ricketyclick

I’ve been playing with feeds and feed aggregators.

They don’t work, dammit. (Well, OK, they don’t work the way I want them to.) This is something that ought to be dirt simple, and that nobody’s been able to get right over the several years I’ve been trying to use feeds.

(For those of you who don’t know about feeds, see here.)

Among others, I tried Feed Sidebar.

Nice try, but no.

This is a slightly-edited version of the review/comment I left there, although it hasn’t yet shown up.

2/5 stars.

Less than a day after installing it, amid much hair-pulling, I ripped it back out again.

Look, guys, all I want is something that flags my bookmarks if they’ve changed since the last time I visited them. I click on the link, and the flag goes away. Make this an option, and I’ll reconsider.

I don’t want a special folder I’m not allowed to organize. I don’t need to have all those feeds re-rendered as my own bland, featureless personal newspaper. I certainly don’t want each article link to open separately. I don’t want to click on the feed link, then move down to another pane and click on the site link, then click on the “mark read” button…. Just open the site, please, and mark it read.

No, clicking on the “mark all read” button doesn’t work either–it takes several minutes to work through the whole list.

And I especially don’t need my computer hijacked periodically while you go through 200 or 300 links, most of which only update once a day at most, but some of which update hourly or better, and some of which are neglected for days, then are updated several times in a few hours (like, for instance, that idiot Ricketyclick blog). (Those last are the ones I most need a feed flagger for.) This means that I want to be able to schedule each link separately, or at least put the links in several scheduling bins (the hourly bin, the twice-daily bin, the daily bin, the weekly bin…).

I’m sorry to whine about this, but I want such a simple thing, and in all the years since RSS first appeared, I’ve never found an app that could do it right.

Piss off. Again.

Pie chart of how web designers spend their time. [Image is too large to fit in this column.]

Via Peeve Farm.

Here’s a block quote:

I like block quotes. When they work, they produce attractive, professional-looking pages. And the style of block quotes that this template produces, with the gray bar down the left, are particularly nice.

It’s true. You can always trust a blockquote.

Here’s the deal, though: In WordPress, do not insert bq’s by hand. Use the “b-quote” and “/b-quote” buttons provided by the editor. There are some invisible paragraph tags that get inserted by the buttons; your crude, barbarian hand coding leaves them out, and the processor attempts to put them in, but guesses badly. It’s even worse if you try to include the “p” tags; the processor ignores yours, and insists on putting in it’s own.

Trust me, the XHTML validator gets really pissy about this.

Worth putting up a test post and playing. Use the View Source to see what the server sees.