Author: Dan Dickinson

A week or two ago, I sung the praises of nntprss, a RSS aggregator-as-NNTP-server. I’ve been using it heavily since that article, and it really has been doing the trick. However, there’s been an interesting side effect here as well.
nntprss has an option for treating RSS feeds as “historical” – thus saving posts if the related item is removed from the RSS feed. It also leaves the original post alone if an item has been edited. So how is this useful?
It’s been hard to miss the fight about Echo. What is essentially turning into Nerd Wars, we have the Trotts, Sam Ruby, and a handful of others on the “Echo is good” side, while Dave Winer and Dave’s followers are on the “Why reinvent the wheel?” side. Edit: I had originally lumped Don Park in with the Dave side, but as he pointed out in my comments, he (and many others) are sitting in a sort of middle position.
So how’s this been useful? Well, a lot of people commit blog edits (especially Dave Winer), and there’s usually no way to track this effectively, outside of praying for a Google cache or someone quoting the portion that gets changed. But nntprss catches it well. For instance: Mark Pilgrimwrote about leaving RSS alone, because otherwise people are “shoehorning”. This is obviously a shot fired at the Dave camp, so of course Dave has posted about it. This is the first article I see (Dave’s posts go to people.blogceleb.winer, just for reference; I’m stripping a few headers) – boldface for the part you should watch for:

Twenty minutes later, this article appears:

Granted, the ability to detect changes is often limited by excerpt size, but most of the time you can catch things like this.
So again, high recommendations for nntprss; everyone should set up their own install and enjoy.

For many people, venting about life problems can be cathartic. For me, listening to other people talk about their problems is often cathartic. Not because I like hearing about people in misery, but because it’s really nice to take my life experiences and see if they can’t help the other person. It helps me put my life in perspective, and helps me see what other people are going through.
So special out-of-the-blue thanks to those people over the past few weeks that have believed in me enough to let me lend an ear – Kim, Brett, Jared, and Nastassya. Actually, double thanks for Nastassya – because I still really appreciate what she said tonight.
Back to your regularly scheduled blog.

My USB ports have been acting funky all weekend, disregarding mouse buttons or thinking the modifiers on my keyboard are down when they aren’t. As such, I popped keys off one of my keyboards, cleaned it out, and while I was using the spare, decided to do some transplanting between the two for these nice designs.
They aren’t identical because one’s just an Apple USB Keyboard and the other is an Apple Pro Keyboard, yielding a different button set. But it still came out pretty neat, I think.