(Yes, I know the article’s a month old — I’m clearing out old items, give me a break).
Category: Interesting
Did MySpace Kill Their Blog RSS Feeds?
Like it or not, we have a bunch of bloggers locally who are using MySpace for their blogs. Just look for the MySpace icons over at BendBlogs.com. The problem is that every single one of the RSS feeds for those MySpace blogs are now dead. I’m getting 404 errors for every single one of them that I have indexed on BendBlogs.com.
I have automated Google searches that help me find new blogs to add to the site, and it found this one. When I tried to add it to Bend Blogs, it gave me an error saying that the RSS feed couldn’t be found. So I looked at the source code for the page, looked at the auto-discovery tag and got this URL. It doesn’t resolve, and I get this 404 page:
That was the entire contents of the page. And it’s been like this for a couple weeks now.
Anybody know something I don’t? Since I don’t follow MySpace news (don’t really care to), I don’t know if this was publically announced or not. If indeed MySpace blogs no longer have RSS feeds for their blogs, look for them to disappear from Bend Blogs (which everybody will probably be happy about).
Video Dump
Some videos for you all to enjoy. Mostly so I don’t have them sitting in my inbox anymore…(videos after the jump).
Random Science
A few interesting stories for science/number/research geeks:
- How fat would you have to be to stop a bullet?
- How many countries have not adopted the metric system? Only three (full Wikipedia).
- 1000 fluorescent tube lights powered by low overhead power lines.
- How many licks does it take to get to the center of the Internet?
- Modify a $5 flashlight into a $95 one.
- Our sun is big, but is nothing compared to other stars.
- Science vs. Faith flow charts (sorry, had to throw some comedy in here).
- MySpace and Facebook mirror class divisions in US society (Fixed with correct link this time).
- Amazing trick on your eyes.
I’m Sure You’ve Already Heard About This, But…
I’m sure you’ve all heard all about Google Maps new zoom feature that brings thing down to street level. And people are already finding all sorts of fun stuff with it. Boing Boing, as usual, is all over it, with great debate, odd images, one of the vehicles behind it, and a new word: screwgled. They also ask if people’s opinion would be different if this were a government group doing this? And there’s one EFF attorney who always seems to be spotted on these things.
The Google Operating System also dives into the privacy issues surrounding this.
In some other random Google news from the Google Operating System blog (can you tell I’m trying to clear links out here?), you can use Google Maps to find directions that avoid Interstate highways. You can also restrict Google Image searches to strict categories like faces.
And, lastly, if you ever plan on going to Disney World, have this Google Map bookmarked on your laptop.
Random Link Dump
These are mostly just for my future reference and/or they don’t need a full blog entry. If there’s something that interests you here, enjoy, but I’ve got to get these out of my “to blog” folder so we can get on with the fun stuff:
- Start page showdown, with Netvibes (which I need to try) coming out on top.
- Apachetop, for monitoring Apache in realtime.
- Stupidly fast disk defragmentation.
- Control multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse (though it doesn’t get rid of monitors, so KVMs are still more useful).
- Sharing big files fast (and I’m sure these are use entirely for lawful purposes).
- 7 Great Things Built on the digg API (I personally think this is the most useful).
- URLSnooper, a program written to help users locate the urls of audio and video files so that they can be recorded.
- Handy .htaccess generator.
- Using DynDNS as a laptop LoJack (be sure to combine that with LaptopLock).
- Things you can do in Linux but not in Windows.
- Mounting Wikipedia as a filesystem.
- Turning off that “Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch” error in Firefox (and there are some legit reasons to turn this off, if you know what you’re doing).
- Power management with group policies in Active Directory.
- Linux for the creative set.
- People are begging to have their computers infected.
- Foxmarks: Cool tool for synchronizing Firefox bookmarks among systems.
- Become your own ISP.
- 101 Blogging Resources.
- Writing the perfect resignation letter.
- Firefox extensions for bloggers.
- Force Terminal Services to disconnect clients when idle.
That’s all for now. Once I get all caught up, I’ll post more entertaining entries.
It May Be “The No Spin Zone”…
…but according to Indiana University researchers, Bill OReilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night. Full story, which doesn’t surpise me at all. And given his feelings for university professors, my guess is these IU guys will get called names next.