Nick Bradbury

What's in a Meme?

Danny Sullivan suggests that a weakness of memetrackers is how they let big stories crowd out everything else. I ran into this same thing yesterday when I noticed that the "personal memetracker" I'm working on for FeedDemon was filled with stories about the Rocketboom dustup.

Gabe Rivera intends to make some refinements to Techmeme's design because of this issue, but he clearly understands that this could get tricky since some users will always want to see the entire cluster of stories related to a topic.

One option (which is admittedly easier on the client side than the server side) is to simply enable the user to hide a specific topic. I like this idea because users are way smarter than their software when it comes to figuring out what they like. So, this is what I've decided to do in FeedDemon - you simply have to click an icon to remove a topic [screenshot].

(via Rex Hammock)

SpeedDemon

In an effort to blog even when I'm in a coding frenzy, I bring you this bit of bragging...

Last month I talked about AQtime, a tool I use to locate performance bottlenecks in my code. One of AQtime's features that I neglected to mention is its comparison engine, which enables comparing the performance of different versions of the same routine to find out which one is the fastest.

Among the most-frequently called routines in FeedDemon is one which returns the location of a feed in FeedDemon's internal database. This routine is called every time FeedDemon updates a feed, draws a feed on the screen, shows a feed in a newspaper, etc. (in other words, its performance affects the performance of a lot of other routines). When I first coded this routine, I did it very quickly so I could move on to other stuff, and I planned to come back and tweak its performance later. Of course, that never happened.

So this morning I finally bit the bullet and used AQtime to compare various ways to boost the speed of this routine. Much to my surprise, I soon found one that was over 10 times as fast as the existing code.

The lesson? It's a mistake to keep putting off the little things you could do to improve your application. I should've done this a long time ago, since it makes so many parts of FeedDemon even faster than they already are.

Link Dump: July 6, 2006

• Anil Dash: Write Something Meaningful
• Open XML Translator project (ODF support for Office)
• Google Account Authentication
• FrontPage: The King is dead, long live the king
• Web Users Open the Gates
• Can Publishers Survive in an RSS Age?
• Scaling up is good. Scaling *down* is even better.

There are no "average" people

Okay, it's time for a minor rant about a pet peeve of mine: I hate it when politicians talk about "average Americans," as though people who don't aspire to a career in politics are somehow "average." How many people do you know that like to be referred to as "average?"

This practice afflicts the tech world, too. For example, while I agree wholeheartedly with this post by Scott Karp, the talk of "average people" made me grind my teeth. How about we use the phrase "non-geeks" (or "non-technical people") when referring to people whose lives don't revolve around their computers? That seems less condescending to me.

WinINet Bug Fixed

Remember that WinINet bug I blogged about last month? Microsoft's David Pow left a comment stating that it's fixed, and the fix should be included in the final IE7 release, and most likely in Vista RC1 as well. This bug was causing a lot of problems for FeedDemon customers, so I'll be very glad to see it fixed.

Now, given that the bug is an obscure one, it might seem strange that it affected so many FeedDemon customers. Here's why: the bug was triggered after connecting to a web server that uses chunked encoding and the server abruptly closes the connection. Turns out that Eric Meyer's server was doing this for a while, and one of his feeds is included in FeedDemon's default subscriptions (in the "Web Authoring" category). So the bug affected FeedDemon customers who stuck with the default subscriptions - in other words, a lot of people. Eric's server is now acting correctly, so problem reports related to this bug have pretty much dried up.