Terminally Incoherent

I noticed today that all the Live Journal feeds I subscribe to via Bloglines have a red exclamation mark next to them. This essentially means that Bloglines can’t read the feed, and thus no updates will show up for it until the feed issues are resolved.

I have been noticing more and more of those marks lately but never really thought much of them. But when all the LJ feeds went wonky at the same time I figured there might be two possibilities here:

1. LJ fucked up it’s feeds
2. Bloglines is not reading the feeds correctly

I exported my OPML and imported it in Google Reader just to see if I get similar behavior. Nope. Reader didn’t show any errors, and I was able to pick up the recent updates. I like Bloglines. I’m used to it. But Google Reader has some nice features too. Is it time to switch?

I added Gravatar support to this site. If you don’t have a gravatar account, go sign up. You give them your email, and upload an image. Nice part is that this pic will not only display here but on every blog that supports gravatars. If you want to see samples just look around in the comments. You should see my picture on all my posts.

I also noticed that several other regular posters here also use them so this should be nice!

Btw, Miloš - if you are interested, there is a Blojsom plugin avaliable.

I hereby decree the Blogger’s Code of Conduct to be a fail. Those badges… They are hilarious. The idea of putting a “Civility Enforced” sheriff’s star on my blog to let people know I moderate comments just cracks me up to no end. It’s almost as funny as the “free speech zones” instituted by our dear government, but much less alarming.

Scobble doesn’t think this is a good idea, but he seems to still be on the fence about it. Personally I think this whole thing is laughable. Get off the damn fence Scobbble, and go with your gut instinct. We all know this is silly.

This whole thing is just a knee jerk reaction to that whole Kathy Sierra thing. Granted that it was messed up, but come on. Does anyone actually really think that a code of conduct and “blog badges” are going to solve the internet troll infestation problem?

O’Reilly’s code seems to just be an attempt to push his own personal comment policy on the rest of the blogging world, and I’m not buying it. I already have my own policy here which is short, sweet and intuitive:

“no spammin, no hatin, no flamin, no fucking with my layoutz, trollz GTFO”

In fact this is so intuitive, that I don’t even have to spell it out anywhere. Most people naturally abide by this code - and if they don’t they are usually up to no good anyway. If they cross the line and post something blatantly offensive, their comments get deleted. And if they are particularly nasty, I just block their IP so that they don’t come back.

See, I already abide by most of Tim’s guidelines (#1, #2, #4 and #6). Technically i also abide by #5 since I do require you to enter an email address to post. However I do this mostly so that you can get notifications about other comments in that thread - so it’s kinda there for your convenience.

The guideline #3 is tricky. In some situations it is best to talk privately. In others public discussion is probably more beneficial to anyone. Still, just as with all the other points, it is a common sense thing.

Do I really need a silly badge in my sidebar? Maybe if you are a big name among the A list bloggers this might be worth while to implement. It’d be like having a “I support Kathy Sierra” bumper sticker on your blog. In fact it would be very much like those “I support the troops” stickers people use. Unfortunately both stickers make you look like a duchebag. We all support the troops, and we all feel bad for Kathy Sierra. We just don’t need to advertise it to the world with a tacky bumper sticker or a sheriff’s star badge.

Screw the pompous “Code of Conduct”. I think Tony Hung has a much better, and simpler idea. Instead of subscribing to some code, simply have a comment policy and spell it out in a visible place on your blog.

This cracked me up:

found @ veronicabelmont.com

What is it about cats that it makes people chronicle their every move? And this is by no means an internet phenomenon! Look at ancient Egyptians - they were nuts for these critters. You know those hieroglyphs that we are yet to decipher? I bet like 80% of them are fucking stories about pharaohs cat and his crazy adventures in the kitchen.

Seriously people, enough with the cats! I have like 4 of them living in my back yard. They are completely wild, untamed, little fuckers, and they run away from people. They do eat the food I put out for them though. But do you see me blogging about them? No!

Fuck… I just blogged about cats.

Everyone seems to be really loving Tumblr these days. It is yet another Web 2.0 service that lost a vowel to gain the cool factor. So I decided to make my own Tumblr blog. Feel free to check it out at terminally-incoherent.tumblr.com. If I really like it and use it often I will probably move it to a subdomain here (for example tumblr.terminally-incoherent.com or something like that).

The thing about Tumblr is that it is incredibly simple to use. You can essentially create new entries with a bookmarklet the same way you bookmark websites in delicious. Only Tumblr bookmarklet is intelligent enough to recognize what you are submitting. For example if you hit a Youtube video, it will automatically embed it for you. If you are posting an image, it will size it appropriately, and link back to the site from which it came from. It’s all essentially one click posting.

It also can integrate with just about any other website out there that generates feeds. So for example, my Tumblr will automatically repost all the del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr images I submit at any given time. In fact you can use Tumblr to create something that Ara talked about recently: your own life stream or master feed which will incorporate every single of your existing RSS feeds. And you can do it the easy way without much hacking, or using the Yahoo Pipes service.

Of course it is also very limited in the way it can be customized, and it does not allow comments which makes it a poor community building tool.

I’m planning to use Tumblr for posting very random vids and images which do not really fit the format of this blog. I will still post the best stuff (ie. stuff that I would like to comment on) here, but if I find an amusing meme, or a really retarded vid I will just dump it on Tumblr.