You have to hand it to whoever does the sub-editing for the New Scientist RSS feeds; they understand that us busy interweb types don’t have time to read unnecessary articles:

Guess I can skip that one, then.

Next week’s feature: “Liposuction a great alternative to healthy diet and exercise, say plastic surgeons.”

Well, I hope you’ve all had a nice long holiday weekend – even if the weather was as rotten as it was here in Velcro City. I hardly noticed, though – I’ve been busy.

One of the many things I’ve been doing over the weekend is playing around behind the scenes at T3A Space, the new-look blog-style website for TTA Press (publisher of short genre fiction magazines Interzone, Crimewave and Black Static). T3A is where updates and story acceptances for the TTA stable are posted, and over the coming months it’s going to grow into a content-rich site with lots of good stuff to read.

Andy (TTA’s head honcho) already had things looking sexy with an eye-catching theme (luckily – as, having seen VCTB, no one in their right mind would set me loose on the aesthetics of a website), but yours truly has been hacking about with the ergonomics and functionality. Upgrades include a working spam-free comments system, and lots of other behind-the-curtain search-engine friendly stuff. There’s still work to be done, but things are looking good so far.

I’ve also set the RSS feed for the site to run through Feedburner, which is a very easy operation but well worth the time invested. But if you click through, you’ll see the subscription counter sat at a lowly first-day count of zilch, zero, nada.

So, here’s the challenge – I’d like you all to subscribe to the T3A RSS feed, which I’ve made extra easy by linking to it there. You don’t even have to click more than once! Let’s see if we can’t get that counter to show something a little more impressive than zero by tomorrow, eh?

It has been pointed out to me that my feeds are not showing complete posts; this is not intentional on my part, but apparently is intentional on the part of the WordPress development people.

I have unearthed a hack that should put things back to the (very satisfactory) way they were before, but I’ll have to wait until I get home to actually sort it out. In the meantime, thanks for your patience; regular service will be resumed as soon as is practicably possible.

Looks like starting your own feed crawler bot is becoming quite a fad. Continue reading “Creepy crawlers”

I love the internet-as-platform, and I love my RSS newsreading malarkey. Continue reading “The curse of Web2.0″

Ah, the web as a platform. I love it; so much good stuff to play with. Continue reading “Web 2.0 goodies”

I was getting paranoid…does anyone read this damn site? Continue reading “VCTB now running out RSS through Feedburner”