I have always been against FeedBurner. I don't like it at all. I've never liked it, as a matter of fact, I have no actual idea why I've been using it on my blog. I do know why I used it on the country feeds on Planeta Linux, and that is because it was very easy to mask all of our URL changes with some level of stability on the subscribers (in times where me being technically competent was a bad joke for myself). Plus, we could plug AdSense into it (that later on I removed because I like to earn actual dollars, not pennies, you cheap clickers!). Or maybe I'm just so against it because of pure jealousy: A few RSS feed geeks, like myself, sold a sub-parproduct to Google in a hundred million dollars. At the very end, I've never had a good reason to use FeedBurner or to stick with it, so hereby I'm dropping it entirely from my own personal blog.

It's obvious that some people who subscribed to my feed using that FeedBurner URL aren't reading this very blog post. It's alright, I've lost reigns before, I will get over it and conquer their hearts again. But you, dear blog reader, planet subscriber, or eventual visitor, have the power to change things, to help workaround the evils of FeedBurner and make me be myself again. Please, help me myself again! And that is, from now on, use this feed URL and only this feed URL, I promise I will support as long as nice good looking HTTP servers (such as nginx or Cherokee) exist:

http://stereonaut.net/feed/

That said, I will get you a beer next time we meet each other and you, dear reader, mention this blog post and mention that you changed to this new feed URL of mine. I'm not kidding. Just go ahead and tell me

Thank you.

During last weekend's WordCamp, Jeremy Clarke gave a bunch of tips for websites server optimizations (I'll summarize my views on his talk later on a separate post) and he showcased a plugin for Firebug that I didn't know about and caught my attention: Yahoo! YSlow. It is a really nice piece of software, it adds a tab on your Firebug window and will grade the performance of the web page you are browsing with a set of tips on how to make it faster, ranging from images, CSS, JavaScript, headers, etc:

I find this to not be the ultimate solution to fix your websites' loading speed of course, but something advisable to use and try to comply against.

I believe it's time for me to get my blog from D to A

It's very sad when projects close down because of lack of financial interest on them. I've seen that on very near projects to me in the last couple of years and it doesn't stop getting me sad. Now, it's tr.im, which was a nice URL shortening service.

They weren't, of course, amything new, but it was really cool. They had a great short domain name and it just worked, plus they weren't one of the shitty services like Twitter-whore bit.ly or elder TinyURL.

I had my Tweeties (Mac's and iPhone's) configured to short my URLs using it so I will have to migrate to something else. Thing is, I didn't like any of others as much as I liked tr.im. Life's hard now.

Too bad. Good luck to the Nambu team and thanks for all the fish. Their blog post here.

I do like Twitter. For quite some time now I've been trying to find a Twitter client that I'd really like. I've tried, lots of them, Twhirl, Twitux, microblog-purple (which I started to dislike since I'm not IMing that much anymore and it can become extremely annoying if not blocked), TweetDeck, etc. All of them don't seem to fill my own needs and preferences. Even when Twitter used to support IM, I came up with probably the best solution I've used so far, GTalk on Bitlbee, so I could easily use Irssi with it. I have also been suggested to use Twidge but direct command-line IO is probably not the best for me. I want to have it a console emulator window, maybe screened in a remote server, running all the time, auto-updating, unobstrusive.

Given this, I started to hack on my own personal client using ncurses. Sadly, my lack of deep knowledge of the not-too-intuitive ncurses API made me abort the project. Maybe some day I could retake it. Shame.

Anyway, within the last week, I found and have been using TwitVim. I like Vim: It's my editor of choice for most of my projects. And TwitVim is a really nice project supporting a lot of interesting features:

There you can see how, on a non-obstrusive way, you can have it running. Since it's built on Vim, you can also do some key mappings so that you don't have to type all the commands. And it has all sorts of really cool and interesting features, like if the cursor is on a given line, \r will start a reply, or other binding will start a direct message, etc.

Here's a picture of my own timeline:

Once you have installed it, take a look at the extensive and detailed documentation with:

:help TwitVim

However, the only downside is that it doesn't auto-refresh. But you can map a key for quick update:

:nnoremap <F8> :FriendsTwitter<cr>

What Twitter clients do you like and use?

Last week, I spent some time building a good (that I liked) feed auto-discovery tool to use in Ruby for other project I'm building, rFeed. I liked CPAN's Feed::Find, and at some point I made a wrapper class to run a Perl script using such module, however, I wasn't happy by mixing it all. So, Feedbag was born:

>> require "rubygems"
=> true
>> require "feedbag"
=> true
>> Feedbag.find "log.damog.net"
=> ["http://feeds.feedburner.com/TeoremaDelCerdoInfinito",
 "http://log.damog.net/comments/feed/"]
>> planet_feeds = Feedbag.find("planet.debian.org")
[ ... ]
>> planet_feeds.first(3)
=> ["http://planet.debian.org/rss10.xml",
 "http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml",
 "http://planet.debian.org/atom.xml"]
>> planet_feeds.size
=> 104
>>

It makes smart use of relative and absolute bases, hrefs, links, content types, etc. It is also a single Ruby file, so you can grab it and use it on your application. Plus, it only requires Hpricot as dependency. It can find all feeds linked on a web page, but it will return the most important at the beginning of the resulting array, so you will have the important one on the first results (see example above with Planet Debian).

Synopsis, README and a brief tutorial have been placed at axiombox.com/feedbag. You can also take a look at the git repo, hosted in GitHub.