Tech
MPAA Wants BitTorrent Sites Shut Down
Wired is reporting Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead and that Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action against the operators of BitTorrent and eDonkey sites.
BitTorrent megasite suprnova.org is not down at the time of this posting.
RSS Feed Considerations
My biggest question right now has been whether or not to add feeds to hockeyfights.com.
I set up the first feeds over a year ago, but never released them. At the time I was trying to decide between formats. RSS/Atom, and if RSS, which version? I was planning on putting out static versions of multiple feeds in multiple formats. After observing for a year and seeing that most use RSS 2.0 - and that seemingly all readers support it, I’ve decided I can start with just that and probably run into no problems.
There are three major RSS feeds I’d be posting: articles (which should see an increase in frequency), news (which can be slow or very active depending on the day), and a forums feed for new hockey threads (should be some pretty good activity there as well).
My issues with these all revolve around traffic. hockeyfights.com receives a good amount of traffic and RSS traffic concerns are becoming more and more well known. There are too many readers out there that all schedule to ping at the same time and some people configure their own to ping non-stop. I have little desire to waste tons of bandwidth and server resources to test out RSS services (something which I do not want to take away once I add, unless the technology progresses to something different).
My issues are these:
- Should I only produce static files? My assumption is yes. No reason to have dynamic feeds and waste the resources for it.
- Should I have “smart urls” for the feeds? In other words - should I do what I do now with the rest of the main site in having the urls be extensionless? The benefit of it is being able to change site structure and feed extension without changing the url. Example: USA Today uses a flat xml file (or at least appears to be, as you can always change the extension to use a scripting language): http://www.usatoday.com/repurposing/NHLRss.xml ESPN uses a “smart” url: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nhl/news The problem with having a smart url is that my server needs to process it. While it’s super fast and doesn’t consume many resources now - that can change if I start getting pinged by tons of people.
- Do I have the type of audience that will actually use these feeds? The largest demographic for the site is the coveted tv audience - males 18-35; stereotypically you’d think they’d be up on technology, but I’d say the crowd is pretty mixed in terms of tech-savviness.
- Do I circumvent this problem by using a service such as FeedBurner? I’m always hesitant to use outside services. Besides the possible non-professional appearance depending on how you view using domain names other than your own on your site (I’m never a fan of it for anything outside of a personal site); things like up-time are never guaranteed and I have no idea about the direction of the service. Will it remain free? If not, will there be ads in my feed or will I have the option to pay and remove them? And if that cost is more than the bandwidth I’d use hosting it on my own machine, could I move it back and have the FeedBurner url pointed to my site correctly?
Other considerations of mine:
- Currently I plan on having “teaser feeds” - that is not putting the full text into the feed. The idea of these feeds is to have people come to the site when interested. Along with that, I should point out I do not plan on having any ads in a feed such as that.
- I’m considering having the forums feed be members-only.
- If I could swing it, and make sure login security is tight, I’d like to have full-text feeds for premium members.
- Having an XML feed for team and player fighting major leaders along with a feed for the last few fights. If a site is interested, I could always design a premium (read: cost) feed for them. This would be useful to a bunch of sites out there, although I wonder how well some would be able to translate the XML and how much I would have to do to support it.
In the end it’s just trying to figure out how many subscribers and visitors I would get from the feeds compared to the cost of the feeds (and compare that to the cost of a “normal” visitor).
I’ll update with whatever decisions I come to, and if you’ve had any experiences where you’ve had to make similar decisions I’d love to hear them.
Finally Bombed
I was comment-spam-bombed yesterday. Fun stuff. Glad I’m quick with a sql statement.
I suppose I could be flattered, but I know it’s just about finding a new target, not caring how many read it, just wanting Google to crawl and help bump up their search engine listing.
Please Unplug My Former Host
Not so long ago I had shared hosting. I was originally with one company, who was bought by another, and then another. I then switched upon receiving horrible service, landed on my last shared hosting company (who was quite good) before moving to my own servers.
So one of the first companies - all one-in-the-same to me has a server (or more) that is basically a virus relay. I receive numerous emails a day from this one IP - all viruses. They have a few other things in common: they are only to domains and email accounts I had while hosting with this company and all of the spoofed “from” addresses are from other domains hosted at this company (or formerly hosted there).
I did what I hope most responsible people would do: I wrote them a polite email letting them know what’s happening and how and suggested they look into it. No response. So I wrote another email. No response.
At this point I’m pretty disgusted. I know they’re receiving my emails and they’re willingly letting this continue. I’ve gotten messages numbering in the teens (at least) within one day. I safely delete them - but I do wonder just how many other machines they’ve infected by letting this continue. I know the phrase “depraved indifference” is usually reserved for murder charges, but it’s quite fitting here.
I’ll have to simply block their IPs from delivering mail to me as I’m tired of receiving this stuff. If I were lawsuit trigger-happy and had some free time I’d probably have a fun case to attempt to set some precedent too, any hosting company that willingly allows viruses to be spread should have some action taken against them.
FireFox 1.0 Released
Jeremy’s put together a collection of links to make it easier to pick it up as well (as of right now, mozilla.org has a good chance of timing out on you).
Happy browsing.
Pirated Album Released on Internet - No Kidding
CNN is reporting U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” has been pirated and released on the internet before the official release date. Wow, what a shocker. This puts them right up there with almost every other album released over the past 5-10 years. This happens with everything, you just have to know where to look. Obviously this is on some major download spots for it to gain the interest of CNN (along with being U2).
Not really a big deal since most people are probably sick of Vertigo already, the song in the overplayed iPod commercial.
The music industry will pretend this negatively affects sales, which it doesn’t according to most non-RIAA funded studies. Mark Cuban wonders “when will the music industry will get it right?”
Beats me.
Finally Found a DVD Authoring Program
For a while I was looking for a program that would easily allow me to take clips (mpg2 format) and put them onto a DVD. While they all do that, most will just add them as titles or separate timelines. The suggestion was usually to merge the clips and then make chapter points. Who wants to do that when you want to put 40 clips onto a DVD?
Finally, I found what I was looking for. TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 allowed me to easily add files (all at once) and have them be chapters in one timeline (although I could make other timelines too). I created a DVD easily, and can skip through it just as easy now. I spent a little extra time setting up a menu for it as well. I have it start out and go right to the first clip, but if you hit menu it’s there. It has about 10 pages of clips, title and picture for each chapter. Not bad. I just have to create a theme since I used a blah default one.
After all the trial programs and such I’ve had to download and try out I’m glad I’ve found something I can work with. As I create a few more DVDs I hope I can tweak it with the same ease it took to create what I’ve made so far.
Getting the Hockey Blogs Together
After patiently waiting for a way to improve the way I can produce a feed, I’m finally able to starting pushing the blog feed on The Ice Block. Blogger only produces an atom feed by default and I couldn’t read those for a while. Unfortunately many sites use Blogger. No problem anymore, atom is all good now. I did have to write a few to ask them to change the encoding, but no one outside of Jes GÅ‘lbez (who does need to use Eastern European accents) will see any difference in their site by doing so, and probably allows more to use their feed besides myself. Jes did change his encoding to an ISO format and hopefully I can tweak my script to include it soon.
Until then, have a look at some of the best blogs around and follow the feed to easily get a nice group update. If you think I’ve missed any major hockey blog, or even a small one that’s just really good and regularly updated, please let me know.
The Many Flavors of a Blogger Feed
I’ve got a decent amount of people I know blogging through Blogger.
Almost none of them have a link to their atom feed (Google does atom over rss as a default on Blogger blogs).
I have been able to find a feed for all I was looking for, but it doesn’t seem like there’s one standard.
Let’s say the url for your friend’s Blogger blog is:
blogname.blogspot.com
To get the feed, try one of these:
/atom.xml
/rss/blogname.xml
/rss/feed.xml
/blognamefeed
Note: you can also normally view the source of a Blogger’s page and get the feed location there.
If I find any more, I’ll post them.
Trade Me Soon
So I was reading more about Jeremy’s sale of his blog, ensight.org and fine his latest post with a bunch of quotes from other blogs about it. So BJ’s post stood out to me because I’m not really up on Blogshares. To quote the site, Blogshares is:
“a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies.”
Seems like fun, reminds me of Wall Street Sports, although I used to do it back in the late 90s and it went on pause for a while and I don’t know how the new site is.
Anyway, seems I’m listed on Blogshares already, but I’m listed there twice. Once with the trailing slash, once without. I wrote to support, hopefully they can consolidate this and I can go tell you guys to buy and sell me. Just another fun thing to distract you from whatever it is you’re trying to be productive at.