I finally got around to updating my subscription list, over on the right side of the screen if you’re viewing the HTML version of this site. This one is generated from my NewsGator subscription file.

In my case, it’s pretty simple – the page is rendered from a list in my SQL database, so I just wrote a quick (10 minutes) application to whip through my NewsGatorSubs.opml file, extract each outline element, and insert it into my DB. Even if you don’t use a database (most folks!), it would be easy to write a small XSLT transform to transform the enhanced NewsGator OPML into whatever you need.

FYI, you can find your NewsGatorSubs.opml subscription file at:

\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\RAI\NewsGator\NewsGatorSubs.opml

Someday, hopefully there will be an easier way to integrate with your blogroll – but for now, this isn’t too painful, if you have some XML knowledge. If not, post what you need, and someone might help you. :-)

I’ve added the RSS 2.0 <author> element to my comments feed, which will make it easier to tell at a glance who posted the comment. Maybe Sam will follow suit – his comments feeds are pretty active…

NewsGator users, just make sure the “From” column is part of the view for that feed, and you’ll be all set!

Update: it would be cool if those of you who have combined feeds for multiple weblogs would support this as well. Mike already does this for the EraBlog combined feed (with dc:creator, pretty much equivalent to author); Scott, how about dotnetweblogs.com‘s combined feed?

Sean Varley has an interesting post talking about embedded processors and trends in that market:

Processors sales run 50 billion dollars a year, but 98 percent of them are invisible.  The truth is that only 2 percent of all the processors sold actually go into your regular old PC…

And a big welcome to Tom Walker, who just launched his weblog yesterday while we were eating pizza and watching Alias. Tom usually has something intereresting to say – watch his weblog!

Don Box writes:

Due to popular demand, my RSS/2.0 feed will soon support <content:encoded>, which will allow users of off-line readers (e.g., NewsGator, NewsGator, and NewsGator) to read my feeds without being connected.

Heh…NewsGator users aren’t a quiet bunch! :-)

I’ve had a lot of requests for NewsGator to be able to scrape non-RSS-enabled sites, and create a “virtual feed” from them. Syndirella supports this capability on the client side; MyRSS can also create a feed from any web site, according to their documentation.

Here’s the question I have. Do you think scraping content from a site is legal or ethical? I don’t think so. For starters, I would think there are copyright issues. You’re taking content, which belongs to someone else, and reproducing it in another form for your own use. Maybe this is allowable use, I don’t know…I’m certainly not a lawyer.

What about sites that make their living based on advertising impressions? Tools that scrape these sites are literally stealing money from them.

Any comments? Am I off base here?

If you’re using weblogs internally in your company, and you’re willing to talk about it, can you send me a note?  Thanks!

In case anyone missed this from the NewsGator updates feed:

Through our arrangement with O’Reilly & Associates, we are pleased to bring you Chapter 2: Content Syndication Architecture, from the new book, Content Syndication with RSS, by Ben Hammersley.

From the chapter introduction:

In this chapter, we’ll look at how RSS feeds are structured: both the feed itself and the way RSS fits into the whole web publishing picture.

Read the full text online!

[NewsGator News and Updates]

Well this is pissing me off…newsgator.com has had some major issues since sometime last night:

Server Application Unavailable
The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable.  Please hit the “Refresh” button in your web browser to retry your request.

Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the system event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur.

I tell you, I’ve been with my current hosting provider for some time, but ever since they were acquired by a certain other company, things have gone downhill in the reliability department. I’m not going to name them here (yet), as I’m hoping they get this fixed in a hurry and don’t want to piss them off. :-)

Anyone have recommendations for a high quality .NET hosting provider? I’ve heard good things about maximumasp.net, but I’m worried about their 2Mb/sec bandwidth throttle – we have times that go way over that. I’ve also heard good things about rackspace.com, but only on the Linux side. Anyone?

Update: it’s back up now, but I’d still like to hear some recommendations from you…

As many of you know from some previous posts, racing cars is my hobby. This last weekend, a new track (Arizona Motorsports Park) opened near Phoenix, so I went down for the inaugural event.

Friday was a test day, so everyone could learn the track. I like the track a lot – despite having no elevation changes (not a lot of hills out there, I guess), it’s a very technical track. The day was going quite well until just after lunch, when a car spun right in front of me, at just that distance where there’s pretty much nothing you can do. We hit nose-to-nose, and I ended up with a bent nose pan and a broken radiator. After miraculous repairs by my crew, I made it back out for the final session of the day. But all was not well…my lap times were 3 to 4 seconds slower than earlier, which let me tell you, is SO frustrating. Luckily, it ended up being a partially broken accelerator pedal, which wouldn’t allow the throttle to open completely. Much easier to fix than the loose nut behind the wheel! :-)

Saturday was the regional race, and I qualified 3rd of 18 cars. And I actually ended up winning the race – woo-hoo! It was my first win in the AZ region – there are a lot of great drivers down there, so I was pretty excited about it.

Sunday was the national race, and somehow all the stars lined up and I qualified on the pole. Out of 21 cars, I believe. It wasn’t meant to be, though…I overslowed a bit going into the first turn, and 3 cars got by on the short straightaway following it. To save you the painful play-by-play, I ended up finishing 5th. A bit disappointing after qualifying on the pole, but not too bad of a finish. And it was a great time!

This weekend was fun…I had been spending a lot of long days finishing NewsGator, and it was good to get back out and do the things that I like to do. Don’t get me wrong, I like writing software – I love my job – but it’s more a means to an end rather than the end itself. If Ferrari offered me even 10% of Michael Schumacher’s salary to drive for them, I’d go in a heartbeat! Even 1%. 0.5%. Ok, ok, I’d pay them. :-)

Wow…I found this post from Technorati while trolling for posts about NewsGator (which I do a couple of times a week). Martin Sutherland writes this about NewsGator:

Even if you don’t use Outlook, it might even be enough to make you switch. (I had been using Mozilla mail until January, and NewsGator was good enough to make me suffer through the hell of converting my email from Mozilla to Outlook so I could use it. Now that’s impressive.)

Now, I can’t help but re-publish a quote like that. :-) But right before that, he says:

But I’m not using it any more.

Basically, he said he’s spending way too much time reading blogs, and not enough time on everything else. It’s kind of funny, because I’ve gotten a number of comments via email from people saying the only thing they don’t like about NewsGator is that it makes it too easy to read lots of news sources, so they read more of them (good) and spend more time with them (not so good).

I’ve noticed this a bit myself; since I’ve used an aggregator that works the way I do, I read more weblogs and other news sources. And as weblogs gain in popularity, I’ll find more that I want to read. At some point, I’ll have to start cutting some of them out – there’s only so many hours in the day, after all. But that day will be an interesting one – if most interesting content is available via a syndicated feed, and everyone has an aggregator…