I’ve been running Philly Future using WordPress and feed on feeds for a while now. It has its positives and negatives.

I’m debating migrating the whole thing to CivicSpace for various reasons. You can take a peek at the what it might look like.

Shelley has the goods on the next WordPress release. Makes my decision more difficult. Hmmmm…

When I get the chance, I’ll post some details here about the decision and my experience making the switch if I do.

You can grab it at SourceForge. A peek into my work: I’m using this library for a project I’m working on for future release. Another peak into my work: have you seen preview.comcast.net?

I don’t mention work here much that much since I don’t have permission – or lack of permission – from my employer. A great deal of the work I do is business sensitive and can involve third parties like Disney. But I don’t think they would mind if I hype something I’ve worked on recently that absorbed every last second of my free time:

If you are a Comcast internet subscriber with children you should try our Disney Connection. Lots of Disney provided videos, games and activities. It’s fun 🙂

Now here is an interesting set of RSS feeds. Feedster.tv offers just a peek at what’s coming.

Finding and subscribing to RSS feeds is a bit of a hurdle for some folks. This solution makes it easy:

1. Use Firefox as your browser.
2. Use bloglines as your news aggregator.
3. Install the Livelines browser extension and configure it to add RSS feeds to Bloglines.
4. Whenever you are browsing a site that has an associated RSS feed (if its site maintainer has followed standard practices for publishing RSS feeds), you will see in Firefox’s lower right hand corner a Live Bookmarks icon. Click and choose the latest version of the feed that that site is publishing.
5. Bloglines will then ask you how you want the feed organized on your personalized page there.

Bingo – all done. No more “find RSS URI and copy, go to some form and paste, process.

Awfully nice of Google to provide Firefox wtih a new start page. And suspicious as well.

Get yr Firefox 1.0 here.

Corporate Fear.

Fear of being different. Fear of telling your boss your ideas. Fear of speaking up in meetings. Fear of going up to someone you don’t know and introducing yourself. Fear of doing something that might destroy your career.

Fear of weblogging.

It’s time we get over our fears.

I meet a lot of people around the industry. Almost everytime I meet someone, I ask them “do you have a weblog?” That’s my way of saying “I like you and want to hear more of your ideas.” Even deeper: I want a permanent relationship with you (and not of the sexual kind, either).

I’ve asked this question of people at Apple. Google. IBM. eBay. Real Networks. Cisco. Intel. HP. Amazon. And, yes, here at Microsoft.

Too often the answer is “I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because I might get fired,” is often the answer. I hate that answer. It’s an example of corporate fear. An artifact of a management system that doesn’t empower its employees to act on behalf of customers.

I find this fear disturbing. Imagine being a flight attendant with this kind of fear. “Sorry, I can’t talk to the passengers in this plane today cause I might get fired.”

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger: 10/19/2004

Sure, you want your readers to read your stuff, and you want your site to be well visited. But if that’s your main goal, you’re missing the – er – point. Editors should not be worried about whether their content can “bring people to our site” – that’s simply not a realistic approach anymore. The goal is to make content that is worth pointing to. If you’re feeding the conversation, as I said in my post, the rest will then follow.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: 10/20/2004

Shelley explains the project and its goals. I got a feeling the Wiki is going to be a true resource down the line. I’m hoping to contribute myself, and since Shelley chose to employ a Wiki, it should be easy for anybody with something to add to get involved.

FTP: FileZilla hasn’t let me down when I need a FTP client on my Windows box. It includes SFTP and a FTP server as well that I haven’t needed yet but are nice to know are there.

BitTorrent: Azureus is a cross platform (Java) client that makes using BitTorrent as easy as can be, with feedback and simple management functions.

Details and discussion at The ServerSide.com. This is huge news for rich internet application developers. I can’t wait to see what is built with this.

If you are Java developer and are wondering how this applies to you this post might help.