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Paul's Time Sink

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Xcast

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 23:37

XcastXcast is a great podcatcher for Mac OS X.  With the best iTunes integration that I have seen.  Instead of just adding the downloaded content to a playlist, Xcast adds the tracks to iTunes, in the Podcast section, under the correct podcast entry.  This allows an it to appear on the iPod in the Podcast section of the UI.

The developer has created a screencast of Xcast, that really shows how well integrated this is with iTunes.

Now, I have told iTunes not to download podcasts, but will do it from Xcast.

[via TUAW]

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Google Reader suggestions

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 22:18

I have been using Google Reader a little bit, and there are some things that I would love to see. (I have sent this feedback to Google Labs, but I wanted to post it here so if some Googler had extra 20% time)

  1. Personal url for the mobile version of the interface.  Google already does this for rss feeds of "starred" items in Google Reader, and for sharing calendars in Google Calendar.  This will make it easier view on a cell phone, where if may be hard to keep entering email address and password.
  2. Provide a way, on the regular and mobile version, to mark the posts that are in the current view as read.
  3. Be able to only have certain rss feeds appear in the mobile view.  For example, there isn't any reason to show podcast on a cell phone.

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Akismet effectiveness

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 21:33

I have been using the Akismet plugin for LifeType for a while, and I have been pretty impressed.  It has worked well  enough for me to disable the captcha plugin for comments. 

I also modified the plugin to call the akismet service for trackbacks.  I found that it didn't block all of the spam trackbacks.  I re-enabled the Validate Trackbacks plugin and this has blocked all spam trackbacks.

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Mon.itor.us notifications

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 21:05

A while ago, I mentioned how I was going to try mon.itor.us since I was getting spurious downtime messages from SiteUptime, even though the servers are up.  For the past few days, I have been getting downtime notifications from mon.itor.us, event though the servers are up.  I think that the are having networking problems.

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