blog.lmorchard.com - Latest Comments

Re: I like it when services treat me like I treat my pets

fluffy — Wed, 01 May 2013 22:42:51 -0000

It's kind of funny how there's such an inherent paradox in that one of the best ways to keep a customer is to make it easy for them to leave. Compare that with the world of, say, cellphone providers; I am finally dumping T-Mobile and paying a $200 ETF specifically because there IS an ETF at all (because it turned out to be overall cheaper to switch to Ting than it was to switch to T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan - specifically because of the ETF that they would have charged me either way).

One reason I don't trust Google services beyond the amount for which I need them is that historically, exporting data from them has been way more work than it should be. They certainly do have "data liberation" APIs but they tend to be slow, cumbersome, and fragile, and they seem to love changing the protocols from the standard just BARELY enough to make it way more work than necessary. (That and Google does plenty of stuff to make it obvious that they ARE spying on me and they ARE using all the data they're accumulating about me to try to get me to pull everyone and everything into their services. Nuts to that.)

Re: Looking for a Django app to manage Roles within Groups

Spencer Ogden — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:11:18 -0000

Hi Les, did you ever find any hidden gems on this? I have a very similar sounding use case where this would be very helpful. Two very stale starting points I came across are:

https://github.com/strange/dja...

https://github.com/brosner/dja...

Spencer

Re: Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)

jbond — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 04:09:14 -0000

Need to think about the share button. It needs to be a bit more heavyweight than a +1 button but less heavyweight than G+ or blogging and perhaps less than even Twitter. It's interesting that you wrote "Maybe offer an optional field for comment.".

Absolutely critical to making this work is that the list of shared items is itself available as RSS/Atom+PSHB. And the same with any composite lists of shares aggregated from multiple people, the results of tags[1] or searches. Which is why it's intensely irritating that G+, Twitter, Facebook don't or no longer provide RSS/Atom+PSHB output.

"hey look at this" is one of the most common internet games people play. There's been lots of attempts at code to support this game. Stumble, tumblr, del.icio.us, Reader sharing, Flipboard magazines, etc, etc, but nobody's ever really cracked it. Then there's the professionals who specialise in the game. "Novelty Curators". Whatever we come up with needs to support both casual and full time actors. The 99%, 9% and the 1%

[1] I have a number of synthetic feeds I still follow like the output of Google News searches. That used to include del.icio.us searches for specific tags but it feels like those died a long time ago.

Re: Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)

fluffy — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:58:49 -0000

This is something I've been thinking about for a while (ever since the Sharepocalypse and me deciding to divorce myself as much as possible from Google services based on their creepiness-factor with Google+) and the problem I keep on coming back to is one of discovery. Well, that and the problem that the vast majority of Internet users don't want to have to install their own LAMP stack and apps on top of it, so anything that's successful is going to have to scale, and ideally should interoperate with a nice open protocol.

I keep on thinking about how to do things with push-based APIs and so on but then it always ends up re-evolving into email.

Re: Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)

fluffy — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:56:19 -0000

I just hope that the guy who maintains it is ready to deal with suddenly having a much larger userbase. My impression of him and the way he's interacted with users in the past is that he sees users with suggestions as a liability as opposed to something to try to support.

I actually stopped using it a couple months ago and switched back to FeedOnFeeds because I'd seen one too many asshole responses from him on the forum.

Re: Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)

Stephen Uitti — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:14:23 -0000

Before Reader, i used Sage in Firefox. Sage is still there. Reader's biggest draw for me was being able to pick up where i left off if i was using some other computer. I could get the same effect if Sage could retain it's list of what's been read from a file. Right, a file on a thumb drive. The fact that Google has my list and is likely doing whatever it is they want with it creeps me out a bit. But not too much, as they clearly have a really good idea of what i'm reading by tracking ads, and so on.

Re: Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)

Les Orchard — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:53:08 -0000

Oh wait, you mean how do I find it using it :) (I've been deluged with questions about its site being down)

Honestly, I haven't done much code review of the thing, and only dove in here or there to tweak a few things that annoyed me. I'm kind of all Dread Pirate Roberts about the thing, as I keep meaning to get back to writing my own aggregator again: "Good night, TT-RSS. Good job. Sleep well, I'll most likely delete you in the morning."

UI-wise, it's totally replaced Reader for me, except on my phone. There are some phone UIs that use the TT-RSS APIs, but I'm not happy with them. Still, I've not yet been ambitious enough to address the issue myself. I have to say, I really liked Google Reader on my various phones throughout the years - from a cruddy WAP thing, to a Palm Centro, to a parade of Android phones

Re: Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)

Amblin — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:24:00 -0000

I was just about to peek at the code and consider installing TT-RSS. This makes me very sad.

Re: Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)

Zack Weinberg — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:45:42 -0000

So how do you find TT-RSS, anyway? It seems to be the game in town for self-hosted cloud RSS readers, but I couldn't get at any of its documentation last night (flood of people trying to do the same thing, no doubt) and the code makes me a little nervous (seems to rely exclusively on quotation rather than prepared statements for database access, for instance).

Re: Half-formed thoughts about Twitter, social silos, web APIs, and mashups

Maxence_Cote — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:22:59 -0000

I've just found this post googling and what a post! Your thoughts on the silos, the web APIs and the sharing of the value resonates so much with our project Cozy Cloud.
We are trying to help improving this "dire" situation with an open source platform where users have control and install apps instead of registering to closed services. We are in a very early phase but it would be an honor to have your feedback, if you see some pitfalls in our approach to tackle this issue or if you have any advice! Here's our website: https://www.cozycloud.cc/

Re: Naming Things: CamelCase vs snake_case

Stephen Uitti — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:45:12 -0000

The only consistent commenting style i've ever seen was no comments at all. It was also the fastest to read. It had the fewest mistakes, since, if the code doesn't match the comments, it's highly likely that both are wrong.
The most consistent naming convention i've ever seen was color coding. The guy only used white wire.
Remember: the term isn't "anal retentive". It's "anal compulsive".

Re: Looking for a Django app to manage Roles within Groups

Shawn Medero — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:09:43 -0000

Did you try privileges https://github.com/eldarion/pr... -- it might do what you want.

Hrm, I also swore I saw a Django app a while ago that tried to mimic the Drupal Groups/Roles behavior which similarly sounds like what you'd want. Mining my pinboard link is returning a blank though. I think it may have been something buried in the Pinax effort http://pinaxproject.com (which means there's probably some undesired coupling.)

Some other non-drop-in parts:

Does everything need to be done in roles? Are something things more like feature flipping? https://github.com/jsocol/djan...

Could you mine anything useful out of: http://code.google.com/p/djang...

There's also django-rubberstamp: https://github.com/eldarion/dj..., brabeion https://github.com/eldarion/br... , & agon https://github.com/eldarion/ag... that you could probably coerce into something.

Re: Too long? Read anyway.

cdent — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:36:08 -0000

Very well said and very worth saying. You've articulated the motivation of pretty much my entire career: encourage thoughtful composition. Thanks for that because it can be easy to get a bit disoriented.

Re: Too long? Read anyway.

Kyla Coulman-Absher — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:21:33 -0000

This is really well said! I blog quite a bit myself, and have been since 2003 in various capacities, and "write like no one's reading" totally resonates, as well as those personal standards of language communication. I will definitely be following your work from here on out.

Re: Too long? Read anyway.

Doug Miller — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:03:46 -0000

I ama saving this URL, and I'm sharing it with all of my colleagues. I may send it to selected customers, as well. Bravo.

Re: Too long? Read anyway.

Eugene Eric Kim — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:58:05 -0000

Excuse my less-than-140 characters response, but this is a freakin' awesome rant. Well said.

Re: Too long? Read anyway.

bsoist — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:51:43 -0000

My son and I were just talking about this the other day. He is beginning to deal with the same issue I've been fighting for years. If you can't spell it out in writing, I don't have time to talk to you about it.

Re: Too long? Read anyway.

Arvo Sulakatko — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 04:13:45 -0000

Like Simon Sinek says, start with why.

Tell the reader why are you doing it and why should the reader read it.

In my case if a scan through the list of my posts in google reader I have to make snap judgement should I open it in a new tab to read or not. I need to decide how important was to read that article in 6 months looking back and reflecting on my own actions. The anwser needs to be it is worth it. Otherwise its part of noise.

Re: Too long? Read anyway.

bear — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:41:25 -0000

*slow clap*

Well said sir! As someone who learned almost everything I have by reading {code, books, examples} I appreciate mightily the effort anyone takes to write down their thoughts and ideas in any organized way. It allows me to figure out at my speed what they are trying to say and then either respond or pass it to others.

Re: KumaScript: Bringing scripting to the wiki bears

Jay — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:58:58 -0000

Happy belated birthday KumaScript!

Re: KumaScript: Bringing scripting to the wiki bears

Dav Glass — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:47:16 -0000

Great writeup!

Re: Building my couch computing station

fluffy — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:05:53 -0000

Ah, makes sense. I didn't realize there weren't desktop monitors using the high-DPI panels that laptops do.

Re: Building my couch computing station

lmorchard — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:04:46 -0000

Well, the smallest 1920x1080 LCD desktop monitor I could find was around 21.5" and too heavy to mount on my laptop stand. This thing ends up weighing just a couple of pounds, and 17" is great for the distance it sits from me on the couch.

Re: Building my couch computing station

fluffy — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 16:52:36 -0000

Maybe I'm missing something (perhaps the hack-for-hacking's-sake aspect), but why not just use a VESA-mountable desktop monitor?

Re: Naming Things: CamelCase vs snake_case

lmorchard — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 22:08:29 -0000

Wow. Now, that, I didn't know. FUN TIMES INDEED!