RSS-Spider

I love Google. Every time I turn around they’ve got some new and cool tool for using the web. A few months ago they introduced Google Site maps which allows web managers to upload sitemaps to Google so it knows where to spider. Recently Google updated the stats page of this system to show the top twenty search terms users searched for and found your site (in this case www.RSS-Spider.com) and clicked on. This saves me tons of time not having to go though all my weblogs and pull up this stuff manually.

I have to admint that most of the terms below I know nothing about… Robot Rage keeps popping up all over the place on my logs. I did a little digging and it’s actually a neat little free Flash game where you can build a “robot” (more like a car since you control it) and battle other players in an areana. You battle for points and more points you get the more “upgrades” you can make to your machine. Very very similar to the Battle Bots idea except no cheesey host.

Anyhow.. the list…

1 robot rage
2 robot rage rearmed cheats
3 amanda wenk
4 secret santa poems
5 robot rage cheats
6 amelle berrabah
7 natasha marley
8 son of dork website
9 son of dork official website
10 son of dork pictures
11 viezone
12 robot rage rearmed
13 roadrunner united guitar tabs
14 2hot4blog
15 sugababes ugly chords
16 son of dork
17 cheats for robot rage
18 brent corrigan
19 robot rage hacks
20 my hunps

One of three TV shows I have my Tivo set to tape is the Office which is the American Spin off of the BBC mocumentary/reality show from a few years ago. The show got off to a very lame start when they simply recycled the BBC scripts but came in to its own late last year with new and original writing. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed so much about the show is the way the sceens are shot. All camera angles keep very close to the “look and feel” of a reality show. Usually one camera very jery movements and very few close ups. Tonight’s episode tossed all that away. Dual camera closeup shots, and worst of all one of the main characters who had this tention for another exposed, pretty much pulling a Northern Exposure. The date June 10th has been set for a wedding and I suspect that that date is one week after the final show.

I’ve been reading a book I got for Christmas by Thomas A Limoncelli called Time Management for System Administrators. I’ve found it totally engrossing. So far in the 3 chapters that I’ve read I’ve been able to clear out the clutter in my office at my “real job”, start to focus on priorities a little better, and I’m even tempted to start using my Palm Pilot again. Now if I could only get everyone else in my office to read this book. Our research directory is constantlly frazzled… our production people are always on edge, and our sales reps are always in foul moods.

Tomorrows task is to clean out all the crap on my desk that has been sitting there since 2004. I’ve got a few files which I haven’t looked at in years which can go in the trash. The book also says that there should be zero distractions on your computer. A clean desktop is a focused mind. Task #2 will be to reduce the number of desktop icons from 8 columns to as few as possible. Again I’m sure some of them have been there for months without me using them.

With the free time I plan on working more on “my.rss-spider.com” Who wants to be a beta tester?

First Happy New Year to the both of you who read this page. Welcome 2006. May it be a great year.

Ok… now that thats out of the way our first big accomplishment of the year with RSS-Spider is to create a search bar plugin for Firefox. I had noticed some traffic coming from an odd Mozilla page tonight and see that Xavier Casto had created a search bar plug in for RSS-Spider. Cool… however, Firefox will only do GETS to search engines and RSS-Spider will only do POSTS. So Xavier created a special page somewhere on WISC.edu which would convert the GETS to POSTS. Well if WISC.edu goes down this isn’t much help and the plugin dies on the vine… or bar.

Now to avoid this I tooled around for about an hour reading the documentation on creating plugins and figured that I could easily create a GET->POST page. Ding ding ding. Well if you would now like to add our PLUGIN to your Firefox browser go to this page…

ADD RSS-SPIDER SEARCH BAR PLUGIN TO FIREFOX

Click on the link where prompted and you’ll then notice the RSS icon in the drop down search bar in the upper right hand corner of Firefox.

Happy New Year!