self-indulgence

Pardon me, but it's been a while since I've written a post of miscellaneous ramblings simply to indulge myself. But if you promise to keep reading, I'll promise to try and make it interesting.

I gave the tradedesk execs the following quote at work the other day and I think it applies beautifully to what I'm about to talk about: "if I could (develop the widget you just requested) quickly, I wouldn't be working here; I'd be working at google." google labs has a product in beta called google reader, which is a web application that will consolidate any rss-enabled web sie te for you. If you don't know what rss is, I could describe it as saying it is about as underrated as myspace is overrated, and has much more potential. You're thinking, "fine steve, so what is it?" It's a standard for syndicating the content of frequently-updated web sites. You're thinking, "fine steve, so what is it?" Well, if you are reading this on my tursi.com web site, you're actually reading an "rss feed" of a blog I have at livejournal.com. I actually write it on livejournal's site, add to the journal there, and my site here is instantly updated - and you can read the update just as if you were reading my blog at livejournal.com. But nothing chaged at tursi.com - nothing was uploaded to my server via ftp or any other method. Instead, every time you type in my web address, the server goes and finds my livejournal rss feede and displays it here.


Pretty cool, eh? Well, let's take it a step further - let's say you visit a bunch of web sites every day, and those sites have rss feeds. Wouldn't it be great if the content from those sites were automatically uploaded to a single web site, so you can go and read every site you visit without clicking through 15 sites? And what if this collective web site displayed and played all the media contained in those sites - whether it be video/audio/flash/whatever? What if this collective web site knew which content you already read and displayed only new stuff?

All of that is in google reader. It's an amazing piece of software that does all of the above and a lot more.

You should definitely go check it out.. The url is http://reader.google.com. In a future post, I'm going to show you how to add this site to your reader.

By the way, google reader isn't the only rss feed reader out there.. But it does have the potential to give rss the notoriety it deserves.

In other news...
Trinity softball - found out today that we're the last undefeated team in theleague of 16. Both of the other teams lost yesterday, one of them to us. We're alone in first place!