If you’re like me (and surely you are), you’ll be happy to learn that Google News has added RSS feeds for its news sections and individual searches.
Personally, the section feeds are worthless to me, because I think the Google News front-page auto-aggregator is worthless. But for news topics I monitor regularly — events from Ecuador and Taiwan, for example — being able to subscribe to a feed for these searches is a real boon.
(Via Micropersuasion.)
Tokyo? Nope. Seoul? Uh-uh. London? No. New York? Try again.
As the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof says in his column today*, it’s in Hermiston, Oregon, a town of less than 25,000. Amazing stuff — the hotspot stretches for some 600 square miles. (My Dad lives in Pendleton, not far away.)
Back in early 2003, when I was living in Ecuador, I rode atop the famous Nariz del Diablo (Devil’s Nose) train. And one of my favorite pics from the journey was this image of me and a vendor who climbed atop the train and was selling his wares during one of the stops:
(for a bigger version, click here. The photo would’ve been better without the annoying German guy sticking his head up behind us. But anyway.)
I subscribe to an RSS feed (What is RSS? you say) for Flickr photos tagged “Ecuador,” and today this one was delivered to me. It’s a photo of the same vendor — and interestingly, though the pic was just uploaded, it appears to have been taken some three years before I met the guy, before he traded in his traditional bowler’s cap for his (probably pirated) Yankess woolie:
Update: Sorry, this photo is no longer available on Flickr, it seems.
One of Flickr’s most useful features is that it allows users to associate their images with “tags,” thus liberating them from individual albums. And discovering such photos is simple with RSS. Pretty cool stuff, if you ask me.
AFP:
“PHNOM PENH – A teenage craze for sending doctored naked images of female celebrities to each other by mobile phones sparked a demand by a Cambodian minister for government action against pornography.
I can now die a happy geek.
Last week, I sent a New York Times article about a Starbucks knockoff in Ethopia to the most popular blog on the Web, BoingBoing. Technology journalist/Internet starlet Xeni Jardin posted it, as well as a link back to newley.com.
The idea of world-wide Starbucks rip-offs has since gained momentum, spurring numerous follow-up posts. Thus, I gleefully take credit for staring my very first meme (though I hate that term).
Occam’s Razor is a theory that states that the simplest explanation is always best. And so it was with a little newley.com bug that I finally got around to fixing just now.
Those of you reading this page on Internet Exploder Explorer will note that newley.com is finally rendering correctly. Before, the sidebar on the left was often pushed down below the main column.
I’d assumed the problem, which had been nagging at me since I redesigned the site, was due to CSS or some other WordPress-related issue. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the coding for the site to no avail. But, alas, I remedied it by simply adjusting the photos I post here so that they fit in the main column.
Internet Explorer doesn’t resize such images; the vastly superior Firefox (or, as Mike F. reommends, Camino), does that automatically.
So the lesson: use Firefox. (It’s becoming more and more popular, but IE is still controls close to 90% of the browser market .) And always focus on the simplest fixes first.
(P.S. newley.com loads correctly on IE version 6, but leave a comment below if it doesn’t look right in an older version of IE — or any other browser you’re using.)
Some of you might’ve noticed that I’ve slowly been outsourcing all of my photos to flickr, the excellent Web-based photo management service. I’d experimented with it before and I liked it, but I found that the free version’s alloted storage space made it impractical. But then Wendy H. kindly hooked me up with a free pro account, and that changed everything.
In the same way that iTunes liberated my music from CDs, so too has flickr made my old photos — many of which had been lost deep in the bowels of newley.com — accessible once again.
I give you, therefore, virtually all of my digital pics; I’m still adding new images in bits and pieces, so stay tuned. Just last night I uploaded the pics from my first and second Thailand trips (back in ’01 and ’02, respectively), as well as my first ‘Nam journey (in ’02).
Ben P., my climate scientist ex-roommate currently living in Oz and apparently scanning headlines from Taiwan, sends this along:
Newley: I assume you heard about this while in Taiwan – you better start collecting those metro cards quick – could eventually be a thing of the past.
Actually, Ben, I hadn’t seen that news — and I’m all the happier that I’ve already got the Taipei card in my possession! I better start beefing up my collection before less tech-savvy cities start doing the same…