RSS MAD

KBCafe Local Search

I took a few hours out of my boring day and wrote KBCafe local search. Simply type your zip code and you have jobs data, local business search, maps, traffic and weather all in one. Some of the stuff also works by location name in addition to zip codes, but I haven't completed that feature yet.

http://www.kbcafe.com/local.aspx

Google Base Experiment

I experimented with uploading RSS to Google Base and found it quite easy. Following Niall Kennedy's instructions, I first created a Webpage that enhanced RSS with Google Base's RSS extensions using an XSLT.

Original RSS + XSLT = Enhanced RSS

Then I began uploading, which is a very manual task of naming and selecting files. I encountered a Beta limitation after uploading my 10th monthly archive (10 bulk uploads max). Later, I was able to search and discover these blog entries at Google Base. Next, I plan to remove what I've already uploaded and start anew, but with much larger RSS files (working around the max 10 issue). Hopefully, I can get the majority of my blog entries indexed tomorrow.

iPodder renamed Juice

Scott Grayban: Our new name is "Juice" or "Juice Reciever".

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/podcasters/message/12603

Randy: I wonder how difficult it would have been to do a Google serch for "juice reader", "juice rss", "juice download", etc? What can you expect from people who original named their product after an obvious trademark.

Game Over!

I've decided to discontinue development of Juice. I finally found an RSS reader that works; Google Reader. As such, this blog will be discontinued. I'm gonna start a new blog entirely focused entirely on C#.

http://www.google.com/reader/lens/

Amazon Web services

Web services are great. Amazon has one called Amazon Web services. I created a shopping Webpage based on this API. Unfortunately, at least once per month, Amazon changes the namespace of its XML. For the next day or two, people scramble to fix their Amazon Web service clients. I've rewritten my service to disreguard the namespace, but it's funny how many AWS clients are broken because of the stupidity of their Dev team.

Remote Include

Here's some awesome code by Marcel Marchon that allows you to remotely include content on your Website and cache it for efficiency.

http://lazytom.com/libraries/remoteinclude/

Juice

Google Talk Crashed

It's nice to know the engineers at Google are human. 

Winner of the 2005 Google Code Jam

PR: Google today announced Marek Cygan, a student at Warsaw University, as the grand prize winner of the 2005 Google Code Jam, Google's annual computer programming competition.

http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/codejamwinners_2005.html

netfeeder

Summary: .NET Beta 2 Xml Feed Framework. Provides parsing of internet feeds such as RSS and Atom to be able to consume feeds in your .NET application.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/netfeeder

Microsoft Issues IE Developer Toolbar

BetaNews: The toolbar works on Internet Explorer 6 and above on Windows XP and Vista operating systems. The toolbar will allow developers to perform such functions as validating CSS and HTML code, and previewing how pages appear in various screen resolutions. No release date was given for a final version. The toolbar beta can be downloaded from FileForum.

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Internet_Explorer_Developer_Toolbar/1127145234/1

SharpDevelop 1.1

I'm developing Juice 2.0 in SharpDevelop 1.1, downloaded a few days ago. There's a lot of new features in SharpDevelop, but the IDE hasn't stabilized any. A compile last night threw the VM memory consumption into the gigabytes and spun the CPU out-of-control. Still, I'll continue working with it, mostly for the experience.

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx

Update: Shortly after I reported this, SharpDevelop ate one of my source files, completely corrupting it and costing me an hour of work. SD 1.1 is less stable than 1.0. Not a good sign.  

Later: CVS to the rescue. I reconstructed the corrupted changes in a matter of a few minutes.

Later: This version of SharpDevelop is simply too unstable to work with. I can't get any work done.

Small Tweak

This is a test of my blogging software. I moved the primary data file from rss.xml to index.xml. Then I redirected rss.xml to FeedBurner, except when FeedBurner is the UserAgent, which I redirect to index.xml. If this shows up in the feed, then all is working.

Update: Kinda looked like FeedBurner was not reporting it's UserAgent as case insensitive FeedBurner with any prepended or appended characters. So instead of redirecting it to index.xml, I simply configured it to pull from there.

Introducing Sparkle

Channel9: Microsoft, today, at the PDC, announced Microsoft Expression, which is a suite of three applications to help you build Web sites and new kinds of Windows applications.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=115387

Randy: Looks like MS-Flash.

10k Downloads of Juice

Wow! Just checking the download stats and guess what. You got it, Juice has been downloaded more than 10 thousand times. Thanks! And you can expect a new version around the corner.

http://www.kbcafe.com/juice/download.html

C# Winning in the Blogosphere

C# has a ten fold lead in the blogosphere over Java.

Visual Studio 2005 RC Released!

Channel9: I' ve heard that Visual Studio 2005 RC was dropped on MSDN today and will also be handed out to all of the PDC ’05 attendees.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=113981

KBCBar

Just hacking around, I decided to create a blog search IE toolbar for my KBCafe blog search engine. I started with the KBBar sample, added a C and came up with KBCBar (KBCafe Toolbar). I was thinking a good name would also be Blogobar.

http://www.kbcafe.com/juice/KBCBar.msi

PDC Bloggers

We put up this site in hopes of connecting bloggers interested in Microsoft PDC and the technologies associated with the event.

http://pdcbloggers.net/

Here's the OPML roll of PDC Bloggers. And again on steroids.

KBCafe login

This weekend, I built an authentication module for the KBCafe domain. You can create an account, change your password, reset your password, deactivate your account and re-activate your account. You can't do anything with your account, but I plan on hooking this up to R|mail in the next few days. This will allow users to manage there subscriptions more actively. You'll always be able to subscribe with R|mail without creating an account.

http://www.kbcafe.com/login.aspx

Virtual Earth API Free

techcrunch: MSN Earth just announced that the APIs for its service are to be made open and also free, for commercial [read unlimited] use. These will not be fully supported until January 2006 but are available now if you inform MSN of your intention to use them.

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=216

Scoble Interviews Bill Gates

Robert Scoble: Visit Bill in his office for a few minutes to talk about where he sees the future going. [cut] Oh, and don't miss the interview with Marc McDonald. He was Microsoft's first employee.

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=111598

Video