Rubénerd :)

To those who auto-post their Tumblr to Twitter: DON’T! Or make it fit in 140 characters. I hate constantly reading truncated … tweets! If this means putting titles on your Tumblr entries like bloggers figured out how to do ten years ago, so be it.

I’ve resorted to filtering out all tweets that include "…", but I worry I’m missing some of your important commentary, such as this.

Your Twitter friend :)
~ Ruben(erd)

Having let more unread posts pile up like a massive pile of unread posts, I’ve decided once and for all to declare Google Reader bankruptcy. George Bush, I Can Haz Bailout?

Read this post >

In case you’re still subscribed to my blog through the old address (pictured above) but don’t follow my shared items in The Google Readers I’m passing this message I posted along with my sincerest apologies!

Sorry for the flurry of blog posts everyone! I had a DNS problem so if you’re subscribed to my blog through the old URL still, you probably just got whacked with two dozen new posts. Forgive me, I’ll try not to let it happen again!

While I have the RSS feed from my old side redirecting, if you’re still subscribed through the old address I encourage you to move over to the new one, if only because it seems Google Reader updates it more often and is more reliable. Thanks :).

Checking my Google Reader page this evening I noticed all of a sudden I have 18 readers for my main RSS feed here at Rubenerd.com, and 34 readers for the old URL bringing the total to 52! I do admit I started blogging because I enjoy writing about my weird and disparate interests first and foremost, but it’s another world of good feeling knowing a few of you are interested in some of it too.

<Cheesyness> So I just wanted to get all soppy for a second and send out a thank you and a hug to all of you for thinking my material here was worthwhile enough to warrant some of the time from your hectic electronic lives. Its a fulfilling feeling that has helped a socially awkward, introverted guy like me in ways you can’t imagine. </cheesyness>

I’ll try my best to minimise the number of typos and grammar mistakes :). I chose the above photo from my Flickr account because it looked all dramatic and the primary colour is similar to uncooked grilled cheese sandwiches.

Peace, health and happiness,
~ Ruben

It’s killing me that I don’t remember where I heard this, but someone made the comment that many of us online are almost welcoming the demise of newspapers because we think they’re outdated dinosaurs, yet at the same time we complain about being overwhelmed by all the content streaming in from web feeds we subscribe to!

Read this post >

Time for some shameless self promotion! I’ve started a new website for a pet project of mine that isn’t a website at all, it’s just an RSS feed. Technically I could have published all the stuff here on my blog, but I thought I’d give this a try.

http://rubenerd.com/puzzles.xml

Some people start blogs about their obsession with cupcakes, so I’ve decided to create one to keep track of the pretty sudoku puzzles I try to do on a regular basis. I figure my blog already has enough stuff on it, and I don’t want to fill up my Flickr account which already has enough things that aren’t photos!

To keep things simple, this page is just an RSS feed I craft myself. Most modern browsers will generate a pretty page when they encounter a web feed, which means I don’t have to worry about CMSs, HTML, themes, maintenance, blasted PHP! You can even subscribe to it if you really care.

Peace, health and happiness ^_^
~ Ruben (@Rubenerd)

Here’s an idea for a Google Reader feature that in my opinion is long overdue. If Reader attempts to fetch a web feed and it encounters a 301 permanent redirect to a legitimate new address it should update its own records in user accounts to point to the new address instead of still pinging the old one.

I ask for my own selfish reasons because as of now more people are still subscribed to my blog here through the old http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/feed/ address instead of http://rubenerd.com/feed/. Each request to the old URI takes more effort and bandwidth than the new one, and I’ve noticed items that appear in the new one instantly can sometimes take an hour or longer to appear in the old one. An automatic update would fix this.

Good idea?

As I’ve eluded to previously I gave up on Firefox 3.5.x on my MacBook Pro OS X and FreeBSD partitions because it was far too unstable to use without going bat crazy insane. I left Windows for a reason!

For some reason though going back to 3.0.x has caused Google Reader to generate a few errors a day after not having any trouble at all. It could very well be a problem with our home internet connection here not Firefox but it is a weird coincidence.

If it weren’t for the fact all my friends from Twitter, Whole Wheat Radio and the real world used it I’d probably go back to Bloglines full time. In fact at one point I was going to research whether I could subscribe to people’s Google shared items and comments in Bloglines and have people subscribe to my Bloglines shared items and comments from Google Reader. Might be worth looking into again.

I’ve figured out why some iTunes users have been reporting problems with subscribing to the Rubenerd Show through the iTunes Store. I deleted my own subscription, searched for "Rubenerd Show" in the iTunes Store and resubscribed to only be given a small circle and an exclamation point.

When I right clicked and chose "Show Description" I was given the above dialog box. No wonder it isn’t working, it’s trying to access new shows from http:///show/feed/ for some reason!

I don’t know how or why this happened. I’ll be contacting Apple about this to see if I can get it pointing back to the proper URI again. I believe my good friend Felix Tanjono submitted my podcast to the iTunes Store back in 2005 back when Australia and Singapore didn’t have access to it.

While I’m sorting this out you can still go to iTunes, choose the Advanced menu and click Subscribe to Podcast, then enter the following address as a stopgap:

http://rubenerd.com/show/feed/

Sorry about this, I don’t know how this could have happened :-(.

For those of you subscribed to my blog through an aggregator using the old URL for the RSS feed instead of the new one, you may have noticed four recent posts with identical timestamps. You probably don’t care why this happened, but I’m so excited I just have to relay it!

When I moved from Servage to Segment Publishing because the former was absolutely awful and because I had so much success with the latter for other projects, I also took the opportunity to move the site back to Rubenerd.com which I had previously lost to domain squatters. RubenerdShow.com was still with Servage, but all it contained was a simple .htaccess script to redirect all requests to the new domain.

Well as of today, I finally got around to moving the domain off Servage and onto Segment Publishing including said text file. This means, FINALLY, I am completely, 110% off Servage. I don’t have anything hosted with them whatsoever. Clear as mud!

I’m putting the finishing touches on my post detailing what an awful webhost Servage is but it won’t be ready for a few days. Another post I’m positive you’re all anxiously awaiting ;-).