RSS aggregators are everywhere, and I’ve used most of them. Eventually I settled on Feeddemon by the always excellent Nick Bradbury. It’s a great piece of software written by a guy who honestly cares about making great tools. But I stopped using it. Why, because as great as it is, it’s just another something I have to launch. That means I have to remember I want to read my feeds, then launch yet another app on my already cluttered desktop. It’s a small thing, but it’s big enough to stop me from doing it.

A few folks recommended Bloglines. This worked for me because it was in my browser, which is always running. It’s always right there so it gets used, never mind the fact that it’s a clunky web interface that nowhere near matched FeedDemon’s GUI. Strange how that works. Eventually after adding a hundred or so feeds, that web interface just couldn’t hold up so I went looking again. That’s when I found Sage. It’s a Firefox extension that uses the bookmark manager to organize your feeds. This gives me both the easy and familiar user interface - bookmarks, along with the immediate and constant availability of a browser-based system. It’s a bit buggy yet, but it’s already my default aggregator. Once again, simple and convenient trumps fancy and complex. At least for now.

I love the fact that in Firefox I can change the font size, even those set using pixels, by simply hitting Control-plus or Control-minus. Given the trend to use microscopic fonts because they look better when you’re putting a bunch of letters together to form words and such, the ole ctrl-+ is handy. The trouble in Firefox is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to reset fonts to their “normal” size. It’s been there all along. Just use Control-0 (zero).

[via Phil Rignalda]

Flickr is officially the coolest thing ever. I just spent a few minutes tinkering with the API and it’s dead simple to deal with. The list of photos typically over on the right there is generated from a Javascript call and it works pretty well. For fun I thought I’d try generating the list myself using PHP. The result (after about 10 whole minutes, which includes finding and reading the API docs) is displayed over there also, but below the others. Those are images with the tag “jess”. They’re not linked or anything, but they certainly could be.

Using PHP 5’s SimpleXML extension, the code looks basically like this…

<code>
// Build URL for REST call first (not shown)
$xmlstr = file_get_contents($RESTURL);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($xmlstr);
echo '<div style="margin:10px;">';
foreach($xml->xpath('//photo') as $photo)
{
echo '<img style="margin: 2px;border: 1px solid black;"
echo ' src="http://flickr.com/photos/' . $photo['id'];
echo '_' . $user_id . '_s.jpg" />' . '<br />';
}
echo '</div>';
</code>

Update: I removed the test images, in case you’re wondering.

By “designer conversations” I mean conversations that a designer has on any typical day with any number of “other people.” Here is the Design by Fire post

My favorite: “If you use that design, you’ll increase your boring quotient by 50%.”

I hate talking on my cellphone. There’s no way to hold it to my ear using my shoulder, like a normal phone. There’s no way I’m using one of those gay (sorry, but they are) headsets. Well, I may have found the answer: POKIA, retro phone of the future

I’ve had a few people comment lately that I seem a little off. Not unhappy exactly, just a bit more off than usual. It’s almost as if the grumpy act I tend to put on is not as much an act as at was.

I don’t feel crabby, but I suspect that I might just be a little crabby. To those affected by this, I apologize. It’s just a phase. I’m sure of it.

I love allrecipes.com. Find some recipes, add them to my “recipe box.” When I’m ready to shop I just add the recipes I want to my shopping list and print it. If anyone knows of other similar recipe sites I’d like to hear about them.

Boy, if I were an artsy counter-culture wannabe poseur with nothing better to do, I would definitely have gone to Burning Man.

I probably just don’t get it. Yeah, that’s it.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Netflix could deliver rental movies directly from your queue to your TiVo? Seems both companies agree, and according to this msnbc article, that’s exactly what they plan to do.

Does anyone know why the “Ads by Google” text on many sites has suddenly stretched to “Ads by Goooooooooooogle”?