So I decided to take a look at LiveJournal‘s RSS support this morning. It works like this. As a paid LiveJournal user you are able to subscribe to a feed. You give it a name and the url to the RSS feed. Once this happens the feed is pretty much out of your control. You can’t do anything with it. It gets a generic template and to other LJ users can appear just like another user in their friends list (You can see how it does it here). Judging from some of my past experiences with some of their site I probably shouldn’t have expected more from them than I got. Though I really only have one real gripe (well, two if you include that I hate how they format the posts).

My biggest gripe about it is how they handle comments. If your blog is subscribed to by someone on LJ, you may have a whole other set of comments for your blog over there that you don’t know about. Because LJ has comments built into it, any feed that shows up on LJ has a link to comments on the posts. This is where I start to not like how they aggregate RSS feeds. Part of RSS is the <comments> item. This contains a URL where comments can be made on a post. If it is there you should use that for the comments link. That’s what it is there for. I’d probably even argue that if there isn’t a comments link LJ shouldn’t let people comment. It gets more confusing too. If you look at some of the popular feeds there is more than one feed for some of the blogs (Wil Wheaton’s for example). And each of those has comments on them.

LiveJournal also has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to for any LJ user. Just add /rss onto the end of their URL. So http://www.livejournal.com/~gblake/ becomes http://www.livejournal.com/users/gblake/rss/. LJ actually does a pretty good job here. In fact, they even support the use of <comments>. Just in case anyone reading the feed wants to read and post comments. How nice considering they don’t pay attention to this tag when publishing other people’s feeds.

So, they get it about half right. LiveJournal gets bigtime points for providing feeds of their users journals. But their support for subscribing to remote feeds has issues that annoy me greatly. It just feels kind of unfinished or not real polished to me. Which, unfortunately, is how a lot of things on LiveJournal feel to me.

John Russell: “Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.” [Quotes of the Day]

A bit of site admin stuff. Since I can never keep track of what episodes of what shows I’ve seen I’ve started an anime page here. It’s just a list of shows I’ve seen/am watching. It is currently a work in progress as I add stuff I see and that I remember I’ve seen. In some cases I’m including notes on the shows too.

Looking to work out and get back into shape? Having a hard time getting motivated? Maybe you need the help of Slaversize. That’s right, dominatrix led aerobics.

“If you don’t keep up, you get punished,” she warned her students at a recent class, which she oversaw with a nonstop string of insults and orders. “I don’t want to hear any whimpering. You’re here to suffer. [ABC News via BoingBoing]

This is just too funny. Xeni also weighs in on the subject over at BoingBoing, including a picture.

Heath Row mentions something I know I read about someplace recently called Art*o*mat. What is Art*o*mat?

Art*o*mat machines
are retired cigarette vending machines that
have been converted to vend art. Currently,
there are 43 active machines in museums and
various locations throughout the country.

How cool. There really needs to be one of these in the Boston area.

Just some random things as I wait for Dunkin to open so I can move my car:

• I just injured myself laughing after reading Davezilla’s 20 Stupidest Pet Names. Number 19, a bulldog named Bitch Tits, put me over the edge. All I could imagine is some old guy, or even better some little kid, wandering through the neighborhood trying to find his lost dog. You’d hear “Bitch Tits! Where are you Bitch Tits!” and “BIIIIIIITCH TIIIIITS!” and “Here Bitch Tits! *whistle*” echoing out across the houses.
• Antipixel has spam we will never see. The sad thing is, I could see them using some of these actually. I mean, I’ve gotten spam recently that advertises that I’ll be able to hit people with my penis (that one seems to be making the rounds again). I think the whole idea is to just get your attention any way possible.

• Boing Boing points to a report of minor sleep deprivation really screaing you over from Journal SLEEP

  Chronic restriction of sleep periods to 4 h or 6 h per night over 14 consecutive days resulted in significant cumulative, dose-dependent deficits in cognitive performance on all tasks. [Journal SLEEP]

  This actually doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve heard a few sleep experts say they think we’re all way behind on sleep in general.

• “Bad Girls Go To Hell” is no longer stuck in my head, but now “Belly of a Whale” is.
• Oh, yeah. Antipixel also now has a full RSS feed. Thank you! (I do actually still hit the actual pages on posts I like because I read the comments.)

Okay, time to move my car.

Evelle J. Younger: “An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.” [Quotes of the Day]

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned Turntables and Beer on here before. Every Tuesday night a bunch of us get together for beer, food, music, and the stealing of wireless bandwidth. I’ve taken pictures a few of the last times there, but am finally getting around to posting a bunch now. Nothing real incriminating here really. This last week’s big feature was the giant metal hook.

The next two entries are picture related. This first one is from tonight at the club. It was lots of fun, some people were a bit out of control. I unfortunately missed all the really incriminating photo ops. Mario spun a really funky set. Unfortunately, the one pic we took of the turntables when he was spinning he seems to have escaped from. I’m gonna try and get pics every couple of weeks. The next one will probably be when my sister is in town.

I’ve been meaning to post this fortune for a while. It just took me a few days to get to it.

Appearance can be deceiving.
Remember endurance makes gold.