Rodent Regatta

For those who don’t check often, Firefox 1.5 is now available for download. Take a look at the release notes to see what’s new.

In the discussion forums for TextDrive I mentioned that I’d be willing to work the mailroom for a company like Joyent/TextDrive. It’s true. There is simply no doubt in my mind that for the masses who try to configure their home wifi routers or move everything from the old PC to the new one, Joyent is a better way. For those who operate a small business and try to keep their copies of Outlook populated with data from Quickbooks Pro, Joyent is better.

Extend the notion to web sites, hosting, shared files and the need to keep regular backups and the Strongspace, TextDrive and Joyent approaches are far superior. Web-based applications will offer lower life-cycle costs and greater benefits than client-server apps installed on customer-owned (and administered) servers.

One of these days there is going to be a way to launch a company completely on line. Some blend of applications like NetSuite and Joyent and Strongspace is going to be installable with a web-based form that triggers all of the integration small businesses need so badly.

The talk about TextDrive and Joyent fuels the roaring fire that is AJAX and Ruby on Rails. Yet, it takes an application like this one by Andrew Sutherland to really demonstrate what a new direction web apps are taking. Click on an element. Notice the additional links. Expand the level of detail just under the title. Amazing.

Few things in the technology arena have interested me as much these past few months as the development of TextDrive. Watching and using their offers of lifetime hosting accounts, their team development and their handling of technology and projects—well, it’s all been quite fascinating. It’s amazing timing given the direction things are taking on the web.

Today, TextDrive is a Joyent company. The press release is here. If you are young and technically skilled, I doubt you’ll find many opportunities that are as expansive as what I see ahead for Joyent/TextDrive et al. If you’re old and technically inclined, crawl up in the stands and be a spectator. This is going to be a great show!

Everyone’s talking about RSS. Some mean Atom. Some mean 0.92. Some mean 2.0. Then, there’s the whole notion of feeding on these feeds with a feed reader.

Textpattern is wrestling with the proper production of feeds as a standard feature of the software.

I used the test files provided in the Textpattern support forum and subscribed to them using FeedDemon 1.6.0.11RC2. A screen in FeedDemon looks like this after the subscription.

What needs to happen now? Here’s a portion of an email discussing the subject:

It looks like, in the list, FeedDemon is displaying the exact contents of the feed items, without any HTML entity decoding. On the right hand side, it’s displaying the HTML source. I’ve no idea why, other than that the RSS spec in particular doesn’t explain how HTML should be encoded and decoded. The Atom feeds are definitely done right, so this could be a FD problem.

The bottom line boils down to whether or not the test files are somehow wrong or whether FeedDemon’s current release candidate is handling them wrong. If Nick reads this, perhaps he can take a look for the benefit of Textpattern and FeedDemon users everywhere. Better still, if you’re a RSS genius, give the folks at Textpattern and/or FeedDemon some help. Me? I’m just the messenger.