As I’ve written before, NetNewsWire Pro is my news reader/RSS aggregator of choice. I’ve just submitted a feature request to Brent that I hope he will seriously consider.

As the owner of a several macs, I’d like the ability to use NNW on many machines throughout the day. It would be nice to not only sync the subscriptions on each machine, but to also sync the history of read articles.

Another issue I see looming on the horizon is the growth in traffic associated with the constant, regualr polling of RSS feeds by aggregators. It’s already becoming a problem for bloggers that are popular; and they’re paying the price in bandwidth charges.

One approach I could suggest is using WebDAV or simple FTP with a server as the intermediate. Perhaps a configuration option in NNW could set one machine as the “master” and others as “subordinate” readers. The “master” machine would do the aggregation, and post a master XML of the aggregated feeds to a WebDAV server. The “subordinate” machines could then poll this intermediate server for the aggregate once, instead of repolling all the individual feed servers. As articles are read on a given machine (or at some point when the app hasn’t seen activity from the user for some period of time), it posts it’s “reads” up to the server for the other machines to sync with.

This way, my desktop at the office could be the polling machine, staying up to date with feeds throughout the day. And when I go home to my home machine (or open my powerbook), it reads the aggregated feed from my server and is up to date with what I’ve read on my office mac.

I dare say most web users have access to at least a small amount of server space accessible via FTP, and could configure it to be the intermediate store (most ISPs give you 10MB or more of webspace for a site, that could easily be used).

I think this would be an extremely useful feature, and further separate NNW apart from the competition as the best RSS aggregator in existence, on any platform.

Heck, I’d even be interested in helping him develop it. I wonder if it could be developed as a NNW add-on? I’ll have to look into that.

Here’s a neat little site, the Guidebook, or Graphical User Interface Gallery. The attempt here is to catalog screenshots of every major (and many minor) GUI-based operating system. There’s still plenty of holes (most notably missing is MacOS 9 and MacOS X), but the author is off to a good start.

Here’s a nice new use of RSS: Apple iTunes Music Store RSS Generator

This nifty little tool lets a user build a custom RSS feed for info from the iTunes Music Store. For example, if I want the 25 newest Pop additions, I can get a feed for that and will be updated in by RSS reader when it changes.

What’s better, double-click on the headline in your RSS reader and iTunes pops up, and takes you right to the album in the music store.

Very nice use of the technology.

Mr. Hyatt over at Surfin’ Safari has some interesting things to say about Safari and XML…

MovableType 2.66 has been released. Most notable change:

As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we’ve released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We’ve included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable. We’ve also added a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time. Of course, there are no perfect defenses, and if you’re truly concerned about the comments on your weblog, the best defense is prevention by closing old comment threads.

Ran across this over at mezzoblue and had to snip:

Three DIVs for the design-gods painting on Macs,
Seven for the usability-lords in their websites of grey,
Nine for Windoze geeks doomed to debug,
One for the Zeld Man on his orange page,
In the land of New York where the pundits cry.
One DIV to size them all, One DIV to pad them,
One DIV to colour them all and in the browser style them
In the land of W3 where the standards lie.

Appologies to Mr. Tolkien.

Dad sent me this link to a fairly detailed history of computing: Computer History

Another interesting link contains a number of historical documents in Computer Science, including such gems as the introductory papers of a number of programming languages (Pascal, C, etc.) and other goodies such as Flowcharting templates and the patent for ENIAC.

â??Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.â?

- Brian W. Kernighan

For those not quite as nerdy as I, Brian Kernighan is one of the developers of the C language, and an uncle to the Unix Operating System.