Back from the trout wars, and ready to dive in again (perhaps). I really should just do a linkdump to cover the highlights of the last couple of weeks, but my post count is in need of padding, so I'll be annoying and separate it all out. 'Ware, aggregators.
Julian Bond comments that it doesn't look terribly hard to hack Google's ToolBar PageRank report. I assume that by now Google's lawyers (who I picture as looking like Dilbert accounting trolls, only not so nice) have eaten him, polished the bones, and created a not-too-convincing Terminator around them, but if someone else wants to pick up the idea, that would be sweet. I understand that there are people who like the toolbar for search purposes, though I can't imagine why (if I want to search Google, I type 'google "shannon campbell"' in Firebird's addressbar, and it takes me right to a Google search with results from my site eliminated, if I want to search Google Images, I type 'gim Sandra Bullock naked', er, 'gim pretty butterflies', etc., thanks to Firebird's quick search bookmarks), but the approximate PageRank from the toolbar is one of the very few reasons why I fire up Internet Explorer anymore.
Playing around with Dave's new toy, the Start Menu News Aggregator, which is a tool that lets your Radio RSS aggregator create a Windows Start Menu folder full of folders for each RSS channel with new items, with a link to each new item in the folder, I realized that even though it's a shiny new toy, it's not quite what I want.
There are a lot of RSS feeds that I read completely in my aggregator: ones that combine the generosity of providing the full item in their RSS with either no comments, or a comment RSS feed that I subscribe to, so I don't have to go see what comments their entry might have, or a few that write about topics that interest me, but where I don't know enough to comment. Then there's another class where I routinely just open the item in a new tab, and read it there: people who churlishly only give me the first ten or twenty words, a very few big news sites that only syndicate titles (currently, The Register's the only one I'm tolerating), and sites with active comment threads where I'll always want to see what's there, and may well want to comment. For those, what I really want is a Phoenix bookmark group dropped into my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, where I can delete the ones I know I don't want to read (nine out of ten Reg articles), and then use the "Open in Tabs" item in the bookmark group to just open up my hour's worth of reading in one click, and delete the bookmark group with one more click. I don't even know if it's possible to create and populate a bookmark group from an external application, but now that it's occurred to me, I desperately want it. Pretty please?
(Meta-note: this entry starts a new category, the ironically named "Make this for me", for (fucking worthless) ideas for things I'd love to have, but don't know how to build. No, I don't expect that anyone will actually build any of it for me, but since every now and then I run across a good idea that someone else doesn't know how to build, but I do, I figure it's worth throwing a few of them out, just in case someone else who hadn't thought of doing it does know how.)