Oops

I apparently had the template for this page set to only list 14 days' worth of contents. It magically rebuilt some time in the last few days and promptly went blank since I have had nothing of value (to me) to write.

I've been working with a non-profit's web site on and off for the past couple of months. I find the whole situation somewhat depressing because at the end of the day we're still hacking HTML 10, not quite 15 years (for me). I've got the staff using Microsoft Word now to update some of the pages, but even that required my editing the pages in emacs first, and then importing to Word, and then paranoically checking across multiple browsers. The solution should be a simple CMS, but most require more server-side support, and more tech hands on on a recurring basis than I think should be necessary.

As a result, the dogs have been commuting to East Hampton, NY every couple of weeks. Just over two weeks ago I drove out at 6:00 a.m. and absolutely flew until I got to the Shinnecock crunch where NY-39 is under construction. Tonight I drove back and spent nearly 90 minutes driving from Amagansett to Riverhead where I pulled over to ge something to eat.

Sailor still does not like riding in the car. She pants, sometimes heavily, and trembles as soon as she gets into the car, but she gets in, she doesn't splay her legs across the door anymore. Lately she will get up on the back passenger seat and wait for me to put the car in gear before shuffling around and under the seat cover I bought. She crawls into a little den for herself behind the passenger seat. This is freaky the first time you hear it happening (assuming you're driving and looking in the direction you're driving, which is not necessarily the case in NYC). But she seems calmer when she does this, still pants but the trembling cuts back and on the drive back from Washington, DC last weekend she actually seemed to sleep a little. Unless the snoring was just "acting".

There's little news on the Frisket front. She was quite frolicky with Sailor over the weekend, and I caught her munching a little bit on le corpse d'seagull on Indian Wells Beach this afternoon, but otherwise she's been healthy (watch me regret typing that as she returns her foul fowl tonight).

Upcoming Travel

We're heading to Illinois the weekend of the 14th so I can see my family (as much as possible over four days) and take some friends to Alinea to congratulate them on their engagement.

Almost immediately on returning from Illinois I'm packing the dogs, the togs, the tevas, and whatever else will fit in the MDX for a marathon drive to Miami Beach. We'll be in Miami Beach from the 21st through 28th (at least that's the plan).

In early January we're flying to London for a long weekend including seeing Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor at Donmar Warehouse.

NextNY Event: MatchUpCamp on 28 November 2007

Tomorrow night (the 28th) (god this is totally a random collection isn't it?) is MatchupCamp, another NextNY event which describes itself as matchmaking for startups – is all about startup networking, creating a place for ideas and talent to meet. I plan to go and offer free grumblings from an old web codger, or something like that. But if you're into startups in the NYC area or just want to meet other people and find out what's going on in the web space in NYC, please come. Sign up on that page I just linked to, it's from 7-whenever at For Your Imagination, 22 W 27th, Manhattan. Occasionally beverages are consumed after these events.

Go see No Country for Old Men

While we were in Amagansett we saw No Country for Old Men. I thought it was a great movie. Definitely violent, but not gratuitously violent in a SAW XXXVIII: The Sharpening sort of way.

The Feed Purge of 2007

Apropos of nothing in particular, I reorganized my Google Reader subscriptions (Oh, joy, he's going to tell us about RSS feeds again). At one point I had over 800 feeds, most of which I read at most weekly if at all. I trimmed that down significantly to under 400 feeds, which is still a lot to read daily, but not so bad weekly. And I don't really read everything, I skim headlines (woe unto ye who writes a lousy headline like Oops) and then Star the ones I want to read later if I don't pop them into another tab. I eliminated any partial feeds which had such brief summaries that I always had to read the full article to find out what the article was about in the first place (Good Bye CNN's feeds). I eliminated feeds if I couldn't recall a substantive article or lead from the feed in the last few months (yes, this was completely arbitrary). I deleted a whole mess of SEO and Search related feeds: there's only a few blogs of value in the space, everyone else seems to either whine about Adsense, whine about Matt Cutts, or whine about not getting linked from the alpha blogs.

I found maybe 100 feeds were 404'ing and purged those. Don't care if you moved to another host/service/feedblaster. I purged feeds related to things I was interested in 2-3 years ago but am no longer.

And I reorganized everything from a incredibly messy collection of over 200 "folders" down to about 20, collapsing maybe 10 NYC related folders down to just "NYC", all business related feeds (regardless of source: blogs or the Faux Street Journal) down to just "business". Am still getting used to it, and believe I lost some feeds I didn't intend to due to Google's silent error handling of bad lines in my OPML file.

The method I used was kind of brutal: I exported my subscriptions into an OPML file, then deleted ALL of them. I also deleted all of the folders and tags. I then munged the OPML file on my Mac, removed all of the folders/tags from it, eliminated duplicated feeds (if a feed is in multiple "folders", Google will export it multiple times, once for each folder). Ran curl on the feeds to eliminate the 404s. And then reassembled the mess into a new OPML file and reimported into Google. Multiple times. Google Reader apparently choked on data it had just exported (and when it fails there's no error message, it just stops importing).

I wish this sort of thing were a bit easier, returning to my information noise/glut/whatever theme of earlier this year: I don't think we can handle all of the crap, digital or physical, we can now accumulate and cart around. Digital tools should include the means to make it easy to purge older cruft. Perhaps force me to pick and choose and assign value to individual messages and digital artifacts.

30

Eh, I have a couple more things to write up but they can wait (mostly: I’m looking for a replacement for my Nokia E70). Sailor's glowering at me so it's either walkies time or I'm supposed to be in bed so she can use my knee as a headrest. Look back here or on my flickr site for some pix of the dogs today at the beach.