WordPrss – Subscribing to feeds is done

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I’ve been plugging away at WordPrss on hacknights and subway rides and I have some progress to show for it.

I can show a feed, and shortcut keys help you navigate backwards and forwards through them. Clicking on a feed marks it as read. By default we hide read items, but you can always show them if you want.

You can manage the details of individual feeds – you can rename them etc.

Adding new feeds works and while I was at it I put in feed autodiscovery. Say you want to subscribe to a site but you just have the URL for the site.

Wordprss will do its best to figure out what feeds the site offers.

Choose one and away you go!

Now that this bit is done I’ll be working on getting the updating to work properly. Soon I’ll be ready to install it up on a server. Just got to sort through security and make sure the upgrade process is sorted…

Are all games stupid?

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Hit play, and start reading.

This piece from the NY Times about stupid games really rung a bell in my head:

Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.

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Save Crush3r – an open letter to Ericson de Jesus

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Hi Ericson,
Crusher was my favorite invite service.  I used it once or twice a year for my parties and thought it was just dandy.  I want to avoid big services because I didn’t like the way they were monetizing me and my friends. They felt gross.

I am an open source developer.  Not a great one, but a persistent one. If you are shutting down crusher and you don’t have a way to make enough money off it to support it, why not get some credit for what you made? If you want to make it an open source offering from Particle, that would be awesome.  If, instead, you’d like some help, I’d be willing to offer some hours from my side to open source it and make it easier for other folks to self-host and contribute.

I think it would be a shame if the great work you did just went poof!  I’m willing to chip in some effort to make this usable to lots of other folks.  If you can’t open source it, I’d love any advice or patterns you can suggest if I want to take this on as a project after I finish up Wordprss – an feed reader for wordpress. I’d like to have an easy evite alternative that I can self host and trust with my friend’s info.

So I’d love to hear from you – any thoughts on how to do this?

Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., and the Humble Bundle

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This is an awesome time to be alive. Everything keeps changing. I remember when it was common knowledge that you had to cripple the movies and games you sold to keep people from copying them.

These days, that old myth is falling apart and people are realizing that alot of that was a pricing issue. Louis C.K. took a chance on his fans and sold them 100% DRM free comedy at $5 a pop.  His fans made him a million in 12 days, because he is genuine and treated them like people.

The Humble Indie Bundle was a crazy idea that you could offer fans 100% uncrippled games for windows, mac and linux – and let the fans pay whatever they want. They also let fans decide where the money goes – to the developers or to a charity!  They stomped it, raising buckets of cash for the developers / the Child’s Play charity,  and have gone on to release many more of these, now including Android versions as well.  Sadly, Apple’s rules prevent the team from offering iPhone games.

Now Azis Ansari is offering the same deal Louis CK offered: Stream or download a 100% DRM free HD video of Aziz Ansari’s latest comedy set – for just $5.