In the bag tonight: Less bitch'n and whin'n, more jam'n.
Counts: Blogging: 8; Dev: 22; Otherwise: 8; SQL: 5; WILY: 8.
Line of the night: "Note: this is called hubris, and is quite a good way of encouraging idle hackers to take a pot shot at your system. You might want to consider being more diplomatic than me, because then you'll look less stupid when your system is eventually compromised..."
I just uploaded my most current OPML file to Share Your OPML (SYO) and my worst fears are realized. I'm now the most insatiable subscriber. If you've been wondering about that donate button over their to your left, now you know.
My read list started out simple enough: just 19s OPMLs for a few sites and for those folks for admitted to reading my blog via SYO. I wrote a little Whidbey C# thing to merge them all into one OPML and was then loaded into RSS Bandit. I've added maybe a dozen feeds or so that strike my fancy, too, but the net result is currently 1,573 feeds.
Give or take, that's 250 more than even Scoble. Reading all of that that is taking away from my quality time with Janell and Beer. Sin. Sin. Sin.
So what I am going to do about it? Binge. Purge. Repeat.
1,087 feeds haven't posted one item in 22-Feb-04. I'm guessing most of them won't. I'm going to write another little bit of code to see if those end points are alive or not. 404 of me then and you're gone.
But what is interesting to me is how I got that number. You've just got to love the fact that RSS Bandit persists your list of feeds and references to posted items as an XML file. That mean you can bust out your favorite XML Swiss Army Parser (mine is XMLSpy) and rat just that kind of information out with XPath. To wit:
count(/feeds/feed/stories-recently-viewed[count(story) = 0])
I'm also guessing that at least some percentage of the 495 active feeds have really been pointing at the same content. Although my OPML builder rejected what it thought were duplicate feeds, I'm know for a fact I've got repeaters (blogs.asp.net and blogs.msdn.microsoft.com) in the list. Need to come with some way of pulling them out.
I think the software lesson learned here is don't be afraid to give your end-users access to their data in a workable form like XML. Dare and the RSS Bandit team could come with some closed system for storing the feeds but chose to do it with XML. Kudos to them for doing so! You've made it easy for me do what I want to with that data.
Of course, putting it in a SQL Server Database would be nice to. In all honesty, I got into such a bloated state because I wanted to write an article for SQLJunkies showing off Yukon's new For XML features. Merging OPMLs and dynamically generating them was going to be the thunder. That said, I'm glad Michael Rys beat me to covering the For XML Bits. He did a far better job of it than I would have.
[Listening to: Okesa Prayer - Kodo - Mondo Head (06:45)]
15 Seconds, one of the oldest and most established Microsoft Technology sites that I can think of, has announced two new RSS Feeds of their site's cotent:
[Listening to: Feels Like Home [Live] - Randy Newman - The Best of Randy Newman (04:13)]
Just installed the new build of XP SP2 on a machine with the B1 Yukon bits installed. The SQLBrowser service periodically shoots the CPU up to over 95%. I've disabled that service for now. More details later... if I find them.
[Listening to: A Certain Girl - Warren Zevon - Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (03:08)]