Tubejumper

I’ve been making tons of updates to my RSS Reader but I’ve been very lax in updating on this blog. So here’s a Flickr Slideshow of the work as it stands.

I’ve annotated the screenshots on Flickr. You can view those here RSS Reader Set

This was the first idea I had when I saw the mini-window real-time friendfeed. It moves the main content of twitter over a bit and puts a friendfeed window on the left. I also got it to put a search bar over the home section.

Get it here, friendfeed_on_twitter.user.js

Here’s just the search bar script, twitter_search.user.js

I also found out that Friendfeed updated their api with a way to query for a url. So i built a greasemonkey script to add a link to friendfeed on every url. I couldn’t figure out how to put the icon after the link and javascript isn’t something I’m an expert at. So far the url search only works via the api and not on the search part of Friendfeed, so the icon opens a window with the xml output of the api call. I fix this when you can search for a url on the main Friendfeed interface.

Get it here, friendfeed_link_on_twitt.user.js

Be kind these are the first greasemonkey scripts I’ve made.

I ran across the need to decrypt some stored procedures. I’m writing an interface to a large enterprise application that the company I work for makes. I just want to see the stored procedure code so I could understand what it was doing. Everytime I asked for access to the source code it was like I was asking for emails from the white house. Finally I figured I would just have to go it alone.

So after about 5 minutes of surfing and passing by shareware products, I came across this url, Decrypt encrypted stored procedures.

I took the stored procedure and turned it into a script that would automatically decrypt the stored procedures in a database. One thing this can’t handle is decrypting stored procedures that are > 4000 characters, since they take up more the 1 row in syscomments. So for me I was able to decrypt about half of the 1300 stored procedures this application uses. Also about half the decrypted stored procedures were recreated under the id I was running the script with rather then dbo.

The logic is pretty simple to follow so I think I might spend some time and build a .net app to decrypt the stored procedures that are > 4000 characters. Don’t hold your breath though, with the stored procedures I decrypted and profiler I was figure out what I needed to figure out.

Download: decrypt.vbs

I’ve found that there are just a ton of articles that I can’t really read. I took a look at the older unread articles and most are either not that interesting to me or about something I already read. I figure those articles can just go away and I’ll never know or care, so I built in articles fading.

I’ve added an integer field to my feeds table so I can individually define the time to live for the articles in each feed or 0 for forever. I also added a field to each article to flag if it was faded or not for reporting.

Now a script runs nightly to fade articles and keep my unread list trimmed down. This keeps me from having to check feeds with a large number of unread articles and manually clearing them out.

I’m about half way through setting up a new feature called bundles on my rss reader. I’ve found that following rss via tags is a pretty good way to go but sometimes I’m doing research on an overarching topic and I need a something to bring it all together.

As it stands now a bundle is a group of tags and feeds that have some common focus. I’ve got one for mobile that includes feeds from wapreview, MobileCrunch, SMS Text News and a few others, plus the tags: mobile, phone, verizon, sprint, tmobile, sms, smartphone and a few others. This way I can follow the mobile industry not just via mobile focused blogs, but also articles that are tagged with a mobile focus.

As long as the bundles stay under 50 articles a river style reading will do fine. If the bundles consistantly have more the 50 articles then I may have to include a secondary grouping structure probably in the form of a tag cloud.

Until I get the time to create a new video, I’ll just update pieces.
This is the side navigation for my media.home application as it pertains to my news reader.

Tag Cloud - This opens a tag cloud that shows the current tags associated with unread articles. After I’m finished reading the articles directly associated with a chosen tag, I’m prompted to search the rest of the unread articles for that tag in their title. This is useful for tags like Microsoft or Google but not so much for tags like product profiles used by techcrunch or daily trivia.

Feed List - This shows a list of all the feeds that have a weight greater then 1 or have 5+ articles. With 100 feeds showing them all is to long a list so it’s geared towards the ones I want to hear from the most. I also have special feeds for articles that have diggs and for articles flagged as Techmeme.

Latest - This ones pretty simple and shows articles with the latest at the top.

Oldest - Same as latest but with the oldest at the top.

Review - List of the articles flagged for review.

Recent - Most recent articles read in reverse chronological order. Helps when I accidently mark something read.

Search - Can search the title of the article with the option of including the articles body also.

Admin - Used to manage feeds and some basic reporting.

Here’s what each article looks like in my reader. Here a list of the sections as shown on the left of the image.

Title & Link - Article title and the link clicks through a tracking page that logs the followed links.

Actions - More info on this below.

Action Display - This area is normally hidden unless an action is clicked that needs additional input.

Text - Body of the post.

Metadata - Additional data in this order now: Weight, Diggs and Techmeme flag.

Favicon - This is the favicon pulled from the blog.

Favorite - Marks it for long time storage. Used for posts like how-to’s or as a reference.

Mark Read - Marks the article read and longs time for usage reporting.

Review - Flags the article for later. Used when I don’t have time to fully read so I can get back to it. Main difference between this and favorite is that these are just flagged until I get a chance to really read the article.

Email - Right now hooked up to gmail so I can send an article to a friend.

del.icio.us - This brings up the del.icio.us interface with link and title prepopulated.

Blog it - This displays a small textbox for me to enter in 120 characters of text which posts to twitter, tumlbr and jaiku. It’s 120 characters because I reserve 20 for the tinyurl automatically inserted into post. Examples: http://twitter.com/smilbandit

Info - I haven’t figured out what I want to do with this yet. I know I want to be able to link to a source of additional data for this post but I’m not sure what that is yet.

Tags - Pulls up the tags associated with this article.

Long time since my last update. Since then I’ve added Techmeme into my information sources. I was temped to include the firehose feed but thought better of it. Instead I use the information from Techmeme and flag any article that is on Techmeme. This flag is used to pump up the weight of an article and enhance the weight of the tags associated to that article.

This makes it so that I’m not contributing to my RSS fatigue but helps notify of that something that normally will read has some importance.

This post mimics my thoughts on why I wanted to include Techmeme but not something like the firehose feed.
Why I Read Techmeme via A VC

I’ve added digg stats to the unread articles.  The thought is to crowd source the articles that are weighted low on my personal schema but dug alot.  Eventually I don’t want to feel that I need to read every article.  By using digg stats I’ll know that the more talked about posts will be brought to my attention and should help with discovering content that is outside what I might normally read.

Right now I have the query engine for digg stats down to about one hour or so for 200 articles, most come back with no diggs.  It will run every three hours right now but probably with my reading habits it will only need to run twice aday since it’s function is ancillary to the main function.

I’ll probably add additional sources like reddit, del.icio.us or maybe techmeme if I figure how to plug into it.

Finally got a chance to do a screen capture of the RSS Reader i’m working on.  Enjoy…