Nifty Toolness

You might have noticed that there are two 'aggregated feed' doodads in the sidebar (over on the right, right down the bottom).

One of them has all the RSS feeds from ZeroHedge, TickerGuy, Mish's GlobalEconomicAnalysis… and a couple of other analytical sites.

I find it useful to aggregate all of these, so that I don't have to read each feed (or even their headlines) in an RSS Reader.

I use ThunderBird's built-in jobbie… and although I only load headlines, it annoyed me to have to go from ZHs feed (the first feed of the day, always) to TickerGuy's, to Mish's… and so on. I only wanted to load one RSS feed – a customised, composite feed that included all the others.

In times past, people who wanted to do that would have to write their own aggregator. I had done precisely that but it was a pain because Atom feeds had slightly different XML structures to, say, RSS2.0 feeds – my litle aggregator never worked perfectly and had to be tweaked anytime I wanted to add a new feed.

Yesterday I found an online service that does all the aggregation for you, and furnishes the composite feed… and as usual, it does so for free.

It's called XFruits -  which shows that the name of a thing says absolutely nothing about its utility.

If you're one of those people who uses RSS to read sites, then it's a sensational tool. Let's say that you load 4 different RSS feeds that give you Economics data… well, combine them into one.

And you maybe look at Gretchen Morgenson's RSS, and ZH, and TickerGuy for opinion… well, collate them.

And you look at a couple of different Economic Calendars… sticky-tape those bad boys together into one RSS and you will feel like you bought one of those things on teh.interwebs that promises to make your junk grow 4 inches in a week.

MarketMentat gets no kickbacks for mentioning XFruits, and I have no doubt that XFruits is not the only service of its type in the entire interwebs… but for your Beloved GT, it gets the nod.

In other news, RantTube now exists, but as yet its user management system is not integrated with the broader MarketMentat user base – I plan to remedy that tomorrow, and enable the whole box and dice on Wednesday.

Thereafter, registered users will be able to upload video (which will be automagically converted to FLV format) to shout their opinion from the rooftops.

I've long been an admirer of the video stylings of Stefan Molyneux (from FreeDomainRadio), but I think that the next step is content that actually goes the other way – that is, 'client-generated' video content… where anyone with a webcam can 'sound off' and give their response to whatever takes their fancy.

Now I would prefer that you don't upload videos of you playing with your own junk, unless it's on a private area of the site (the private area will exist, dont worry about that).
 

How’s THIS for Sexy?

OK.

In case you didn't see it, this arvo I buggered the entire site in my haste to install phpMotion -  a free 'YouTube' clone-ability package. [As an aside - if the technology of youTube is now freeware, what is the value of its stock? If you guessed "A: Zero", you get to pick from a range of fluffy toys]

Anyhow – back to my story.

I installed it, activated it, and 14 seconds later the site got DoS's by hackers out of Israel (I shit you not: the reason is straightforward… phpMotion is the primary distribution mechanism for content that gets banned from YouTube when the hasbarat complains about videos that might make the goyim feel sorry for the Palestinians).

At present I'm still trying to iron out the wrinkles in the install script, in order to offer this… but soon, any Rantophile will be able to UPLOAD whatever video they want.

I don't plan to do much filtering – be it comedy, porn, ripped-off movies: frankly I don't give a rat's arse, since I am philosphically opposed to copyright.

However, you will have to be registered, and if you want to upload anything longer than 5 minutes you'll have to be a subscriber.

 

I will tell you what I WANT you mufuhs to do: I want you to create CNBC-Bloomberg-mashups that make the Elder Statesmen look like fuckwits. But really, you can upload yourself reading poetry in the nude, if you like.

As the Black-Eyed Peas might have said…

Let's get it started.

 

{Damn, beeyatch… you never thought ol' GT would be a fan of the B-to-the-L-to-the-A-to-the-C-to-the-K-eyed-Peas, now did you?}

Pump It.

To quote Nirvana, we will be chokin' on the ashes of our enemies….

HeatMap – problems with FireFox 3.6

I've upgraded FireFox to version 3.6 (the newest version) recently, and today I noticed that the MarketMentat HeatMap is throwing a javascript error when the user tries to 'drill down' to the intraday stock chart for index components.

There has been no change to the code, and I have not found any reference to problems with javascript in FF3.6 on any of the developer threads (so far).

So anyhow – the issue is known and will be resolved as quickly as possible.

OK – Let’s Break Something…

The implementation of the new login structure went off with nary a hitch, as far as I can tell; registered users weren't required to log in again, and non-registered users who had some form of online 'presence' – from GMail to WindowsLive! to whatever – have successfully accessed the steaming piles of wisdom of your Beloved GT.

So… fresh from teh.win on that front, I think it's time to up the ante.

Now comes the attempt to offer differential site views (menus and content access) based on subscription vs free-readers.

I am also keen to implement a 'myMarketMentat' style of front-end, where registered users can select the stuff they want to see on the front page, and have that selection saved to a database… so that when they log in they only see what they want to see, all on the front page.

Between those two things, I am reasonably confident that something will break… so be warned.

RPX Working OK (It Seems)

Well, the RPX OpenID protocol has been implemented, and my spy system notices that most users didn't have to log in again.

Furthermore, for the last week most 'web-crawlers' – and some RSS aggregators – were being booted to a login page, but now they don't get booted, because they all have their own OpenIDs and associated mechanisms to log in automatically through the RPX API.

In the reasonably near future we will take advantage of our OpenID affiliate status, and folks will be able to sign up for an OpenID from within our borders if they want.

OpenID is much more useful than you might imagine – for example my three primary e-mail addresses are al llinked to one OpenID account… and one Gravatar account … so that the same photo appears wherever I post, so that people can gaze on my beauty. But it also systematises the links used to attach to my ID… so no need to type in e-mail or link fields in comment forms.

RPX functionality should now also appear in users' profile areas.