The Ryndex

This post relates to Gilman’s Model: The Fotonovel.

RYAN: This is a pivotal scene, showing layers and layers of Dr. Ward’s character. An acteur can’t disassociate himself completely from his character, so underneath all the layers is just me. So, here, underneath the confusion and quizzical-ness and placidity…

ALAIN: and confusion! Ha ha ha!

RYAN: yes, and confusion, you see a bit of me — just wondering. You know, wondering what it’s all about.

ALAIN: This shot was entirely CGI.

RYAN: Hmmm. I didn’t know that.

This post relates to Gilman’s Model: The Fotonovel.

RYAN: Alright, this is my big entry. I remember spending weeks with Alain trying to get my characterization just right, and finally he said to me, “Ryan, just try to look as if you aren’t sure what the words in the script mean.” That nailed the character down for me — the sense of being lost, floating, and biting the inside of your cheek in vague confusion.

ALAIN: We did the voice-over well after filming, of course. It sounds like it’s being read off of a crumpled piece of paper in a basement bathroom, but that’s deliberate. We went through three crumpled pieces of paper until we found just the right one.

I hate to harp on and on about a topic, but this is a good one.

Let’s say that I’ve set up all my favourite web sites in RSSOwl (my current aggregation tool). Instead of leisurely going through all my bookmarks during my work day, I launch this application. It goes and finds all the news feeds, and marks all the new items.

I can read the summaries of the dull ones without going to the web site. I double click on the interesting ones and navigate to the full web page. For low traffic web sites (such as This and That, I don’t need to go there every day to see if he’s added anything interesting. His feed will tell me through RSSOwl. For high traffic web sites (such as A Cat’s Life), I don’t need to check every fifteen minutes to see if a new article has arrived. His feed will tell me through RSSOwl.

Blah blah blah, you say. But it gets a bit more interesting when you think that the request to find a feed is an HTTP request like any other. A clever developer can do a lot of things with a simple HTTP request/response.

For example, Feedster will let you create a “Search” feed that looks through thousands of other blogs for a search term. If you add the feed:

http://feedster.com/search.php?q=Skraba&sort=&ie=UTF-8&hl=&content=full&type=rss&limit=12

to your aggregator, you’ll automatically get all of the articles that Feedster can find about Skraba. See? Simple and fun!

What about other great ideas? How about a personalized site that feeds you birthdays a few weeks before you invariably miss them? You could combine that with a personalized TO DO list. Hooray for syndication!

This post relates to Gilman’s Model: The Fotonovel.

RYAN: Hello, I’m Ryan Skraba, and I’m here with some of the cast and crew from the filming. Lots of old faces here today, and we are particularly lucky to have the elusive Alain de Smithee on a high fidelity line from France. Are you there, Alain?

ALAIN: Damn you all!

RYAN: Great, great! The extradition process still hasn’t caught up to you?

ALAIN: Man do I hate that question. And almost every bleedin’ person I know is guilty of asking it if (s)he hasn’t seen in me in more than 5 days. In fact, I have to often bite my tongue to make sure I don’t ask it of others.

RYAN: Excellent. Oh wait, watch this bit — see how everything swirls as it fades in and out? That’s not an easy effect. Too much swirl and you’re all like “gagaga?” And I understand that the motion of the water was actually filmed IN REVERSE.

ALAIN: Thanks to modern techniques, I have captured it on hidden video.

RYAN: Alain, I understand that in making this film as the sole director and producer, much of the artistic tension in the film came from your legendary internal battles between your ego and your id.

ALAIN: Id is trying to make it more Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-ish, while Ego’s coming in with an Apocalypse-Now-show theme. Where the two pies collide, there shall be a very fishy-ish surprise.

Syndication is cool and fun. No, I will NOT hush.

Alright, I’m always harassing my new blog friends to turn on their syndication. Now, you ask, what is syndication?

There are some sites that I check and are updated every day, for example Boing Boing, Slashdot and Dilbert. There are other sites that I think are great, but are infrequently updated, for example Bad News Hughes and Overcaffeinated. In addition, I know five people writing seven blogs.

It turns out that there are dozens of sites that I’d like to check every day. Many of them offer a syndication feed. This is simply a file that summarizes the recent news added to the site. You can check out one of my feeds at http://www.skraba.com/travellog/atom.xml.

Now what good is this feed, or syndication file? Instead of browsing twelve pages, I can use an aggregator, an application that works with syndication feeds. An aggregator can load all of the feeds and compile a list of articles that you haven’t yet read. It can notify you when new articles are available, and you can skim the summaries of several sites in a single window before deciding which articles are interesting.

I’m using RSSOwl as a syndicator. I tried a few, but I chose this one because it’s relatively clean and quick. As a plus, it’s written in Java, so I can contribute to its development (one of my goals this year was to be involved in some open source project). It’s only on version 0.81beta and in active development, so expect to have to upgrade frequently.

To turn on your syndication in Blogger, go to your blog management page in Blogger. Select the large Settings tab, then the small Site Feed tab. Select Publish site feed: Yes and Descriptions: Full and rebuild. Do it now. Tada, you’ve syndicated your site!

Boring. Mostly boring.

The idea is interesting (at least it was back in January 2004 when social networking sites were HOT HOT HOT). It starts with the principle that you have a circle of known, trusted and likable friends and takes the logical step of introducing you to THEIR known, trusted and likable friends.

This generally happens more randomly in real life (outside that thar Intar-Web), and I’ve met many of my friends that way. Maybe even most of my friends. And even if it’s true that I’ve met many of my friends through work, the transition from Colleague to Friend was Friend-of-a-Friend based.

Online, however, the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) relationship is exposed and made tangible. You can set up metrics for trust and reputation and extend them to total strangers. You can search for links between you and other people, or stumble on someone interesting. It’s scientific because it’s measurable — you can rate and categorize and evaluate. It’s social because you can join communities, send invitations and messages.

I was never too interested, because I doubted my friends (and FOAFs and FOAFOAFs) would be that interested. The less people you know in the system, the less value it has for you. And there is very little value in artificially introducing yourself into the system through links of “friends” not validated in that aforementioned real life.

Then Roger (a snappy dresser) informed me that he had an invitation to Orkut, one of these social networking sites provided as an experiment by Google. I begged an invitation from him and joined. But now there’s not really anything left to do.

Anyone want an invitation?

Should I copy the comments made on this site back into the other? There’s some duplication of content, but while I’m happy to goof off with Blogger, I’d like to keep The Inaccurate Tourist as my permanent archive. I’ll have to think about that.

I just realized that I moved in with Kendra and her family back when I was the same age that she is now. Time flies — and I’m glad it does.

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