RSS in the Money
RSS, one of my favorite “toys” on the web (as I love syndication) is attracting serious money according to Wired News.
Technorati, a company that’s like a search engine of blogs through rss feeds, received funding, which reportedly totaled $6.5 million. So what’s the company doing with the cash?
“We’re putting our investments to work building infrastructure and providing service to a population that’s growing at an explosive rate,” wrote Technorati founder David Sifry on his blog Monday. “Frankly, we’d rather talk about that than about the money others have invested in us.”
More funding into rss companies to come - but I am curious to see where the money does wind up and how or if it will help the technology in any way or just help these companies become larger.
Matisyahu: Hasidic Reggae
From the “now I’ve seen it all” department I present to you: Matisyahu, Hasidic Reggae star. While I have no idea how much of a “star” he is, his name’s gotten around and I caught him on Jimmy Kimmel last night.
From his interview on the show after he performed it seems he was just a “normal” guy growing up, liked reggae as a teen and stuck with it. He became religious a few years ago and I can’t think of anything that would advance his career more then that. His performance on the show was pretty good too. Which then brings up the question - is it weird that he’s Hasidic and performing reggae or is it weirder that he actually didn’t sound bad on the show? I’ll admit, I’m not into reggae all that much, so what the hell do I know, but a lot of musical acts sound like crap on late night shows and his didn’t. In the end, I think he’ll get at least part of his 15 minutes from this, good or bad.
Will DVDs Be In Your Future?
Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com and current Dallas Mavericks, HDNet and a bunch of other things owner, writes about
HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future.
It’s simple in theory, and there are obviously some things that need working on, especially for people to rely on hard drives more. Reliability would be concern #1. Sure, a DVD can get scratched, but the odds of a DVD going bad compared to my hard drive crashing are pretty low I’d assume. Some would say that’s why hard drives are becoming so cheap to begin with (made cheap, priced cheap). Anything that I’ve ripped from tape hasn’t been to dvd, it’s to mpg2. Same thing in viewing, but I’ve got the files all saved on a big hard drive, and when I can, backed up on another. It’s not close to cost effective right now, but it’s much more flexible for viewing then DVD and it also is portable in mass (one of my external drives could probably hold 60 DVDs and many more “DVD quality” movies).
The worst part of the whole discussion is you know the best technology won’t be backed by the big companies, only the most profitable. All we can hope for is backwards compatibility, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
ISAPI Rewrite for WordPress
One of the biggest perks of running Apache as opposed to IIS is a nice native rewrite engine. Apache’s mod_rewrite can make most urls super-clean in just a few lines. Luckily IIS has a decent answer for it, although not native. ISAPI Rewrite from Helicon Tech is an ISAPI filter that works in a very, very similar manner as mod_rewrite. They have a free version, the biggest drawback being you can’t use it site-to-site, it’s only for global rewrites. The full version, currently at $69 (with some decent discounts starting at just 2 server licenses) allows you to go site-to-site with the filter.
I found a few leads about how people translated mod_rewrite for WordPress to ISAPI rewrite. Few were doing me any good until I came across DA Williams’ post at Blue Crescent Tech. In fact, I was able to almost use his rules out of the box. For one thing, I did not have to delete the line relating to the comments feed that he said he had to delete. The other was that it seemed he had no line to rewrite the main feed link that WordPress uses. Following the simple conversion instructions he left I was able to add it back into my httpd.ini file easily.
What I added to my httpd.ini file:
RewriteRule /archives/category/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/author/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?author_name=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/author/?(.*) /index.php?author_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&page=$5 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&feed=$5 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/trackback/?$ /wp-trackback.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1&withcomments=1 [I,U,O]
I’m glad I got it working here, seems to be giving me no troubles and is super fast (so far). I hope to implement this on quite a few other sites.
The Palm
So tonight was good, shared a six-pound lobster with my girlfriend at The Palm. An early birthday dinner from my parents. Fewer dinners are better then huge lobsters cooked well and this one was pretty damn good.
Not sure about the rest of the night, it’s still fairly early, we didn’t go out until a little after midnight last night and I’m still waiting for a few people to call, but I think tonight may be a movie night anyway… nothing exciting, but hey, the lobster was good.
And so it starts
This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. In fact, it’s something I semi-started a while back and put on hold, deleted and then restarted it again.
So why blog? Right now it’s to simply share a voice. Pretty much the same reason anyone else does.
I think we all want to set topics when we first start. Most just want to throw out an opinion or link to cool things they find and I’m not far off from that.
Subjects should be technology, sports (heavy on the hockey I’m sure), movies, television, video games for when I find the time, along with anything else that crosses my path that I deem worthy. I’ll also throw in a run-on sentence or two.
A design will be coming here eventually, but until then I’m just going to have a very simple design. Easy on the eyes and easy on the loading time - for now.
One of my main issues was which domain to use. vodkafish.com? VodkaFish has been a name I’ve been using online for almost 10 years. It’s not exactly the most professional thing in the world, but it’s not like it’s on my business cards. So what to do? Use it? Use another generic name? I’d love to get a variation of my real name, but all those domains have been taken for quite some time. I asked a few people and they all said “vodkafish.com” - of course, they already know me as VodkaFish and what I’m about is already also known to them. But in the end this is the logical choice. A name I use on a slew of sites, it’s here to use and hell, it somehow already has a Google PR of 2 to build upon.
And so it begins… I step into the blogsphere or whatever catchphrase they’re using today…