recursion

The Economist: Partisan-in-chief. I don't agree with the Economist's stance on the Iraqi war, but they've got the analysis right in this piece. Bush is somehow managing to kick the Democrat's asses in the campaign.

It makes me wonder: When did the flag become a Republican Symbol?

What's up with that? As I've said before, I agree that more often than not, patriotism is the sign of a scoundrel. So when I see people decked out in American flags, I immediately think "conservative". It shouldn't have to be that way. The flag stands for the American nation, and the nation is supposed to stand up for freedom, equality, and opportunity. And it does, sometimes. But when I see people waving the flag around, I don't think they want to stand up for those things. They want to go kill people for some reason, shove Jesus in my face, keep people in jail for hurting no one but themselves, strangle mass transit, and tell me that if I don't like it, I should go back to Russia, or where ever the regime de jour is.

I don't like that. I want to be able to do whatever I want to my own body. I don't want people to hate my country because we keep fucking theirs up. I don't want morality to be legislated. Does this mean I "hate" America? No. It means I want to be free.

Well, I've been using AmphetaDesk for a couple of weeks now and I really like it. It does take some of the fun out of visiting dozens of unique sites each day, but then again, it takes most of the time out of visiting dozens of sites each day, too. After using AD for only a few days, I started becoming annoyed at sites without RSS feeds. It's almost like they don't exist anymore for me.

What follows is a short list of features I'd like to see added to AmphetaDesk. These are ordered from most to least important to me.

I'd like to check items as read and delete them. Most aggregators have this feature, and it is the #1 feature I'd like to see. This would solve the problem where people who have long weblog entries (which I've read already anyway) make the AmphetaDesk page terribly long.

I run AmphetaDesk on my colocated server so I can access it where ever I happen to be. This works great...except that if anyone finds my installation, they can totally fuck with it. I don't mind people reading my feeds, but editing them should require authorization. I know this is a non-issue for most users of AmphetaDesk, who use it on their local machine. But I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation.

Relative images are not displayed correctly.

Being able to searching for channel by title/description would be nice. I know the metadata sucks, but it'd still useful. I understand this feature is in the works.

The globe icon on the "My Channels" page is unnecessary -- clicking on the title of the website takes you to it (as it should). More to the point, I don't think the globe icons should stand in for links anywhere in the application. They are too small and more ambiguous than textual links. These icons are a disease lifted wholesale from Radio Userland, and they should be taken out back and shot. Links are easier to click on and a ubiquitous user interface on the web. Edward Tufte has written a lot about this. He says that the words should be the interface, and I agree with him.

There is too little distinction between the names of the "Channels Home" and "My Channels" links. They need better, more descriptive and distinct names.

I would like a visible preference for how to sort the channels (alphabetically, chronologically, etc).

Feeds which start with "A", "An", "The" should be sorted by the first word which is not an article, like a book title.

It'd be nice to display all the stories together, regardless of channel. But if I could check stories as read, this probably wouldn't be necessary. In fact, this idea may be totally stupid.

I know it's wrong and immoral, but I wish invalid feeds with invalid XML were displayed anyway. :)

My coworker Nick sent me this site:

Microsoft Proxy Server, the quick way to force everyone to use MSIE on your corporate network.

I like the "handshake" graphic. Heh.