BugMeNot is absolute genius.
If you don’t know what it is, imagine never having to register for a news site ever again.
Before it I would just stop whenever I hit the Washington Post or NYT registration pages.
FeedThing absolutely and utterly needs a “BugMeNot” button on its toolbar.
Note to self.
Dragging a link from a web page (not the address bar) to another application only works if the target application sets the drop effect to DROPEFFECT_LINK. DROPEFFECT_COPY does not cut it.
Google was unhelpfully silent on this matter. Hopefully from now on it won’t be.
Chad Dickerson via Scott Shuda via Dave Winer
InfoWorld.com now sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity at the top of every hour, presumably because most people configure their newsreaders to wake up at that time to pull their feeds. If I didn’t know how RSS worked, I would think we were being slammed by a bunch of zombies sitting on compromised home PCs. Our hourly RSS surge has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack, and although the requests are legitimate and small, the sheer number of requests in that short time period creates some aggravating scaling issues.
Scott and Dave proudly scan at odd times past the hour.
I scan no sooner than one hour after than the last time the feed was scanned. This means that if the aggregator starts up after a long period of inactivity, it immediately scans all the feeds. Thereafter it scans them an hour after that. If you get impatient and hit refresh before the hour is up, it won’t scan again until another hour has passed. The practical upshot is there is no guaranteed time past the hour that I scan, it is randomly distributed.
This is only scheme that makes sense to me. Scanning at sheduled times (particularly the top of the hour) is bad for servers and for consumers. As a server I don’t want to be hit all at once. As a consumer I want the news as soon as I can get it (subject to not flooding the server), not at some arbitrary time past the hour. I’m stunned that this is not how all aggregators work.