Feeding Our Reading Habits, a long and fascinating article by Alex Kessinger, whom I know as @voidfiles on app.net, set me thinking, as it was surely intended to do. Ostensibly about RSS readers, one of the least understood and most useful tools of the internet, the article is also about how and why an RSS reader can be a good thing, and in the course of settting out a draft manifesto for a new kind of RSS reader, Alex discusses some of the things readers ought to be able to do, and some of the things you ought to be able to do with them.
I'm not going to attempt to summarise those points; if you've come this far, you owe it to yourself to go and read the article in full. Instead, here are the thoughts it provoked in me.
I'm no expert, I admit that. I know enough to be dangerous. But I also know enough to know when I'm being taken for a ride. So my current hosting provider, Gandi, gives me all sorts of grief about what really ought to be a very simple instance of WordPress. I decided to move to Linode. But it really does assume an awful lot of knowledge. After two mornings inching forward, following instructions to the letter, except when they don't work and then I have to improvise, I've reached the stage where I think I have a working server.
The long-awaited paperless office recedes ever more quickly, at least in most official offices. Here in the home office, however, my printer has sat idle for more than a year, probably because printing at the office has been available. But last week, I needed to print. Usual problems. Ink past its sell-by date. 1 All of them. Then discover I don’t have a full set of replacements. Order them, and wait for them to arrive. Pull out the old ones, stick in the new ones, throw the old ones in the bin. Discover that the new cartridges are of the wrong region.
Back before there were blogs (honest; I promise this is true) my little company website had a kind of diary of newsletters, updated roughly once a month, and delivered by hard-coded HTML tables. It looked, I fancied, a little like an index card file 1 with little tabs at the top for the various d...
Technology has not been kind to me today. But people have been great. So I’m going to try and focus on that, and ignore the awfulness that is my printer and the rubbish “service” that my other blogging platform and server are delivering. If I could, I’d migrate that one to Octopress too, as I hav...
