Nick Bradbury

Mac Shareware Company Raises $30,000 for Tsunami Relief

Kudos to Babel Company for raising $30,000 for the tsunami relief effort.

United against comment spam

This is already being blogged all over the place, but I have to shout about it, too: several major search and blogging organizations (including Google, Yahoo! and Six Apart) have agreed upon a simple method to significantly reduce comment spam.

ANN: FeedDemon 1.5 RC2

FeedDemon 1.5 RC2 is now available. Be sure to check out the release notes to find out what's new. As always, RC2 should be installed directly on top of your existing version.

If you run into any problems using this pre-release, please let me know by posting in the FeedDemon 1.5 Beta Forum.

Free "RSS to HTML" PHP Script

The folks at FeedForAll offer a free PHP script which enables webmasters to display RSS feeds on their sites.

Freudian Typos

I hope I'm not alone in suffering from Freudian typos. Unlike normal typos, these typos are the kind that make you wonder about your mental health. Case in point: I sometimes accidentally type "lust" instead of "list." It's a simple mistake - U and I are right next to each other on the keyboard - but it makes you wonder if I need to get out a little more.

My worst Freudian Typo was one that made it into the help file for the very first version of HomeSite. In a section about trouble-shooting, I recommended that users "Shut down their computer" if they experience problems. But I made a little mistake. Yep, you guessed it - I ended up asking people to "Shit down their computer" instead.

Even more embarrassing was the fact that this mistake was reported to me several months later by an acquaintance at Microsoft. Now any time I want to complain about Microsoft's security woes, I remember how I once instructed my customers to soil their computer's innards, which has security implications beyond those that Microsoft has to deal with.

The RSS copyright can of worms

Robert Scoble provides an excellent summary of the recent RSS copyright debate.

Dexter Cartoon for Jan 14, 2005

Dexter RSS feed

"How to use RSS" video

Advanced Business-Blogging offers a "How to Use RSS" video which showcases FeedDemon.

ANN: FeedDemon 1.5 RC1a

FeedDemon 1.5 RC1a is now available. Before installing it, you might want to check out the release notes to find out what's new. As always, RC1a should be installed directly on top of your existing version.

If you run into any problems using the beta, please let me know by posting in the FeedDemon 1.5 Beta Forum.

Note: Now that FeedDemon 1.5 has reached the release candidate stage, it's safe for translators to localize English.fdlang. There may be a few changes before the final release, but I promise that they'll be minor ones.

Really Simple Subscription

Dave Winer proposes a solution to the problems caused by the lack of a standardized method for feed subscription. While I would love to see these problems resolved, with all due respect to Dave, I can't say I'm wild about the idea of a centralized subscription server. This seems too complicated for something called Really Simple Syndication, and I imagine many users wouldn't want their subscriptions stored on someone else's server (or wouldn't be permitted to by their employers).

In my mind, the real problem is that the browser does the wrong thing when you click that ugly orange RSS or XML button. Just as your browser knows how to handle "mailto:" links, it should understand what to do with a link to a feed.

So I have to point out that the feed:// protocol (aka: feed URI scheme) was created to resolve this problem. Is it a perfect solution? No, it's not (there's no such thing). Past discussions about this idea have devolved into arguments about MIME types, but I maintain that it's the best one we've got because it works right now. It's already supported by FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, RSS Bandit, NewsGator, NewzCrawler, SharpReader, Shrook, FeedReader, Awasu and other desktop RSS readers. It would be simple for Yahoo!, Google or MSN to support it through their toolbars, and for Bloglines to support it through their notifier tool. And it would be dead simple for browser developers to support it as well.

The other part of the problem is that those orange RSS or XML buttons look far too techie. Why not drop the geek acronym and just use FEED instead?