onfocus

In case you haven't heard, Google bought Pyra—the makers of Blogger. (I joined Pyra a few months after Ev and Meg founded it and was there for about two years.) I think this is a good turn of events for everyone who believed and invested in Pyra/Blogger in the early days. (Anyone close to the company has had a bit of a rough ride with ups and downs.) And it feels good personally to see something I believed in and worked hard for enter a new phase with a company like Google. Sometimes I wish I could still be involved with Blogger's development, but life never goes according to plan. We always had fun anthropomorphizing the application—and this feels like Blogger's graduation.

I think reversible.org could add some order to the chaos by using the first two levels of the DMOZ category hierarchy (or a simplified version of it) from the top-level page. It's a very fun idea, and I hope it becomes a well-used resource.

Even after they're captured, terrorists can terrorize. [via Anil]

The only time the cat is interested in TV...

I like sending photos to reversible.

It's amazing to me that there is a whole group of people out there who are building their own submarines. This site is filled with plans, photos, stories, news and general personal-submarine talk. They even have an Open Source Submarine project to design the ideal personal submersible as a group.

The secret behind Amazon Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering. [via Erik Benson]

The Academy Awards got something right? Bowling for Columbine is up for best documentary.

Feeder 0.1

In my continuing quest to prove you can do more with Windows scripts than nightly file backups, I wrote a simple RSS reader with WSH. It stores a list of feeds in a tab-delimited file, and grabs/transforms them on the fly with the MS-XML-parser and an XSL stylesheet. It will only work on Windows 2000 or XP, and you probably need the latest parser (4.0) and latest Scripting Host (5.6). (If you're using IE 6, most likely you already have these installed.) It might work with earlier versions anyway, though. It's extremely simple and doesn't have any features beyond adding/removing feeds and reading them as HTML. I wrote it for my own use and figured someone else might like it too. I got a huge head-start on the all-RSS-flavors XSL file at this page.

Download: Feeder 0.1 (Alpha)

To install just download the zip, create a folder at c:\feeder\, and unzip the contents to that directory. Double-click feeder.vbs, and you should be off and running. If you want to change the install location, just edit the first few lines of feeder.vbs to match your setup.

Beautiful macro flower photos. I can't wait for spring.

As I mentioned a few days ago, the default snapGallery design wasn't displaying properly on a Mac. After playing around with different solutions, I decided to go back to using tables and standard HTML. It's the only way to vertically center content across platforms. bummer. (Thanks again to Brian and Dave for helping out this Mac-challenged developer.) So the latest Mac-friendlier version is now available to download.