Tag Archives: content

Thoughts

Photography, take two, part five (finis)

I have completed the work of replacing photos hosted with third-party services. All of the photos that are published on my site are now hosted locally. If you’re not familiar with this effort, which took me a few months to complete, you might want to have a look at parts four, three, two and one. The main reason was to gain independence for my photographic content. Depending on third party services that might go down or go out of business for photos used in published articles is not the kind of strategy that can hold up in the long-term.

There were LOTS of posts I re-edited this time. Not only did replace the original images, but I also introduced new ones as well. This means that if you take the time to go through some of my old posts, you will see new photographs.

I’m not going to list all of the posts I modified. The list would be huge and it would dilute my message. Instead, I’m only going to point out the more significant ones. This post is the culmination of countless of hours of work. As a matter of fact, I’m going to have a little celebration. Enjoy!

If you’d like to see all of the posts that I modified in this last round of updates, just have a look through the Photography archives, and go all the way back to April 1st of 2007, starting from August 31st of 2007. Don’t worry, this is no April Fool’s joke…

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Thoughts

A few feed changes for my site

Birds of a feather…

The transfer of all my content from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com has gone smoother than expected, which is great. I’ve been monitoring the feed usage stats, and it looks like everyone has migrated over to the new feed. Just in case, please check your bookmarks and feeds, and correct them as follows, where appropriate:

All of my other feeds have stayed the same. Here they are:

Of course, all URLs are getting automatically redirected (with a 301 status) from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com. That’s been working great, although some people reported issues during the first few days. Thanks for letting me know about those!

If you’re linking to my site in your sidebar, could you do me a big favor and check to make sure you’re no longer linking to comeacross.info but to raoulpop.com? And if you’re not linking to me, would you please?

A big thank you goes out to FeedBurner for migrating my email subscribers and helping with the feed redirect!

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Events

Happy New Year!

Things were quite busy at our home as the New Year arrived. I was working on my site, transferring the content over from ComeAcross and making sure the feeds were pointing the right away. That was my New Year’s surprise, something that I’d planned to do for quite some time. I wanted to move all of my content from ComeAcross to my namesake domain. It’s now pretty much finished, minus a few details that still have to be worked out. By the way, I apologize for the double feed items that occurred overnight. I’ve straightened that out and it shouldn’t happen again.

We also found time to celebrate with a wonderful dinner prepared by Ligia, and a couple of movies. We watched “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), which was wonderful even for a second time, and “The Secret of NIMH” (1982) an animated movie which could have been much more entertaining, but was so stretched out that it was dull. Children might still enjoy it though, for its animation and colors, which were done quite well.

I leave you with a few photos. This was the last dawn of 2007.

Last sunrise of 2007

New Year’s wouldn’t be New Year’s without the celebratory sparkler.

Celebration

The clear sky allowed us a wonderful view of the New Year’s half moon. The photo is somewhat soft, and I apologize for that, but there was no way I could have gotten that close without the aid of the digital zoom on my trusty Olympus C770UZ (and as you may already know, digital zooms will make things softer).

Have a slice

Happy New Year! May this year bring you many blessings and good health!

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Thoughts

A few suggestions for FeedBurner

FeedBurnerI’m a very happy user of FeedBurner, the wonderful feed management service from Google. I’ve been using it since early 2006, and I log on multiple times every day to keep track of my feeds. I’d like to talk about some features and options that I’d love to see on the site.

Ability to splice multiple feeds without having to add them to a network or put them in FAN. I’d love to be able to have a single feed that combines all of my content, without having to go through what I’m going now, which is to create a feed network, add my own feeds to it, and burn that feed to a feed… I know there are other services on the web that do this, but I’d rather be able to do it through FeedBurner.

Ability to splice external feeds (ones not burned at FeedBurner), into a single FeedBurner feed. This would work sort of the way that Jaiku or TwitterFeed work, in the sense that I’d take my feeds with very few subscribers, like my Twitter feed or my Vimeo feed, and add them to my single feed without needing to “burn” them as separate feeds at FeedBurner, and having them show up under My Feeds. I’m not really interested in managing those feeds at this point — I just want to add them to my single feed.

Better revenue reporting from FAN (FeedBurner Ad Network). I never know how much I’m getting, because the figures are just approximations, and the pay is somehow always less than what’s indicated in the control panel. AdSense always reports my revenues correctly, Amazon does it too, but FeedBurner always leaves me wondering how much money I’m going to get. Maybe I just don’t know where to look, but believe me, I’ve looked all over the place. There’s only one place where revenues are reported centrally, and then there are ad revenues for each individual feed in FAN, and still I don’t know how much money I’m making with my feed ads.

Ability to “refresh” feed flares. Old feed flares display with old preferences, so I have a ton of flares showing up for older posts. I understand that they’re cached, and they have to stay cached, because it would be murder on a database if the flares would be constructed dynamically for every feed item, including the older ones… But I’d like to have a manual “refresh” function for the flares, that would let all of the old posts and old feed flares inherit the most recent settings for my feed flares.

Ability to separate feed flares from the ads. I’d like to display the feed flares at the top of my posts, for example, and the ads at the bottom. Right now they’re together and there’s no way to display them but right next to each other.

The SmartCast feature is a bit confusing. Either I’m the one that doesn’t get it, or it doesn’t quite work as advertised. Here’s what it says on the site:

“Makes podcasting easy in feeds that normally cannot support it. Link to MP3s, videos, images, and other digital media in your site content and SmartCast creates enclosures for them automatically. Optionally adds elements required for a richer, more detailed listing in iTunes Podcast Directory and sites using Yahoo Media RSS.”

When I took my podcast feed, which is a simple category feed from my blog, and turned on the SmartCast option, enclosures for the media files linked from each post weren’t turned into enclosures. The iTunes elements were added to the feed, but it still didn’t become a feed that I could subscribe to from iTunes, so I gave up on it.

Now, a little more than a month since my last podcast, I see that I can subscribe to that feed in iTunes, and the podcast downloads just fine. But only the last item shows up instead of every single episode, or at least the last 10 feed items, which is the standard. Why? And why didn’t it work when I first turned on SmartCast for this feed? I can’t help but be confused by this. SmartCast can be a very elegant and easy way to turn a normal feed into a podcast feed, but it looks like it still needs some work.

Photo Splicer only works with the Flickr ID. The Photo Splicer option says I can put in either my Flickr user ID or my screen name, but it really only works with the User ID, which is annoyingly hard to find on Flickr. It would be nice if the User ID would be automatically looked up if I entered my screen name.

I know the FeedBurner folks will read this. They’re very conscientious and follow up on these things. I don’t want special treatment, but it would be very nice if they could consider my feature requests and see what can be done. FeedBurner has my thanks for a wonderful service!

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How To

Do not allow websites to resize your browser window

Websites that resize my browser’s window or maximize it are completely annoying. When someone does that to me, no matter how interesting their content may be, I go somewhere else instantly. Fortunately, there’s a way to block anyone from messing with my browser windows or tabs in Firefox. Here’s how to do it:

First, go to Tools >> Options, then click on the Content icon in that dialog box. It should look like this:

Firefox content options

Now click on the Advanced button next to the “Enable JavaScript” checkbox. You’ll get the following dialog box:

Firefox advanced javascript settings

Make sure to uncheck the following options:

  • Move or resize existing windows
  • Raise or lower windows

Click on the OK button twice to save the changes, and then you’re done. This will disallow any website to adjust the size of your browser window. It’s a great way to make sure your browsing experience stays yours.

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