ is also a Texan… fond, no doubt, of ten gallon hats.

Upgraded to WordPress 1.5 today. Followed the upgrade instructions and so far all seems OK.

The 1.2 version template survived being translated into a 1.5 theme. Had to remove “Links” link from menu as it was not rendering properly (started using bold) until I find where it is defined in new version. Of course it does not render 100% correct in Internet Explorer - surprise, surprise not.

Found a small bug - if the site has no comments (my site is still new) the PHP code does not check for that before it runs and it comes up with errors like “no for in foreach…”.

Seems to be much faster in saving posts.

——- Update ——-

Tracked down where problem was with IE rendering page in WordPress 1.5. Had to make 1em width change to stylesheet.

I have been continuing to use Onfolio and liking it, but have come up with one snag - performance. At home I have been trying it on my AMD Athlon 64 computer with 1GB of RAM - no problem (well you would hope not with that machine spec!!).

However when I tried it on my computer at work I had to uninstall it, the machine just became too slow. Certainly too slow to leave Onfolio running in the background collecting feeds. My machine at work is a P4 with 512MB of RAM, a reasonable computer, average for a mid-range office machine.

As always when you get into something new, especially on the Internet, you find yourself being drawn into a new world and finding new things. It’s sort of like a chain reaction effect leading to an ‘explosion of knowledge’. Find out one thing and it leads to two others, which lead to four, to sixteen…

Yesterday I looked at FeedDemon, my first foray into RSS client software - yes I know the proper term is “desktop news aggregator” but wonder how long that term will last when RSS goes mainstream? Currently RSS usage, even though it is rapidly expanding, is still only a small percentage of Internet users.

Anyway, while getting familiar with FeedDemon and thinking how great it was, I utilised one its features called “Watch” which allows you specify a topic you are interested in, and as new documents come in via feeds you can see a summary of relevant information. I setup a watch on the topic “RSS” and from that read a blog posting from Scobleizer (he’s supposed to be the human face of Microsoft) about a product called Onfolio. I downloaded the beta 2 version from the Onfolio website and I have to say I agree with him - it’s impressive.

1. It works inside your web browser (Firefox or IE), so you don’t have another application and user interface to have cluttering up your desktop. Also it uses the rendering engine of your browser and, in the case of Firefox only of course, gives you the security and anti-popup/anti-ads protection you have spent time building up in your browser.
2. In the latest version there is support for Firefox which is a natural fit for RSS news feeds. In Onfolio (as in most RSS clients) you have a folder of grouped feeds on common topic - the view is called a ‘newspaper’. I open up a Firefox tab for each newspaper and can easily scan through the abstracts for each post, when I see something interesting I just press [Enter] to read.
3. It has ‘Search Folders’ for defining searches on subjects. Define a simple or complex search and it looks through all (thousands) of abstracts in RSS feeds and shows you a ‘newspaper’ view of all topics. When a new item is downloaded via an RSS feed if it matches the search it goes automatically into the folder.
4. It has other tools for finding, collating, filing and presenting information gathered from the Internet which I have yet to explore but which look equally powerful.

As a tool for helping to keep up with, and digest information, it’s definitely a step forward. It’s interesting to imagine how people will find ways to use it.

The funny thing is that the very software I used to find it, FeedDemon, then ends up being ousted.

I have just installed the trial version of FeedDemon from Bradbury Software the maker of the TopStyle CSS editor.

FeedDemon is an RSS (definition here and here) desktop news aggregator client for Windows. News aggregator - now there’s a mouthful guaranteed to scare off the uninitiated. Wikipedia has a good explanation of what a news aggregator is.

RSS is a standard mechanism for websites - be they a news site (what RSS was originally designed for), a weblog (like mine which you are reading), or anything really - to supply a summary of content on the website page(s). Why would you be interested in a summary of the pages on website? Well if you go to most commercial websites, PC Magazine being a good example, you are bombarded with extraneous content YELLING at you to get your attention. Kind of like driving down an American road being besieged by billboards.

With an RSS feed, which by the way I believe is pull, not push, technology despite what some press websites say, you can download summaries from hundreds of content publishers (websites, blogs) using a standard protocol. Then with client software you should, hopefully, be able to absorb, filter, manage and massage this information in a more effective way - this is where a news aggregator client comes in. The software should provide an interface to allow you to deal with this greatly increased amount of information to get to things which interest you. I’ll see how well FeedDemon fits the bill.

RSS has a lot of potential, the only thing we have to hope is that Microsoft is not allowed to “embrace and extend kill” the standard.