matt.griffith

I've given the aggregator a concept of whuffie. I can give any item that has been aggregated a thumbs up or thumbs down, increasing or decreasing the item and site's wuffie. I sort the sites out as I display them by their whuffie. It is a simplistic way of keeping the sites I'm interested in at the top of the list. I'd like to wire in a Bayesian classifier too, and see if that helps me get the items I like to the top. [John Beimler]

How strange. I posted a screen shot of TouchGraph running on .NET in response to a post by Scott Hanselman about .NET Purity. He commented on that post so I visited his site again. In the process I reread an unrelated post of his. That's when I saw this:

I'm envisioning a full-screen, small-font, very dense RSS aggregration workspace (much more dense than Outlook Today) perhaps ala The Brain...I'll need hunt around and perhaps write this if I can't find it...maybe I can pull from Danny Ayer's IdeaGraph? [Scott Hanselman]

No wonder he thought my TouchGraph screen shot was cool.

P.S. I'm seriously considering a .NET port of TouchGraph. If you are interested let me know.

On a slightly related note Matt Griffith asks for functionality that's been in RSS Bandit since version 1.0. The primary reason I started work on RSS Bandit was because aggregators didn't provide a portable way to serialize feed information besides scanty OPML files. Maybe more news aggregators should use the feed list format described my Building a Desktop News Aggregator article. [Dare Obasanjo]

Excellent. It looks like a very good start. But RSS Bandit doesn't like this:

Also, I'm probably missing something but it doesn't look like a feed can belong to more than one category.

I would love to see the community work to design a common extensible Subscription format. Then we could define an API for saving and retrieving the subscriptions to a central store. Anyone else interested?

P.S. RSSBandit holds a lock on the import file when an exception is thrown during the import.

Attention LazyWeb. Let's create an ISubscription interface along the lines of the IBlogExtension interface. Here's the idea:

I visit a web page. If the page supports RSS Autodiscovery my browser's toolbar button is enabled. I click the RSS toolbar button and it runs all the ISubscription plug-ins I have installed. The plug-ins are passed the Uri of the page and the Uri of the RSS feed.

I have some ideas how this could be implemented for IE using COM and/or .NET interfaces. But I'd also like to think of ways to enable non IE browsers and non-COM/.NET plug-ins. Comments?

I'm finally moving to my new home. I'll continue to update the old site for a while.

I will maintain the existing content on the old site for the foreseeable future.

One surely can't expect a very complex C# Winforms app with all the fancy GDI+ goodness and user controls to just work on Mono (unless I'm missing something) - not until the underlying implementation of ALL the dependancies are written and implementing using whatever Linux OS primitives are required to provide these features. [Scott Hanselman]

This is TouchGraph version 1.22-jre1.1 compiled with J# 1.1 and running as a .NET 1.1 Windows application:

The fact that it compiled without modification is surprising. The fact that it runs error free is amazing. The fact that it is slower than molasses in January is understandable.

I imagine I will feel the same way IF the Mono team is ever able to get something like Vault running.

I stumbled across SQL Buddy today. It looks promising. I wonder what they have planned for SourceSafe integration...

The Microsoft XQuery demo is gone. Anyone know where it went?

Just miserablly cold weather for far too much of the year, and yes, I am allowed to complain, since I did do something about it. I moved to North Carolina. [Joe Gregorio]

I hear you Joe. But I can't complain until I move south. Know of anyone hiring in your neck of the woods? ;-)

This - and now this - made me think. To one degree or another I use the following languages/technologies at my day job:

• C#
• TSQL
• VBScript
• VB6
• VB.NET
• C++
• JavaScript
• HTML
• XML
• XSLT
• SOAP
• WSDL
• XSD
• CSS
• Java

Wow that is the first time I've committed that list to "paper". It seems a little crazy looking at it like that. Especially when you consider that I use 8 of them at least once a week.

For the record my favorite is C#.