The Deets

The majority of the content I read online is read through one website: Google Reader. This site allows me to pull in stories from blogs and news sites that interest me, so rather than bouncing through a bunch of bookmarks every day, I simply go to my Google Reader account and read through all of the new posts from sites that interest me.

How many sites and stories? According to the trends reporting within my account, I’m currently reading around 375 stories per day that are generated by 353 unique feeds.

I’d have to clone myself many times over in order to directly visit 353 unique websites every day.

Which brings me to Paul Schmelzer’s Eyeteeth blog. I love the stuff Paul writes about on that site. However, it was absolutely painful for me to read his site because he was truncating his blog’s RSS feed. When I went to read his stories in Google Reader I’d only see a headline along with the first couple sentences of his posts.

In many cases, I just unsubscribe from sites like this. In Paul’s case, I added him to a purgatory folder within my Google Reader account I’ve labeled “Truncated.” At the end of the day after reading everything else that interested me, I’d either take a peak into the truncated folder or click the “Mark all as Read” button to wipe it clean.

But something recently changed at Eyeteeth. Paul stopped truncating his feed! In my opinion, this makes his blog 80% better since I can now read 100% rather than 20% of his posts from within Google Reader. Or would that make it 400% better?

According to Paul, he made the change after Aaron mentioned the truncated post problem to him. And Aaron mentioned it to him after Aaron and I had a beer inspired bitch-fest about how much we liked - yet hated - Paul’s blog because it was truncated. Which proves that beer makes the world better.

Holy Crap: DeRusha’s WCCO feed isn’t truncated anymore? People, you need to put the word out about this sort of thing. I’ve gone 6 months without Jason!

Now, if only MinnPost would give me more than a headline and 2 sentences to work with . . .

There is a blog I used to read all the time. We’re talking every post they wrote. I would find something interesting enough to write about from their site around once a month on average and link to their site from here.

But not they’ve switched to truncated feeds. I thought about this before writing this because I originally planned on writing about something I read there but decided to skip that in favor of this blather because I didn’t want to reward them with a link and traffic after they made the idiotic decision to switch to truncated feeds.

For those of you who’ve gotten this far and have no idea what I’m talking about, go sign up for Google Reader. Once you’ve subscribed to some sites, you’ll find that some sites publish their entire articles for people to read within the program using a code called RSS while others only provide a title and short summary. This is basically a backlash post about the latter.

I feel like offering some unsolicited advice to MinnPost.com. If you’re not into techie web stuff, just move on now.

Last week, I mentioned that MinnPost.com’s pre-launch site’s lack of an RSS feed was kind of scary considering how important RSS is to the news hounds the site is apparently targeting.

This led to a quick response from Matt Grey in the comments, pointing to the RSS feed and mentioning that it was available from the News page of the site.

Less than a week later, here is what I’m seeing:

1. The initial press release was added to the RSS feed, but truncated. Not sure why.

2. A story was published to the RSS feed today, but was slightly truncated. Not sure why.

3. A progress report was published to the site on 8/27, but never showed up in the RSS feed. Not sure why.

4. The Featured Journalists and MinnPost Press articles on MinnPost.com never made it into the RSS feed. Not sure why.

5. The “news” section has been renamed “Progress” and the RSS feed is no longer available from that section.

6. New sections, Press and Journalists, have been added, and do not have discoverable RSS feeds.

7. There is no permalink to the 9/4 progress report.

8. Or the 8/27 progress report.

9. The 9/4 progress report isn’t available under the “Progress” section of the site.

10. It’s strange how few blog write-ups of the MinnPost.com announcement have made the press page. Compare the press page to Google’s results for the term “Minnpost.com” to get a feel for this. Where’s Chuck Olson, Charles Quimby, or MNSpeak, to name just three? As far as I can tell, unless the write-up came from either the online side of a traditional media site or the blog of a media insider, it didn’t make the cut.

This all may seem picky, but it raises what I see as legitimate concerns about their understanding of web technologies and the role of blogging in online journalism.

BTW, if MinnPost.com is looking for an easy way to fix most of the stuff listed above, here’s how to do it:

1. Install Wordpress. It’s free.
2. Slap the current logo into a comparable Wordpress theme.
3. Copy/paste the current stories into Wordpress.
4. Set a 301 redirect from the current feed’s location to MinnPost.com/feed/

Less than 2 hours of work and you’ll have a platform that’s probably easier to use and will scale nicely between now and the launch of the site. I’d also consider using that as a permanent press center at the domain minnpost.com/blog

The pages load times on The Deets over the past few days have been painful, as if the server was approaching the peak of Everest with a piano in tow. I finally had a chance to look into why this was happening and figured it out.

The left column used to have a feature called “Recent Posts from Friends” or some sort of similar term. It used an RSS aggregation service called FeedBlendr to pull together the recent posts from around a dozen sites into one single feed, and the “blended” feed was then syndicated onto this site.

Apparently, FeedBlendr hasn’t had enough fiber in it’s diet lately, so The Deets was becoming backed up when the page load reached the FeedBlendr request. FeedBlendr would eventually get it out with some squeezing, but it was a painful process.

So, FeedBlendr is gone.

It’s worth noting that the problem may not be with FeedBlendr but with one of the feeds I has mixed in the blendr. That’s something I’ll check out on another day.

While digging around, I noticed the Flickr photos in the upper right-hand corner of the site didn’t have dimensions in the HTML code, so the server didn’t know how much room to set aside for the photos until they loaded. Fixed as well.

Back to the regularly scheduled programming.

As a web geek who blogs, this really connected with me. I’m curious to know if less geeky types find it informative too:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/6gmP4nk0EOE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Via Frank Gruber.

Here’s how you can make a custom Google homepage:

1. Go to www.google.com/ig

2. Login with your gmail address if you aren’t already logged in.

3. Now you’re logged in, but you probably see some marginally relevant headlines. How about adding The Deets?

4. Click the Add Stuff link along the right side of the screen.

5. Click “Add by URL” near the search box at the top of the screen.

6. Paste the following URL into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDeets

7. That’s it. Now the latest headlines from The Deets will come directly to your Google Homepage (you can adjust how many headlines you like by clicking the Edit link next to the section’s header).

PS: Consider changing your browser’s homepage to http://www.google.com/ig so it will be the first thing you see when you open your browser.

An adoring fan writes:

“I really like that I receive the daily emails with your latest deets updates now. Since you know I don’t like bothering to click on links to go outside of my email, this is perfect, the newest deets come straight to me!“

Great point, loyal reader. What better way is there to break up the work day than a fresh serving of Deets from The Deets? Subscribing is free and easy along the right column of every page.

“And I like that the whole article comes to me. In our [name removed to protect the guilty] google groups, it only sends the first 2 or 3 lines, then after that, to keep reading you have to click out to the actual google group. Thumbs down to that.”

I couldn’t agree more. The Deets is all about taking care of our loyal readers. Why would I force the people I care about most to click through to finish reading my latest ramblings? Not gonna happen. Full RSS feeds are the bomb diggity.

Reader feedback is always welcome. High priority emails can be sent to my PayPal account.

If you happen to be one of my fabulous readers who reads my blathering using a mobile RSS reader like Bloglines Mobile, you may have noticed that I don’t like using apostrophes. I’d just like you to know that I’m not really opposed to apostrophes. The problem appears to be caused by Wordpress taking my rather boring straight up and down apostrophes and turning them into sexier slanted apostrophes, which Bloglines mobiles then fails to display.

So, while I may have plenty of grammatical issues, I swear putting an apostrophe between the ‘n’ and ‘t’ in ain’t ain’t one of them.