July, 18, 2005 archives

kevin roderick passes on the old news that the los angeles times is working with another company to build an rss aggregator. what a terrible idea. the first step for the times should be to publish their own damn rss/atom feeds.

when i graduated college (ten years ago!), one of the places i applied to work was the times. they didn’t get back to me before i had found a job. while at the gym this morning, all that was going through my head is how much of a blast i could have at a place like the times if simply given a mandate to kick ass. (another is that i am probably way more qualified to do that now than i would be even if i had been working at the times for that last ten years.)

if it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur, it should also be a great time for everyone trying to do kick-ass things on the web. if i were at the times, and the team at a paper from a small town in kansas was continuously out-innovating me, i’d go nuts. especially when they have have released their web-building framework as open-source, and the best thing i’ve got going is an rss aggregator that is going to suck being built by an external company.

tomorrow, ana marie cox, editor of wonkette, will be the featured guest for the zócalo lecture series at the central library, with mickey kaus of kausfiles moderating. i’ll be the one who looks like he wishes there weren’t so many other people there.

damian conway’s “ten essential development practices” article (via daring fireball) may appear on perl.com, but the basics are applicable to any software project.

i would put “use a revision control system” way at the top of the list, and i would also add “use a bug-tracking system.”