Gadgetopia

If you've used Bloglines lately, you've met the Plumber. The Bloglines Plumber is what you get on Bloglines when they have some sort of technical error, down for updates, or etc. The Plumber is interesting, because he isn't just an error message. He puts a human face on the ...

Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregator, and an impressive one at that. It's extremely simple to set up and just as easy to use. "Unlike other aggregators which require you to download and install software, Bloglines runs on our servers and requires no installation. Because your Bloglines account is accessible ...

I've started reading RSS feeds in Bloglines (and loving it, but that's another post). Bloglines has a snazzy feature which shows how many other Bloglines users are subscribed to the same feed you're looking at. The winner among my feeds? Slashdot, with 23,001. Second is Boing Boing with 14,767. Gadgetopia ...

Google has launched Google Reader, an online feed reader. As expected, it's a fairly slick and AJAX-ized reader interface that seems at home alongside Gmail. I imported my feeds from Bloglines, and here are my first impressions: Google's reader takes the approach of focusing on aggregating all the posts into ...

I just pulled a log file for the last week and cranked up Webalizer. It took me 30 minutes or so to screen out all the spiders I could find and all IP addresses that might be someone associated with this site, but after finally getting some clean stats, the ...

Feedster Top 500: We appear as the 265th most popular site on Feedster, but for some reason it's the comments feed, not the actual site feed. I can't figure that out. The comments feed only has 11 subscribers on Bloglines, compared to 606 for the main feed, so I know ...

There are a lot of free services on the Web -- we all use one. But which ones would you pay for? Of the free services you use, let's say they all decided to charge $30 per year. Which ones would you go without and which would you shell out ...

Is it just me, or does RSS suck all the mystery and joy out of the Web? Does it make the whole concept of "sufing the Web" just a little more disappointing than it used to be? Once or twice during the course of an evening, I'll tell my wife ...

Are there RSS feeds you can't keep up with? I have a few that I just can't stay on top of due to posting volume. A friend of mine called it "drinking from a fire hose." They are: DZone (yes, I know I love it, but I just can't keep ...

The Feedburner subscription numbers have settled over the last 36 hours or so since we switched the feed over. The final subscriber number is about 2,250 people sucking down the RSS feed. Of course, I have no idea how that number is being calculated, but a lot of other people ...

Question: do any of you subsribe to blogs that don't publish the entire post in RSS? USA Today just added Kevin Maney to their new blog lineup. I subscribed, but he just has the first two sentences or something in RSS and you have to click-through for the rest. That ...

Solution Watch: This is just a great blog. It's full of in-depth reviews of really cool new Web tools and services. Solution Watch surveys the bleeding-edge of the productivity world, reviewing and providing in-depth walkthroughs of today's best services all day and every day. The posting volume is low -- ...

dzone.com - fresh links for developers: I do not add RSS feeds easily to my aggregator. The last one I added was Solution Watch, several months ago. I added dzone again last week. This is like Digg, but just for developers. Now, I know, Digg-ish sites are a dime a ...

Fraser Speirs on "Time Management for System Administrators": You know time management is in short supply when O'Reilly is writing books about it. Thomas A. Limoncelli's book Time Management for System Administrators is perhaps the first example I've seen of a book which advocates a GTD-style workflow with some modifications ...

Userscripts.org - Universal Repository: Here's a site full of Greasemonkey scripts for about everything you could ever imagine. I like this one, that automatically switches all Amazon affiliate links in the page you're viewing to your own affiliate ID. Sneaky. This one for Blogines continually checks your feeds in the ...

Buzz Game: Home: This is fascinating. The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions ...

Lifehacker: I'm not real quick to add things to my aggregator. I only have about 20 feeds in Bloglines. But this new addition to the Gawker family of blogs is really top-notch. If you like Gadgetopia, you'll love Lifehacker. Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, ...

My content, my readers, my numbers, damnit: Here's a funny rant that points out a very real problem: it's virtually impossible to figure out how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed because of feed aggregators and cachers. If you took a song and cached it and fed it ...

I ve recently switched to Google Reader from Bloglines. There s a lot of nice functionality, but here s something I think is really neat: the Next bookmark. This is a bookmark I have in my sidebar. When I click it, I get the permalink of the next item in my feeds. So, ...

Uh, well, here we are, I guess. Five thousand posts. Huh. This has been my goal since that first post 1,291 days ago. I posted about The Gutenberg Project back then, back when the site was deanebarker.net. Since then, we've managed to post just under four items a day, every ...

About four months ago, I asked you all to send me a screencap of the Gadgetopia home page sitting in your browser window. I promised to do some analysis of the results, and I kept meaning to get to it, but never got to it. Tonight, I finally sat down ...