RSS developments and other odds and ends
March 9, 2003
I’ve been persuaded to give Awasu a try, and you know what, I think we have a winner. I’ve been playing with it a bit tonight and it seems very flexible. I may have to install this one at work in order to demo monitoring table of contents and other current awareness items. I would like to pass this tool on to a few of the faculty who are interested in staying on top of the literature.
NOTE: I just found out about Roogle - the RSS Search Engine. AND, they have a blog to help you keep track of developments. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one.
:: The possibility that PDAs will fade away in the next few years (~2007) doesn’t really surprise me. I think it’s pretty clear that with the speed of technological development and the advances in wireless mobility, convergence devices are bound to become more and more prevalent. I’m pretty excited about PDAs merging with cel phones, MP3 players, cameras, etc. if for no other reason than I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life wearing cargo pants just so I can carry the damn things.
:: Win Without War TV Spots - Janeane Garofalo, Susan Sarandon want to let the UN inspections do their work.
:: Google brought to its knees?? And they said it was unsinkable… I was wondering if it was just me that was having problems, although this seemed a bit too much like Charlie Brown walking around with the rain cloud over his head.
:: Cow manure — the price of natural gas may be going down as one crafty farmer demonstrates how methane from manure can be transformed into heat and power. This is really going to cause the shit to hit the fan. (sorry, i felt obligated to throw that one in somewhere).
Posted in Blogosphere
March 10th, 2003 at 10:14 pm
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
I love the picture you put up. It goes well with the default sound Awasu plays when an error is detected
March 11th, 2003 at 12:44 am
All the thanks go to you! It’s the pathetic “couldn’t program to save my life” kind of people like myself that rely on the likes of people like you to come up with these wonderful ideas.
I really do like Awasu, and have nothing but good things to say so far. I want to dig a little deeper and find out what plugins have been written for Awasu and what they are capable of doing. Keep up the great developments!
March 11th, 2003 at 5:57 am
There have only been a few plugins written to date since I’ve been focusing on writing core features. However, librarians are certainly one group of people that could really benefit from using RSS so if there’s anything you want to monitor, let us know and I’ll see what can be arranged. Due to the generic nature of the plugin system, Awasu can be used to monitor absolutely anything at all so let your imagination run wild!
I’ve been working hard on some new features that are almost ready for beta testing. You will be able to do things like get Awasu to send out an email when stories of interest arrive, or record them in a database, perhaps for processing later by another program. Again, it’s completely generic so whatever you might want to do, we can probably whip up a little plugin that will let you do it.