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KPAO - KSTS - 0O5 - KPAO
Yesterday, I completed my second cross-country solo flight. Palo Alto to Sonoma County for lunch with Dad. Then on to Davis, then back to Palo Alto. 3.0 hours on the Hobbs meter. One more step towards my private pilot’s license.
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Aggregators Integrated With Email Clients
Dave mentions the reasons that Scoble uses an aggregator that’s integrated with his email client. I have wondered why people would do that. With the ever-increasing spam load that everyone has to deal with, it would seem to me that the last thing I would want is more stuff in my Inbox. Scoble lists two things as advantages to this type of set-up: easy ability to email items of interest, and ease of saving items for later.
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What I Did With My Weekend
I cranked pretty hard on some new features for Bloglines. We rolled out the Bloglines Notifier, which is a tiny (100kb) Windows application that puts a little icon in your system tray. Whenever you have new items in your Bloglines account, the icon changes and a little window pops up. Great for, well, being notified that you have new things to read. Tomorrow we’ll be rolling out a couple of additional features, as suggested by our great users.
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Big Bloglines News
Yesterday, we announced that Bloglines supports blogrolls. See that list of links on the left side of my blog? That’s automatically generated by Bloglines, based on my subscriptions there. We’ve tried to make it very flexible; you can have it show only an individual folder. You can mark specific subscriptions public or private. In other big Bloglines news, on Monday we passed 4 million blog entries in our database. This is a huge resource of knowledge, and it’s completely searchable.
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Nice Bloglines Mention
I’m nose to the grind-stone working on Bloglines, which seems to continue to gain traction. Here’s a nice article on RSS and Newspapers, with a great mention of Bloglines. Thanks! I’ve mainly been working on backend issues with Bloglines, stuff that’s not user visible. It should be done this week, which is good because working on new features is always more fun.
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Miscellaneous
Yesterday I took another step in my flying career. I completed my second supervised solo. This now means that I can go practice without having my instructor around. Of course, I’m subject to many limitations, on weather and other things. But still, I’m very happy. Bloglines continues to gain momentum. I’m getting an amazing amount of great feedback. Everyone who uses it seems to really like the service. I just need to continue to focus on getting the word out, and continue to roll out new features.
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Pigs Fly
Today, after two months of flying lessons, and dozens upon dozens of supervised take-offs and landings, I soloed for the first time. I did 3 take-offs and landings on my own at Palo Alto, in Citabria N5054B. Below is a picture of the plane and I after the flight. Right after that picture was taken, as per tradition, the back of my shirt was cut off and marked up to commemorate the event.
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Miscellaneous
Some bits:
The Forbes article that I’m mentioned in appears in print this Friday, so I’m told. There might even be a picture of me in it, so hide the children. I’ve noticed with Bloglines that a sizeable percentage of users use a tagged email address. This is a special purpose email address, usually with the word ‘bloglines’ in it. While tagged addresses are an interesting attempt to thwart spammers, it really shows how badly the war against spam has been going.
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What A Slashdotting Means
On Saturday, my other site, Trustic, was Slashdotted. It was the top story for 3 hours or so, I’m told. Fantastic. You always hear about the ‘Slashdot effect’, of how it funnels so much traffic to linked sites, that they go down in a steaming pile of dead server hardware. Well, that didn’t happen to Trustic. Between Saturday evening and 11:59pm Sunday night, Trustic served about 36,000 pages. Not hits, pages.
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Welcome Slashdot Readers!
Trustic was mentioned on Slashdot yesterday. Hundreds of people have signed up for the service because of the mention, and we’re grateful. The service handled the load fine, which is good because I was away from a computer almost the entire time. Please also visit Bloglines, my other service. Bloglines is a web news aggregator. You can stay up to date with Slashdot and thousands of other sites easily with Bloglines.