Tag Archives: meerkat

Websites come and websites go

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O’Reilly shut down the wonderful Meerkat aggregator website a while back and now I see that Raph may be shutting down Advogato.

Yet another website I frequent, on the subject of Free/Open hardware, almost shut down in June. FreeIO.org has been run by Diehl Martin for years, providing GPL’d hardware designs. Unfortunately, Marty has pancreatic cancer and decided he didn’t have time to run the site anymore. After seeing his shutdown announcement, I offered to take over hosting and maintenance of FreeIO.org. We completed the transition in August. We’re still pondering the longer-term plans for the site.

I’ll miss advogato if it shuts down. Thanks for the effort you put into Advogato and mod_virgule, Raph! I’m still running robots.net on my own version of mod_virgule but I’m guessing mod_virgule is not likely to survive long without Advogato, so it may be time to rename my version and go off in my own direction with the code. There are lots of enhancements I’ve wanted to make like dropping the specialized XML templates in favor of standard XHTML templates, replacing the template processing code with the XPATH support available in libxml2, maybe replacing the flat-file db with SQL support. There’s still a lot of potential in the codebase; it’s just a few years behind the times at this point.

I still haven’t found a good replacement for Meerkat. I’m trying to use Technorati. It looks pretty but it’s riddled with technical problems and there are apparently no humans at the other end to talk to, just faceless form emails promising replies that never arrive. Technorati only manages to update from robots.net maybe one out of every ten times I ping them. Complaints about the Technorati ping problems and their non-existent technical support are common. I’ve tried several of the recommended work-arounds for the ping problem but none have worked for me so far.

Random Complaints

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Does anybody else miss the O’Reilly Meerkat aggregator? It was nice because you could subscribe to the results of arbitrary keyword filters rather just specific blogs. Anybody know of another aggregator like that? There are plenty of places that allow keyword searches of blogs but I’m not aware of any that allow one to subscribe to the results of those searches.

I downloaded the Fedora Core 5 ISO images this morning and burned them using X-CD Roast. That program wins the prize for worst, most non-intuitive user interface of the week. I’ve used several Windows CD burning programs that take just a few clicks to get from ISO image file to burning the CD; something like “create CD from image”, “select an image file”, “burn the CD”. on X-CD Roast I spent a half hour trying to figure out how to get it to burn anything at all. I eventually gave up and Googled for the website. Helpful hint to the developers: when your interface is so bad that “how do I burn a CD from an image file?” is a FAQ, it’s time for a redesign.

For the curious, the steps are: click “setup”, “HD settings”, type the path to your ISO images and click “Add”, “OK”, “Create CD”, “Write Tracks”, select the image file, click “Add”, click the tab labelled “Write Tracks” (not the nearby button labelled “Write Tracks”!), click the new button that just appeared, also labelled “Write Tracks” (yes, at this point there are two buttons and one tab that all say “Write Tracks” – all three do different things), insert the blank CD, click “OK”, grumble, and blog about bad user interfaces while you wait.