Category: BlogTalk

First, the links: Why Snap previews are a terrible idea and how to disable them.

The downside to the recent widespread adoption of WordPress by Hebrew bloggers is that they’ve adopted on masse some of the worst eyesores of the global WordPress community, specifically an annoying bit of blog-bling that pops up (Pop. Up. doesn’t that already sound like a bad idea? Haven’t most browser advances since 1997 revolved around finding ways to disable and remove things that pop up?) a preview image of each website just as soon as you move your mouse over an external link. Not only is this annoying and distracting, it’s bringing you information you really don’t need at a time you really don’t want it. I mean, who cares what the site you linked to looks like? 99% of the time, it’s going to be another damn blog, using another damn bog-standard blog template.

Now, of course, annoying javascript widgets like this send any self-respecting geek scrambling for a greasemonkey script or even firefox add-on to disable it (user stylesheets, maybe? hosts file hacking?). Turns out there’s an opt-out option described in the FAQ of the company that provides this worthless “service” (it toggles a cookie from the snap.com site). Of course, it feels like a sissy’s solution. But the freedom from distraction is worth it. Update: I found a way to do this with greasemonkey.

Every day, I do my bit to help keep the Internet read. And in my feed aggregator (Google Reader), I’ve got “Starred” items and “Shared” items. The “Shared” list looks kind of lean, perhaps because I felt a subtle pressure to tag only carefully read and reviewed, “curated” links there. The “Starred” stuff, though, is a steadily growing collection of things that “look interesting but that I don’t have the time, or the speakers, or the privacy to get to right now”. Presumably one day I’ll go through them, or not.

I should just call those “Electric Monk” items – bookmarked so that I can avoid actually reading/viewing them.

Speaking of reading feeds, a technique that’s working quite well for me and which I haven’t seen described elsewhere is to split feeds between Firefox’s Live Bookmarks and a proper feed aggregator.

I use the aggregator for feeds where I want to read (or at least skim) each entry – blogs and the like. I use Live bookmarks (which just gives you a regularly-updating menu of about 20 titles with links for each feed) for feeds belonging to one of two categories:

• “Headline-centeric” sites, like Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, New Scientist, BoingBoing, שמה and other proper news sites, where reading all the items is like “sipping from a firehose”, and letting them accumulate unread in the aggregator is depressing. This way, can dip into the links for some casual reading, without the onerous “duty” of tracking each one.
• Updates, feeds that I use to track something, like torrent site searches, comment threads, forum discussions, wiki modifications – these feeds are an easy way to track when I should go to the site and do something – download a torrent, delete spam, respond to a comment.

Hummph. I didn’t plan to get all technical, starting this post.

Anyway, going over the stuff stashed in my “to look at later” items, I found a link to a Hebrew MP3 blog, which I think I bookmarked because it had a picture of a naked chick. And then I looked at the photos and realised I know that person (well, vaguely). Oddly, this isn’t the most dramatic example I’ve seen tonight of someone I know exposing themselves online: Here’s an amazing look at the inside of Folger’s brain.