Worker.digital.info

Mark Paschal's Kit Radio Tool really rocks! It replaces the standard Radio News Aggregator with one that has filters (text, time, span), grouping, date stamping, and color coding. Using the Kit Aggregator it is now possible to subscribe to dozens of feeds, group them by interest category, filter the category by time or key words, and get only a small subset of the thousands of possible articles. This is very nice.

I believe such filtering is critical to effective use of RSS and Aggregators in K-Log environments, where you may need to filter down to key articles that pertain to project- or time-specific topics. Oddly, a search for Paschal's name on the K-Logs Yahoo! Group yields zero results. I would think the other K-Loggers would have discussed this improvement.

Installation is a snap, directions are clear, and after a little experimentation use seems pretty intuitive. Oh yeah, Kit does all sorts of other things like run scripts, search weblogs, change time/date stamps on posts, edit outlines, and probably other things I don't understand. But if it didn't do anything more than give me control over the aggregator it would be a winner.

Paschal also makes Stapler, an RSS generator you can use to create feeds for sites that do't have them. Once you create the feeds Stapler will store them locally, update them, and even aggregate them into combined feeds. Pretty cool.

Another gem found courtesy of [Russ Lipton Documents Radio].

Aggregator Redux

7:18:53 AM

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I've been using AmphetaDesk while on the road. I think it has some configuration options I haven't quite grasped yet. I know Morbus Iff is going to add grouping in the next release. Some aging and auto-delete control would be nice, too.

Nothing beats being able to post directly to the weblog, though. I miss that. It's a pain to have to do the cut-and-paste routine 2-3 times to get the URL, the title, the copy, etc. How do other weblogs do that? Do blogger and such have aggregator facilities or some interface element that lets users post from third-party aggregators?

Deep-seated Insecurities

7:17:03 AM

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I like the idea of remote access. I'm gonna do it. Soon. I don't like the security issues. I think I'll have to setup a special machine that runs only the apps I want to access remotely, and has no access to other network resources. I'll have to figure out the stupid Windoze Users and Groups permissions so the machine runs in something less than Administrator mode. Lots of programs don't seem to run well like that. I don't know if that's my fault or the programmer's.

If I do this I guess I'll be a "remote" user all the time, huh? Even from my primary machine I'll be accessing Radio over the network. Wonder if there are any performance issues. I'll have to experiment.

What about a software VPN? Doesn't Windoze have something built-in? It would be nice to have access to my files -- at least a subset of files. Ugh. Document management. Versions. Keeping track. Argh-h-h-h. Must be a better way. Anyone have a suggestion for accessible doc storage? I know X-Drive and all those silly "hard drive in the sky" operations have shut down, and I don't know that I trusted them anyway. I guess putting them in a pwd-protected subdirectory on my web host is about as good as it gets. But then there's uploading, file management, versions, keeping track. Ugh.

Maybe I just share out the D: drive on the host machine, mount that across the network and store my project docs and stuff there. Wouldn't be too hard to have a projects or work folder. Since my other machines wouldn't be on when I was gone there would be no chance of getting to them.