I wanted a sleeve for my new 15″ MacBookPro . Incase makes good neoprene sleeves, but I didn’t want to spend $30. Sam’s guide to making your own laptop sleeve out of corduroy looked promising, but I don’t have a sewing machine.

The super budget solution was to tap into that other Force that binds the universe together - duct tape. All you do is take the paper fiber sleeve that the MacBookPro ships with and liberally apply duct tape. You could go the extra mile and follow the isoglossia guide to doing the same thing except with an extra layer of foam padding.

Before and after:

New stuff:

• Added an option to automatically mark items as read. This is a cookie based option, so you’ll need to set it on each computer/browser you use.
• Added a “mark read” link to the top of unread entries (many users requested this).
• Moved the option to view flagged entries to the main tab area (many, many users requested this).
• Moved the “mark everything read” button outside of the left area scroll when you have independent scrolling on.

Bug fixes:

• IE was having trouble with AJAX refreshes of new, unread items because of a conflict with the Javascript for visual effects that happens when items update. This is fixed.
• Fixed parser issues that cause sometimes very bad repeats of “read” items. This might mean that you’ll see one last set of duplicates of items you’ve already read as the parser catches up with the our new way of seeing if feed items are new.
• Fixed issue where mixed case feeds were being forced to lower case, making them impossible to add.
• Fixed parser issue that was causing feeds not to be updated. Basically the parser was choking on several blog feeds from Weblogs, Inc.
• Made several parser, backend, and other fixes.

Safari Users

Be sure to clear your cache and reload (Safari can be overly cache happy).

We have a lingering and annoying bug in Safari. When Safari receives content via AJAX, it gets the encoding wrong and things like proper quotation marks get mangled. We thought we could fix it by using the browser filters Rails plugin, but it didn’t work. This issue and other possible fixes were mentioned in the forums. Anyone know what the deal is with Safari?

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with suggestions and bug reports!

Step one: Wear a Longhorns hat.

There is no step two.

Whenever I wear this hat strangers always talk to me. Sometimes they are USC fans, but more often they are expatriates from the Republic of Texas. I got the hat during my last trip to visit my girlfriend’s family in Texas in order to blend in. Of course, instead of camouflage, the hat served as a beacon saying “Fellow Texan! Please talk to me about football!”

Tired of being embarrassed about not knowing anything about the college football schedule, I was shocked to find no RSS feeds of game schedules. I did find some football schedule OS X widgets, so I thought there must be a feed somewhere. Nope, it turns out that the widget developers scrape the HTML of ESPN pages.

Maybe there are copyright issues at work here (though how anyone could claim a copyright on the schedule of public events is beyond me), or maybe the people at the NCAA and ESPN need to find a clue.

A couple of days ago I posted about deleting my Yahoo account. I wasn’t able to delete it because the Yahoo delete account form is broken. Five days and many emails to customer service later it’s still broken, and I have yet to hear from customer service.

Thanks Yahoo.

A while back we accidentally broke our delete user form. However, when someone emailed to complain I was horrified and apologetic, and we addressed the issue right away. Everybody makes mistakes, but if you treat the customer right when something goes wrong they can actually end up with a better opinion of you.

Two helpful Newshutch users emailed about this today. The only bug I see is that it breaks the “Go back to the original page” link on the subscribe confirmation page.

Alex Muntean sent me JavaScript that will automatically set up Newshutch as the default Firefox reader, so that when you click on the RSS icon in the URL bar Firefox will submit a subscription request to Newshutch.

The script in action: Click to automatically set up Newshutch in Firefox 2.0.

User Nogg3r5 posted the way to do it by hand on his blog.

Thanks Alex and Nogg3r5!

Today I killed my Yahoo and MySpace accounts. Ahhhhh… cleansing.

As a disciple of The David and Merlin, I did it mainly to reduce my number of “buckets”.

I didn’t use Yahoo mail anymore, especially since their old interface was aging badly and their new beta interface is just overbearing.

I quit MySpace because it’s slow, ad bloated, and ugly. The most annoying thing is that friends got lazy and started favoring MySpace as an email client. Another inbox, yuck.

Now, rather than closing my MySpace account, I deleted all my friends so they wouldn’t think I was still there, and I put a short large type message saying “I’m not here anymore, email me at nathan at some domain dot com”. That way if people from my past want to stalk me (the real reason for MySpace’s popularity), they still have the option.

I did need to close the Yahoo account because they don’t offer forwarding with the free account, and I want mails to bounce rather than collect dust. I did have to forward about 30 important archived emails one at a time to my other email account, which was painful. To add insult to injury, their “delete account” page is broken.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t force users to use the nuclear option of closing their account: Let them forward email, export their data, or set their account to “idle”. If Yahoo had let me forward mail they could have kept me as a customer. Instead I HAD to delete my account.
• Lock-in is a bitch: I had maybe 5 years of email in that Yahoo account. Luckily I keep my inbox pretty clean and I only had to forward about 30 archived emails (still sucked though).

  I feel for MySpace users who have spent a lot of time writing blogs, aquiring friends, and posting pictures. MySpace depends on lock-in, so they will never provide a way for people to export their data and jump ship.

  Going forward I plan never to use software or services that don’t allow me to freely export my data. If a company lives by lock-in, it means their product probably sucks anyway.

• I wish someone would develop an open source, peer to peer, social networking service. I don’t know what such a beast would look like, but it couldn’t be worse than MySpace.

Currently we use the ACCESSKEY attribute to create shortcut hotkeys on the “open next” and related buttons visible when you are viewing feeds. The problem is that the keys used to select an ACCESSKEY vary by platform and browser. This means that we have to sniff for different browsers and platforms to show you the correct key combinations.

Now that Firefox will be switching in 2.0 from Alt + key to Shift + Alt + key, ACCESSKEY is officially dead to me.

We’re switching to javascript shortcut keys that will be the same on all platforms. Some of the current keys we’re using like “z” will cause shortcut collisions on some platforms, so the keys will have to change.

Here’s what I’m thinking:
Open Next: CTRL + ,
Mark Read: CTRL + .
Mark Read and Open Next: CTRL + /
Add Feed: CTRL + \

Let me know if you think these combinations are comfortable and if they cause any collisions for you.

Unfortunately, the javascript shortcut keys won’t work in Opera (if anyone knows of a way let me know), though any Opera user that was actually pressing Shift + Esc then the accesskey probably died of fatal carpal tunnel long ago.

We’re sick of our current host. They are unreliable and unresponsive (I’ll name names after we move).

Can anyone recommend a good hosting company? We need a couple of dedicated *nix boxes.

Here are some images and code snippets so you can put “add to Newshutch” buttons your site. Download the images to your own server or just link to the images on this page.

To create custom buttons, download this editable EPS file of our logo, or just roll your own. If you create your own buttons, we’d love to see what you come up with, so post links in the comments of this post.

Code for dark background button:

<a href="javascript:location.href='http://newshutch.com/external/add_feed?url='+encodeURIComponent('http://yoursite.com/yourfeed.rss')">
<img src=”http://www.newshutch.com/wp-content/assets/newshutch_add_dark.png” alt=”Add to Newshutch” />
</a>

Code for white background button:

<a href="javascript:location.href='http://newshutch.com/external/add_feed?url='+encodeURIComponent('http://yoursite.com/yourfeed.rss')"> <img src="http://www.newshutch.com/wp-content/assets/newshutch_add_white.png" alt="Add to Newshutch" /> </a>

(Remember to change yoursite.com/yourfeed.rss to the URL of your RSS or Atom feed.)

Our old friend Micah recently got back from a European tour with his band Giant Drag. Yesterday Micah, Doug, and I got together for an intense database and Rails optimization session.

Micah is an excellent programmer, hardware person, database expert, and a first rate drummer.

He’s also available for consulting work while he’s back in LA, so if you need a top notch developer, contact him at micah at giant drag dot com.

Sorry about the downtime today. Our hosting company had a blown router.

New features

• Flagging.
• Scrolling panes work better.
• Now we prevent adding duplicate feeds.

Fixes

• Feeds in any language and encoding should work. Old entries parsed before this update will still have invalid characters though.
• Mixed case URLs don’t mess up when adding feeds.
• Add feed bookmarklet now prompts for login when needed.
• Other bug fixes and parsing fixes.

Sorry about the downtime Saturday night from about 10:15pm to 1:30am. We’re looking into the cause of the outage, so we’ll let you know what happened. Thanks for being patient.

This is a fantastic piece of animation that combines architecture, pseudo-info graphs, and John Coltrane.

Screen shots:

Via information aesthetics.

Steps:

1. Notice that site has become really slow the last few days.
2. Stumble upon a fantastic resource by Ian Gilfillan for people with limited MySQL experience.
3. Slap forehead and finally turn on slow query logging to find queries that take more than one second.
4. Realize that, oh crap, we’re reading every row in the session id table constantly.
5. Add an index to the session id table to fix that.
6. Try to fix other expensive queries that use sorting.
7. Fix those by upping the startup variables that effect sorting cache.
8. Forgive self for rookie mistakes because I’m a CSS jockey not a DBA.