Archive: April 21, 2003
Ok, this must be a common problem. I know I left a comment on someone's weblog a few days ago, but I can't remember where it was. This happens a lot, where I have to fill my brain with reminders to go back and check sites I've commented on for replies. And I really don't leave comments places all that often.
So this is a call to action. Everyone who has comments on their web sites should have a way to subscribe to that post so that you receive an e-mail when a reply is made. RSS feeds for comments on a post aren't good enough, for a whole bunch of reasons. Who wants to have to subscribe to an RSS feed for every place they ever leave a comment? How long do you wait to unsubscribe? Weblog comment subscriptions should be a "push" technology; you shouldn't have to think about it unless there's something there. Hey, and people complain about bandwidth use for a main RSS feed... How much will that be multiplied if people subscribe to comment feeds for every post?
There are a few ways to do this. You could get an e-mail for every reply that's made, but that could quickly flood you with e-mail. It doesn't scale well, and I guarantee you messages are harder to put in context this way. The better solution, and the one that message boards use, is to e-mail you when there's a new post made, but then not e-mail you again until you've visited the site and seen all the new posts. This scales better.
Plus, it solves another problem. Let's say someone's e-mail address changes, but comments are still being made. If messages start bouncing, they'll keep on bouncing as long as comments keep being made. However, if e-mails are only sent once until the person visits the site again, if an e-mail is sent and bounces, then that's the only one that'll ever have to be sent to that address again.
I used to have a subscription feature on my site. I'll be implementing it again soon when I'm done with my form stuff.
Update: Looks like this is already planned for Manila and/or Radio. Also see Dan Sugalski's post on Better blog distribution. Also see the comments on Sam Ruby's blog.
Man, I just had an awesome shopping trip. I went to Best Buy and got an ATI Radeon 7500 for $44 after mail-in rebate, a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 512 for $32, Spirited Away for $20, and a CPU fan I needed because the one in my dad's PC is making too much noise. Kick ass.
By the way, update on the sound card problem. I went with a Creative Labs like Matt recommended. So I wouldn't have to spend money, I tried putting the Turtle Beach piece of crap in my dad's computer and used his old sound card in mine, but the TB piece of crap kept crashing his computer. So, now I'm going to give him his old sound card back and take the Sound Blaster for myself  It has the EAX hardware 3D audio built in, so now Unreal Tournament won't have to fake it in software. So, with the new 64 meg video card (with DDR RAM, oooh), and without Unreal having to fake 3D audio, hopefully this'll make it a lot faster. It's gotten unacceptibly slow after installing my new OS (boo).
Hmm... here's a review of the ATI Radeon 7500 and a review of the GeForce MX420, which was my alternative. I wonder which one would have been best? The GeForce was like 10 bucks more. Hmmm...
Wow, I really should start keeping a list of WYSIWYG web-based HTML editors. James just pointed to the SPAW editor. Looks great, but according to the site it only works with IE.
There's also htmlArea, which is cross browser in its newest (currently alpha) version.
Any others?
Nice, here's a good list. Check out the FCK editor.
There's not too much else out there. htmlArea seems to be the only one that works cross-browser.
Jeez... I've written about 200 lines of code so far, just for the base class of my form processing thingy in my CMS. It has a good deal of comments, but still.
I think it's going to rock though. Finally, it'll be easy (at least easier) to write correct code to process web-forms. Now, writing the HTML forms is another matter. I want to make that easier too If PHP only had closures I'd be able to design this one way... but nooo.
I think I'll add The City and the Stars to my reading list. I hope I'll get to that after I finish reading The Brothers Karamazov. I just started TBK and, even though I'm only a few pages in, it's incredible so far.
Check out this great post about NATO from Steven Den Beste. I learned a lot about NATO I didn't know before. Definitely worth a read.
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Monday, April 21, 2003
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new⇒Timesheet Calculator
Hadn't seen it before now, but mycompany already uses a timetracking prog...
Keith: Oct 7, 10:44am