The Budget in Oreo Cookies

Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry's fame, has done a brilliant Flash video for TrueMajority, a political advocacy organization. It discusses the budget situation in terms of Oreo cookie stacks, and presents some very good arguments for shifting just a little money (only a few cookies) from our &$#*% military budget over to education, children's healthcare, and alternative energy. Good job Ben. And your Cherry Garcia ain't half bad either ;)

My Yahoo Supports RSS

I just set up My Yahoo to read Scripting News and another RSS feeds. This is really cool and RSS is certainly main stream. It won't read Atom feeds, so this blog is not readable.

Atom on Blogger

Well, I'm sad to say Blogger only support Atom and not RSS. Old timers of Blogger Pro apparently get RSS and Atom.

Need to start working on that Atom<=>RSS translator. Or find it already on the web....

...but FeedReader won't read the file. Sucks.

Proposed change to FeedDemon

Nick Bradbury is suggesting a change to how FeedDemon accepts Atom feeds. He is proposing to be less strict. However, I don't think it closes the feedback loop very well. My comments:

I think you need to close the loop on this malformed feeds.

First, in preferences you should be able to say as a user if you will accept bad feeds. If you don't want them, then the old pop-up works fine. If you are willing to accept bad feeds, the the approach on a single pop up when subscribing is fine.

The reason I like this approach is that the author will know that they will lose some number of subscribers if their feeds are bad. This add incentive to make good feeds.

Second, to completely close the loop, the author needs to know. I suggest including the author's email address in the pop up so as a user I can immediately let the author know that I don't appreciate bad feeds. This will be real incentive.

Michael Moore Thanks Deaniacs

I could not have said it better. I'm not convinced a senator can be a good President, so Dean and Clark?

Bletter Featured at Users Group

Earlier this week I gave a presentation on Bletter to WAMMO. Stuff is up on their site and I posted the presentation. I try not to do Power Point, so this one uses HTML from HEMS.