Toluu

dOgBOi on Tech

On HiatusApril 8

I'm going on a brief hiatus to reevaluate this blog and what it means to me. It's not going to be long. Perhaps 2 weeks, no more than 3. But I have to take a serious look at myself in relationship to the internet.

My beliefs are pretty strong, and I stand by my ethics. Not everyone will agree with my ethics, and that's okay. What other people think of me is none of my business. What's important is that my ethical bar is set high and I try to meet that bar everyday.

One of my biggest concerns is intellectual property: I don't like it. any site that uses the engine. Otherwise, do with it what you will.

I can't, in good conscience, continue along the path I was on. Google is the least of my issues. Most of my problem is with how I've been operating, and it ends now.

Toluu ReviewApril 5

There are many feed aggregators out there, but Toluu.com does some unique things with your RSS feeds. For one thing, it's not an aggregator at all. It doesn't deliver news items to your desktop or your browser. Instead, it keeps a list of all of your feeds. What makes it special is what it does with the data.

Toluu is, at it's heart, a feed recommender. It compares your list of feeds to other Toluu user's lists. It then algorithmically determines other feeds you might want to read based on the feeds you already like to read. There's a social element as well. You can find people who read similar feeds and add them as friends. When your friends add new feeds, you are notified.

You can import your current feeds through OPML. You can also add feeds manually, or use a bookmarklet.

Toluu is currently in private invite-only beta. I currently have six invites for anyone who wants one. Just send me a tweet on twitter (user name: dOgBOi).

You can see my profile on Toluu by clicking here.

Personas for FirefoxApril 3

The default Firefox theme is pretty bland, and the ability to change the theme using the add-on architecture is nice. But sometimes, you want to change a whole lot more than just the buttons.

That's where Personas for Firefox comes in. It's a lightweight theming engine for Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta. What it does is allow you to quickly and easily change the look of your browser without a restart. It doesn't change the buttons or layout. Instead, it adds graphical elements to the top and bottom of the browser.

A picture being worth a thousands words, here's two:





As you can see, the effect isn't very subtle. But it is very fun, and allows you to customize your browser quickly and easily. You just hit the button in the bottom left of the browser that looks like a fox in a mask, choose the theme, and instantly your browser is changed.

CommentsApril 2

Because I believe in free speech, I have a policy here. If a comment is not generally offensive to the community at large, whether I agree with that comment or not, even if that comment is a personal attack, I'll approve it. If someone believes in free speech, that should cross into every area of their life.

Someone commented here today, anonymously. They commented on an older post, which still has the old commenting system (pre-disqus). Since it's buried weeks back, I thought I'd share the comment and my reply, in the interest of transparency, not to mention because I find such things amusing.

So first, the comment:

Anonymous said...

... You blog sucks... i hope you get cancer, fat bastard.

Hmm, it's so nice that he cares. (How do I know it's a he? Because it's been my experience that commenters like this are generally teenage boys. I'm making a huge assumption there, but I'm rolling with it.) I just love ellipsis abuse, not to mention the clever use of "You" as an alternative for "Your". It's the little things that give me pleasure.

Of course, this was just begging for a reply, which is probably wasted, since I imagine that the commenter stumbled here and will never return, but hell, it gave me something to do for a few moments.

So here is my reply, in it's entirety.

dOgBOi said...

I shouldn't have approved this, no

New Commenting SystemMarch 26

I've switched my commenting system here at dOgBOi on Tech to Disqus. Should make things a little easier as far as comment moderation, and it'll look nicer too. Let me know what you think.