Category: Web/Tech

Why did I avoid zefrank?

Published on by Nick Bradbury3 Comments

I admit it: despite being a geek myself, I tend to ignore anything that geeks are suddenly going crazy over. So when I kept hearing great things about The Show with zefrank, I did my usual contrarian thing and ignored it.

Wow, what a mistake that was.

Last night I gave in and watched a bunch of episodes, and holy crap is zefrank funny (and even poignant). I definitely have to make it easier to view stuff like this in FeedDemon.

WinINet Bug Fixed

Published on by Nick Bradbury10 Comments

Remember that WinINet bug I blogged about last month? Microsoft’s David Pow left a comment stating that it’s fixed, and the fix should be included in the final IE7 release, and most likely in Vista RC1 as well. This bug was causing a lot of problems for FeedDemon customers, so I’ll be very glad to see it fixed.

Now, given that the bug is an obscure one, it might seem strange that it affected so many FeedDemon customers. Here’s why: the bug was triggered after connecting to a web server that uses chunked encoding and the server abruptly closes the connection. Turns out that Eric Meyer’s server was doing this for a while, and one of his feeds is included in FeedDemon’s default subscriptions (in the “Web Authoring” category). So the bug affected FeedDemon customers who stuck with the default subscriptions – in other words, a lot of people. Eric’s server is now acting correctly, so problem reports related to this bug have pretty much dried up.

Hello, Gnomedex!

Published on by Nick Bradbury1 Comment

OK, I’m not actually at Gnomedex (here’s why), but I still want to send my greetings to everyone there. I’ve attended Gnomedex several times, and I learned a lot each time (it’s where I first heard about podcasting and attention, for starters).

And if you’re there and happen to see a guy named Jack Brewster, stop and say hello. He works for NewsGator, and chances are you’ve been helped by him if you use one of our products. If you don’t know what Jack looks like, take a gander at his new son. Jack looks almost exactly like him, albeit with slightly less hair :)

NewsGator Platform Roadmap (2006)

Published on by Nick Bradbury3 Comments

This week NewsGator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker posted a two-part overview of our company’s roadmap. Part I provides the necessary background for part II, which talks about where we’re going in the near future.

It’s an ambitious roadmap – but so was the one he posted in 2005, and our company has met every one of the stated goals (along with a few more). It’s going to be a fun and challenging year as we cross the next chasm.

Digital Identity Newbie

Published on by Nick Bradbury1 Comment

I haven’t focused too much on digital identity, but I’ve been paying more attention to it lately. I don’t know enough yet to post an opinion on the subject, but here are some recent posts about identity that I’ve enjoyed:

Start Coding Like a Cowboy

Published on by Nick Bradbury16 Comments

Given that I’ve been blogging since 2002, you’d think I would’ve written about software development many times. As it stands, though, I’ve written very few posts about programming. I think a big reason for this is because when I’m coding away like a madman, I don’t blog (or do much of anything else!) – and when I’m not coding, I don’t feel like writing about it.

But I’m in the middle of another coding frenzy right now, and this time I’m going to open the kimono by talking about a “memetracker” feature I’m considering for a future version of FeedDemon (screenshot). I enjoy memetrackers like Tailrank and Techmeme because they let me know what people are talking about, but I’d like to have a memetracker that looks only in feeds I’m subscribed to in FeedDemon. Not only would this inform me about popular topics, but it would also let me read multiple posts about the same topic at once so I don’t have to read them one-at-a-time as I come across them.

So, given that I’m supposed to be a seasoned, old school programmer, you probably think that I first sketched out some ideas for how this feature should work, and then followed some sort of formal design process before coding it.

Nope. I went straight to coding. No design. No plan. No nothing.

Now, before you label me a cowboy coder, let me explain. See, many times I’ve followed a more formal design process, only to run into some unforeseeable problem that stops me in my tracks once I start coding. More often than not, my logical design fails to predict the irrational behavior of some external process or service. For example, I’m sure I’m not the only aggregator developer who scrapped his initial design after discovering that a huge number of RSS feeds aren’t valid XML (“but I planned to use an off-the-shelf validating XML parser, dammit!”).

Rather than face that torment, I’ll often start coding away for the sole purpose of running headlong into the cruel wall of experience. FeedDemon’s memetracker is a good example of this, since I’ve already had to start over due to problems that I couldn’t have anticipated.

Here’s the fun part: a week or two from now, after I’m comfortable that the memetracker is working as intended, I’ll then throw the code away and start a more formal design approach. Cowboy coding is a great way to find problems, but it’s no good for commercial software – you’ve got to write well-thought-out code unless you’re willing to be buried in bug reports. So the goal here isn’t to complete a feature quickly (although that’s often a side effect), but instead to discover the gotchas up-front so you can design the feature correctly.

PS: I should add that I have no idea when this memetracker feature will make it into FeedDemon – it’s still in the hacking stages, so it may be a while before it appears.