Meta « glide along

June 23, 2007

Google Reader Shared Items

Filed under: Computer Stuff,Internet,Meta,Programs — ricardo @ 12:02 pm

For a while now, I’ve been using the shared items feature on Google Reader.

The idea is pretty fucking good, but unfortunately, it seems to be only half way done. Once you start sharing the posts from your google reader list, they will be added to a web page and made available through a feed (the webpage created for my account is an example as good as any other…).

I would like to add a quick list to my sidebar (here at glide along) that is automatically updated as I share something on Google Reader, but I couldn’t get that to work for two reasons:

Firstly, the created feed is invalid (not compliant with the feed specifications).

Secondly, the Word Press sidebar widget supposed to do this does not support Atom feeds, only RSS. The “RSS vs. Atom” discussion has been going on for a while, however, I never found it slightly interesting and, thus, never took the time to read anything on the subject. This means I really do not know (and don’t care) what are the pros and cons of using one feed format or the other, all I know is that all major feed-related software today supports both. So should both Google Reader and the WP widget.

More than not being able to add my shared items to the sidebar, as a friend of mine pointed out, it is impossible to use Google Reader to subscribe to a Google Reader Shared Items feed… Not only the feed is broken, it is is broken in such a way that not even Google Reader itself can… err… read it………… Amazing, isn’t it? The fix I found for this specific problem is to burn the feed through FeedBurner, so if you wish to subscribe to my shared items feed, please refer to this link.

By the way, I couldn’t find anything about this on the company’s website…

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February 28, 2007

finally blogging

Filed under: Meta — ricardo @ 11:00 pm

In the beginning, people would “surf” the Internet.

The “surfers” would think of the web as an enormous pool of information, where one could search for and research about everything.

That perception, however, has changed a lot since those early days and continues to evolve towards an unclear destiny – we simply don’t have a clue of where it is taking us, but nonetheless, it IS taking us.

Instant messengers, wikis, peer-to-peer file sharing and many other… hmm… “cool web technologies” have permanently changed the way everyone uses the Internet. And one thing I particularly like about this series of nearly daily revolutions is that it is forcing people to be a part of it. The days when only geeks would take advantage of the virtual world and its many, many aspects are long gone.

The Internet today is not about information; it is about expression and communication, it is about personality, culture, style and art, it is about us and about what we make of it, it is about itself. We are learning new ways of using the Internet as a tool, we are understanding that it can help us more if we see it as something beyond a static source of information. An encyclopedia on the Internet is not a book, it is much more than that.

Blogs are just another step in that path that leads us to god-knows-where. As time passes, the revolution forces the population to learn how to “use” blogs. Not everyone will be posting, but they will certainly be reading.

Under my personal perspective, the tide has finally pushed me strong enough to make me face it: It is time to blog.

“glide along” is, above all, an experimental portal for some of my thoughts and ideas and I will hopefully be successful in posting them in the form of interesting reading material, I hope you like, comment and contribute.

Ok, enough with the meta-talk.

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