Friday, May 16, 2008
17:58 by FoxTwo
If you don't know what RSS is, in a nutshell it's a consolidation of blog entries in a simplified format, so that you can use a reader to read it instead of visiting every blog you like to read the latest entries. All you need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and add the RSS URL into your reader, and you can read all your favourite blogs in one place - your reader.
Yeah most blogs have a "subscribe me" button that asks you to enter your email address, and Feedblitz emails the RSS feed to you. Well, at least that was what it USED to do. In the intervening months where I've left Feedblitz alone, I just realised what it can do when I had to reinstall its code on my new blog templates.
Yeah look at the options now - MSN, Yahoo, Twitter. Now you can get the whole RSS thing beeped to you wherever you are!
I just can't imagine how your Twitter will look like if a full blog post comes in via RSS through your Twitter... your followers would probably see a whole bunch of tweets coming from you (assuming you used the public option as shown in the picture).
And if you have subscribed to the feed via your MSN or Yahoo or AIM, Lord help you when you're in the middle of a presentation for your bosses and a new blog post comes in :)
17:58 by FoxTwo
Feedblitz Does More Than Just Email Now
Anybody who has been blogging for more than a few weeks will have heard of "Feedblitz". If you haven't, then it's time for you to head on over there.If you don't know what RSS is, in a nutshell it's a consolidation of blog entries in a simplified format, so that you can use a reader to read it instead of visiting every blog you like to read the latest entries. All you need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and add the RSS URL into your reader, and you can read all your favourite blogs in one place - your reader.
Yeah most blogs have a "subscribe me" button that asks you to enter your email address, and Feedblitz emails the RSS feed to you. Well, at least that was what it USED to do. In the intervening months where I've left Feedblitz alone, I just realised what it can do when I had to reinstall its code on my new blog templates.
Yeah look at the options now - MSN, Yahoo, Twitter. Now you can get the whole RSS thing beeped to you wherever you are!
I just can't imagine how your Twitter will look like if a full blog post comes in via RSS through your Twitter... your followers would probably see a whole bunch of tweets coming from you (assuming you used the public option as shown in the picture).
And if you have subscribed to the feed via your MSN or Yahoo or AIM, Lord help you when you're in the middle of a presentation for your bosses and a new blog post comes in :)
Thursday, May 15, 2008
23:39 by FoxTwo 15 May 2008 is supposed to be "Unite For Human Rights" day, as Blogcatalog puts it. Before we go into anything too "deep" or serious, I request that you view the video below:
Funny? Perhaps. To me it is. In this part of the world, parents beat their kids. The western concept of "sending the kid to the room" has yet to catch on. The way that comedian Russell Peters put it across is hilarious, but it does ring true.
So what does this have to do with "human rights"?
As I see it, "human rights" is a set of rules (or "guidelines" may be the more appropriate term) by a group of people stating what should and should not be done to other human beings. Their "guidelines" stem from their own beliefs. They see that in other parts of the world, people do not behave like they do, hence they declare that the people there have little or no "human rights".
Just like parents beating their kids.
Sending a child to his/her room might work in the US, and it might work in Canada, but it won't work for other places in the world. For one thing, many children in other parts of the world don't have rooms (as Russell Peters put it across so hilariously).
When the pro-democracy movement in 1989 at Tianamen Square in Beijing was crushed brutally by the Chinese government, a huge outcry against "human rights" was heard from the western quarter of the world. Yes it's brutal. Yes it was devastating.
But, if you look at it, it was exactly the traditional way how a Chinese "parent" might approach a rebellious child - whack the guy till he gets some sense into him. The Chinese government was thus, "beating their children" to put them back in line, by sending in the army (the much-feared "cane").
Having the US government (and other governments in the world) imposing sanctions against the Chinese government is akin to your next-door neighbour coming over and telling you that you shouldn't beat your kids. How would you react?
Typically, one would say "Don't teach me how to discipline my child!".
China has won the privilege to host the 2008 Olympics. Here comes the "human rights" organisations of the world trying to tell China how to treat its "children". You think it'd do any good? What will happen is that China will tighten security measures and be even more brutal, since an "outsider" is coming in to "interfere" with domestic affairs.
I'm not even going to touch on the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, which partly happened under the banner of "human rights".
Human Rights, the concept, cannot be forcefully driven across to everyone. There are social norms and traditional barriers to overcome first, before this can be achieved. Education, while a slow process, will eventually change the mindset. However, a large forceful demonstration against a ruling government will almost always result in failure.
Case in point - just try holding a protest in Singapore. Within minutes, you will see a heapload of "ang chia" (Singapore's version of SWAT trucks and riot police) appearing to "maintain order". Human rights? You can talk about it in the lockup.
Last point to note - I am not for or against Human Rights. My point is just that the concept needs to be taught slowly, not driven across forcefully.
23:39 by FoxTwo 15 May 2008 is supposed to be "Unite For Human Rights" day, as Blogcatalog puts it. Before we go into anything too "deep" or serious, I request that you view the video below:
Funny? Perhaps. To me it is. In this part of the world, parents beat their kids. The western concept of "sending the kid to the room" has yet to catch on. The way that comedian Russell Peters put it across is hilarious, but it does ring true.
So what does this have to do with "human rights"?
As I see it, "human rights" is a set of rules (or "guidelines" may be the more appropriate term) by a group of people stating what should and should not be done to other human beings. Their "guidelines" stem from their own beliefs. They see that in other parts of the world, people do not behave like they do, hence they declare that the people there have little or no "human rights".
Just like parents beating their kids.
Sending a child to his/her room might work in the US, and it might work in Canada, but it won't work for other places in the world. For one thing, many children in other parts of the world don't have rooms (as Russell Peters put it across so hilariously).
When the pro-democracy movement in 1989 at Tianamen Square in Beijing was crushed brutally by the Chinese government, a huge outcry against "human rights" was heard from the western quarter of the world. Yes it's brutal. Yes it was devastating.
But, if you look at it, it was exactly the traditional way how a Chinese "parent" might approach a rebellious child - whack the guy till he gets some sense into him. The Chinese government was thus, "beating their children" to put them back in line, by sending in the army (the much-feared "cane").
Having the US government (and other governments in the world) imposing sanctions against the Chinese government is akin to your next-door neighbour coming over and telling you that you shouldn't beat your kids. How would you react?
Typically, one would say "Don't teach me how to discipline my child!".
China has won the privilege to host the 2008 Olympics. Here comes the "human rights" organisations of the world trying to tell China how to treat its "children". You think it'd do any good? What will happen is that China will tighten security measures and be even more brutal, since an "outsider" is coming in to "interfere" with domestic affairs.
I'm not even going to touch on the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, which partly happened under the banner of "human rights".
Human Rights, the concept, cannot be forcefully driven across to everyone. There are social norms and traditional barriers to overcome first, before this can be achieved. Education, while a slow process, will eventually change the mindset. However, a large forceful demonstration against a ruling government will almost always result in failure.
Case in point - just try holding a protest in Singapore. Within minutes, you will see a heapload of "ang chia" (Singapore's version of SWAT trucks and riot police) appearing to "maintain order". Human rights? You can talk about it in the lockup.
Last point to note - I am not for or against Human Rights. My point is just that the concept needs to be taught slowly, not driven across forcefully.
Labels: Human rights, random
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
12:17 by FoxTwo
For example, I discovered the Intense Debate commenting system and implemented it here. Then a day or so later, I came across a competing commenting system, which also garnered rave reviews, and implemented it on my gaming blog. Well yeah I am still "in the process" of implementing the commenting and forum features to my third blog, and even thinking about using it on my website in general too.
Before we go further, I'd just like to jog your memory a little. When you read blogs, do you notice that a vast majority of them have some sort of "share this" button or link at the end of the entry? Yeah, those that you click or mouseover, and a list of services will be shown, like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter etc?
Well today I'll just touch on something similar, and it's available on the browser. It's a FireFox extension, called Shareaholic. and it's your own personal "share this" button on your own browser.
Remember when you first joined StumbleUpon? Yeah they told you that "it is highly recommended" that you install their toolbar. Then, you joined de.licio.us. They told you the same thing - "install our toolbar". You joined Technorati. Although they don't have a toolbar, you can use the many bookmarklets they have there to "bookmark" your faves.
The list goes on. For every of these "social sites" you have yet another toolbar to install, or more bookmarklet codes to put on your browser bar to "share" your favourites.
This is where Shareaholic comes in. This one single add-on will render all those toolbars and bookmarklets useless! Ok I exaggerate, but this can replace all of them in one fell swoop. Well check out the picture below for a better idea:
As usual, click to enlarge if you can't see it clearly.
As you can see, this one single add-on allows you to share the current page you're on with a multitude of services. I personally only picked those I really use. After all I doubt anybody would have an account on each of those services!
Well, is that it? Not quite.
Shareaholic also works very much like StumbleUpon. Well I think of it as "StumbleUpon without stumbling". What do I mean? Well when you click on the icon in your browser, you will see a selection called "Community links". This is where people using Shareaholic have bookmarked stuff and are sharing it across the various services that Shareaholic supports. The stuff they are sharing all appear here (although not really in real-time). The more impressive thing about this is that, you need not necessarily have an account in whatever services those links are bookmarked to - as long as you have the Shareaholic extension you can see every link passing through the system.
Yes indeed, by using this link, I "stumble" upon new stuff, almost exactly like "stumbling" :)
12:17 by FoxTwo
Shareaholic - The One Button To Rule Them All
In recent days, I have been surfing and discovering stuff that make me itch to implement in my blogs, or install into my browser and give it a spin.For example, I discovered the Intense Debate commenting system and implemented it here. Then a day or so later, I came across a competing commenting system, which also garnered rave reviews, and implemented it on my gaming blog. Well yeah I am still "in the process" of implementing the commenting and forum features to my third blog, and even thinking about using it on my website in general too.
Before we go further, I'd just like to jog your memory a little. When you read blogs, do you notice that a vast majority of them have some sort of "share this" button or link at the end of the entry? Yeah, those that you click or mouseover, and a list of services will be shown, like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter etc?
Well today I'll just touch on something similar, and it's available on the browser. It's a FireFox extension, called Shareaholic. and it's your own personal "share this" button on your own browser.
Remember when you first joined StumbleUpon? Yeah they told you that "it is highly recommended" that you install their toolbar. Then, you joined de.licio.us. They told you the same thing - "install our toolbar". You joined Technorati. Although they don't have a toolbar, you can use the many bookmarklets they have there to "bookmark" your faves.
The list goes on. For every of these "social sites" you have yet another toolbar to install, or more bookmarklet codes to put on your browser bar to "share" your favourites.
This is where Shareaholic comes in. This one single add-on will render all those toolbars and bookmarklets useless! Ok I exaggerate, but this can replace all of them in one fell swoop. Well check out the picture below for a better idea:
As usual, click to enlarge if you can't see it clearly.
As you can see, this one single add-on allows you to share the current page you're on with a multitude of services. I personally only picked those I really use. After all I doubt anybody would have an account on each of those services!
Well, is that it? Not quite.
Shareaholic also works very much like StumbleUpon. Well I think of it as "StumbleUpon without stumbling". What do I mean? Well when you click on the icon in your browser, you will see a selection called "Community links". This is where people using Shareaholic have bookmarked stuff and are sharing it across the various services that Shareaholic supports. The stuff they are sharing all appear here (although not really in real-time). The more impressive thing about this is that, you need not necessarily have an account in whatever services those links are bookmarked to - as long as you have the Shareaholic extension you can see every link passing through the system.
Yes indeed, by using this link, I "stumble" upon new stuff, almost exactly like "stumbling" :)
Labels: Extension, FireFox, internet
