RSS wankery « Labda Hata Mimi

MBOX to RSS converter I am thinking of setting up for listservs I hardly check because Thunderbird frustratingly doesn’t notify when new messages come into folders other than the Inbox.
Via Boing Boing I found Life Hacks>, in the same vein as Google Hacks and Digital Photog Hacks from O’Reilly. Mr. Craphound (aka Cory Doctorow) went around to lots of Alpha geeks including my personal notables, JWZ and Ward Cunningham. I just did some googling and it looks like there was a previous edition of Life Hacks. fun. He should have linked to it too I think.

One of their hacks is use RSS and screen scraping to bring things to you. Wonder how much of this came from JWZ (see last week’s cheesegrater entry)
“He read from the cards and then threw them like shuriken into the audience” I heard about someone who did this in 2003 Western Senior Presentations via Mr. Duncan who judged it as kind of melodramatic. Was the Westerner copying with the idea that no one would *ever* notice? Ha, really makes me think. You wonder if you “borrow” something from the web or more generally, be it a web design, a few phrases from a billboard advertisment, ideas, or mannerisms, what are the odds someone will track it back to the source?
“Download your banking info and graph it” Considered doing this during finals week but not enough time, checked CPAN to see if US Bank had any script for scraping, they don’t although others do. I need to learn Perl/Python and I need projects to start on, I have time, I’ll probably do this. I wonder if I should just not learn Perl 5, considering 6 and do Python now. Not very familiar with these for all my linux use, meh.

Seb Paquet, another internet notable of mine who just keeps showing up with great things (he created the K5 ‘s Ko4ting
wiki which I quickly took to and added a much needed K5 article directory) also has a personal “thoughts” wiki. Mine is at wh.thadk.net. It’s great productivity wise, I think it should make the next Alpha geek Life Hacks.
Utilizing subdomains are another of my Life Hacks…wn.thadk.net goes directly to my notes page, wh.thadk.net/Subpage goes to a subpage of my homepage and wp.thadk.net/Subpage takes you to a subpage of my projects page: a particular project’s homepage, or generally wp.thadk.net takes you to the project index.

The added nimbility of Asterixes for lists and brackets for links sure beats this hard code html
I wish everyone could have 2 letter subdomains for their user pages on wikis. Makes it easy to sit down at any terminal and get cracking on work.
Of course, long ago I started my own todo.txt as well, which is still in more or less constant use for things that don’t really need to be on the wiki.

RSS wankery