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2007

Lovin' Feedburner

About 6 months ago, I burned my blog’s RSS feed to Feedburner. I was using WP-Shortstat as a WordPress plugin, and the RSS feed subscribers didn’t look realistic (and they weren’t!) as it was over reporting on the number of subscribers. I’ve been happy with Feedburner since, and it provided a very simple view to my feed’s statistics, and there was a plugin to view the statistics right in my WordPress dashboard.

When I was syndicated on Planet Foresight, I created a Linux feed on Feedburner so those users weren’t subject to my entertainment and copyright rants, and later I burned a feed of the Foresight Linux Newsletter as well.

Since then, I continue to learn more about Feedburner and its features, in no particular order:

  • Feedburner takes over Steve Smith’s WordPress plugin for Feedburner stats, renames it Feedsmith.
  • Rick @ Feedburner recaps why partial feeds are a bad thing. I couldn’t agree more – I’m too lazy to follow links out of my feedreader just because a site wants hits. I’ll usually end up unsubscribing after a while unless the site has really, really good content, like TV Squad.
  • It might be fun to create a Headline Animator – if I could do a non-cheesy looking one, might be a good way to market the Foresight newsletter
  • I can’t believe I didn’t know about FeedFlares until today – what a great concept. Add little tags to the end of your posts, such as “add to del.icio.us”, “email author” etc. See the whole list here. I’ve already updated my feed. And the have an open FeedFlare API to create your own.

I also use Feedburner as tool combined with the Foresight Wiki based on Confluence. Confluence gives you the ability to build a feed right from the dashboard, but it’s really only useful for tracking a whole space, and not independent pages.

The first feed I built was the Foresight Linux Newsletter. Using Confluence, I created a RSS 2 feed based on any news post in the Newsletter space. Confluence gave me me a feed that looks like this:

<br /> http://issues.foresightlinux.org/confluence/createrssfeed.action?types=blogpost&statuses=created<br /> &spaces=newsletter&labelString=&rssType=rss2&maxResults=10&timeSpan=180<br /> &publicFeed=true&title=Foresight+Linux+Newsletter+RSS+Feed

Not necessarily human readable, or easy for a subscribe to type in to their feedreader, though possible using cut and paste.

I took that feed, and burned it in Feedburner, and got this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter

Much better, and now I have statistics tracking for our subscribers (Which we need more of!)

The second feed I created in Confluence, was for the Package Request page on the Wiki. On this page, users can request software packages to be added to the Foresight repository, so they can install them via Conary, instead of building and compiling the software by hand.

Confluence doesn’t give you an option, at least that I could find, to build a feed for a specific page. First, I gave the the wiki page a specific label, “package-requests”. I then went to the Feed Builder, and chose to build a feed in the Developer space, with a label “package-requests” and to show all new edits and comments on the page. Confluence gave me the feed:

http://issues.foresightlinux.org/confluence/createrssfeed.action?types=page&types=comment<br /> &statuses=created&statuses=modified&spaces=kitchen&labelString=package-requests<br /> &rssType=rss2&maxResults=10&timeSpan=5&publicFeed=true&title=Foresight+Linux+Package+Requests+RSS+Feed<br />

I burned that in Feedburner and came up with:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/fl-packagerequests

So if you want to add that to your feedreader, you will see all requests and comments for new packages, as well as edits to the page when someone marks a package as added to the repository.

I’m really starting to dig the power of Feedburner.

Derivative Works

Big Media is nothing if not two-faced about the creation of derivative works. From the music industry busting re-mix artists – the same artists paid by the industry to promote their artists in dance clubs, to the film industry’s penchant for remakes. And how many movies made today are born from an original idea? Even this year’s Best Picture winner, The Departed, is a remake of a Hong Kong film.

Techdirt takes a look at this issue, using the story of the fans who re-made Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot starting in 1981 and taking the next 7 summers to complete it. As Techdirt points out, this couldn’t be done today. The author does a great job in pointing out the irony in the movie business on the subject of copyright.

Click here to read the article.

Mark Shuttleworth: In defense of independent governance

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, has a stirring blog post up titled In defense of independent governance.

I cannot due a summary justice, but Mr. Shuttleworth’s extremely well written words on culture, democracy and free speech have moved me, and I encourage you to read it.

I’ll leave you with this from Mark Shuttleworth:

At times like these, we are our own worst enemy. We hear what we want to hear. It is painful to hear that one might be wrong, that oneÂ’s hero might have flaws, that oneÂ’s leaders might not be all that we wished them to be. The awful truth of the media is that it pays to tell people what they want to hear, much more than it pays to tell people what they need to hear, and so society can whip itself into a frenzy of mistaken greed or fear or anger, and make poor decisions.

It takes great courage to speak out, when these basic principles are at risk. In a free society, there is nevertheless pressure to conform, to stay with the herd. In a society that is not free, one speaks out at some considerable personal cost to life and liberty. I salute those who do.

Elisa

With the recent announcement of Ubuntu forming a Media Center team focusing on Elisa as it’s media center platform, I took another look at Elisa as a potential solution for my home theater PC. (Sidenote: I’m way too lazy and need a gook kick in the butt. I’ve had my HTPC built and ready to go for a year, and have barely tried to fix the last few issues I have with it. Shame on me. Though since I got my dual-tuner HD-DVR from DirecTV, when combined with my Sonos and Xbox 360, I haven’t really needed all the features of a HTPC that I originally planned on).

Elisa was already available in the Foresight repository, but it was version 0.0.1. Asking nicely in IRC, Ken Vandine updated the version to Elisa’s current release, 0.1.6. Ken was unable to run it because of an ATI or Xorg issue in 1-devel with 3D effects, but it started right up for me.

I’ll do a more formal review later, I’ve only played with it for maybe 30-60 minutes tops over the last day and a half, but for a very, very early release, Elisa looks promising. After some user error on where you edit different file locations in the ~/elisa/elisa.conf file, I was able to browse my music and photos.

To be clear, it’s a program to manage your media – it does not have DVR functionality built-in. And for me, that may just be perfect. It will manage your movies & videos, play DVDs, photos, and music. It has built-in support already for Streamzap remotes. (I don’t know what that is yet, but I’m going to find out).

One obvious bug, is when I start Elisa from a terminal or Alt-F2, there is no window border. Changing Elisa to fullscreen with the “F” key and back to a windowed version, brings up a window. This tip is useful, because if you don’t, and you lose focus of Elisa, none of the shortcut keys work if the window border isn’t there.

I’m going to play with it more this weekend, and will post more thoughts on Elisa early next week. For now, here are some screenshots of Elisa in action, with bigger versions available on my Flickr account.

elisa

elisa2

elisa-photos

No Halo3 Beta For Me

I bought a copy of Crackdown when it came out a few months ago, and was quite happy with the game. It was fun to play a GTA-style game on the side of the good guys for once.

An added benefit of buying Crackdown was an exclusive invite to the Halo 3 beta, which went live this past Wed. Or was supposed to. Of course demand was higher than expected, and the download was delayed a few times throughout the day.

I was finally able to download, and I start the beta through Crackdown – which takes about 10 minutes from start to finally getting in the game after going through the Halo 3 lobby and matchmaking. And each time I try to play, I get an error: “The disc is unreadable” – which is kind of funny as there is no disc.

There are a few threads on the Bungie / Halo 3 forums about this, with other folks having the same issue, and no clear cut fix. Quite frustrating, to say the least.

doh!

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Bladerunner DVD Details

One of my new favorite blogs to read, Total Dick-head, devoted to everything Philip K. Dick, has the details on the next Bladerunner DVD release, via DavisDVD.

I love Bladerunner – it was really the Director’s Cut being released in theaters that really got me into it, as I remember going to the Oriental in Milwaukee to watch it, and just being blown away. The first DVD release was pretty poor – it was basically just the Laserdisc version slapped on to DVD without being remastered, and the quality is iffy at best. Bladerunner is by far the best adapation of a Philip K. Dick story (though A Scanner Darkly is the truest adaption), and the story, the visuals, and the acting were all top notch.

I eagerly await this release on DVD! Read the details on the 5 disc box set here.

Bluetooth (Headset / ALSA) update

A follow-up to last night’s post about Bluetooth adapters on Linux to use a headset with my desktop:

_

Breaking News: Foresight Developers can read minds!_

Serendipity struck, that within an hour of posting, Ken Vandine pinged me in IRC on #foresight to let me know that earlier in the day, he had already updated the Bluetooth ALSA packages on Foresight to make this project work.

So not only will Foresight developers package up software if you ask nicely in IRC, I have now learned that Foresight Developers have the ability to read minds, and package software they know their users will want later in the day.

Can your distribution’s developers read minds? Get Foresight today!

(Now I’m off to pickup a bluetooth adapter later today!)