SoylentNews

I can't stand April Fools Day. It's juvenile, and a complete waste of my time. Spare time is not something I have a lot of.

I can see the appeal it once had, when newspapers used to sneak ONE fake story in, somewhere on page 5 or 6. This days though, it seems as a news website you are not trying hard enough unless 90% of your stories are fake, with bonus points for how plausible they are. It means that reading news online on April 1st is completely pointless - you might as well just boycott all news sites for 24 hours.

Which is what I did, including SoylentNews - I'm sure the VT100 theme was funny to some - thankfully I didn't see it.

I'm trying to commit more to SN again. Recently I drifted away, the endless barrage of ACs posting offensive comments and the lack of proper discussion finally wore me down.

However, as part of my renewed commitment, here's some points:

1. I should post more. I should offer an opinion on everything, if only to get a discussion going.

2. I should write semi-regularly in this Journal. I have no other 'blogspace' on the Interweb, so this Journal can become the net for my thoughts.

3. I already mod a lot when I'm here. I use interesting/insightful a fair bit for registered users, and I use spam/troll/flamebait for ACs. Rarely do I mod up an AC as they have no Karma - If you want someone to care about what you say, put your name on it.

4. I should consider submitting more stories. I'm time limited though and all that link formatting takes time. Which is why I don't submit. I also can't get the vibe of the SN community as to what topics they like. I wonder if there's stats somewhere that show levels of engagement per story topic?

-Jar

I may be crazy, but I'm finding myself wanting an RSS feed just for SN Journals. It'd be like a blog-roll in my RSS reader of everyone's journal entries, which would be cool, and make for easy reading on slow news days...

Am I crazy...? should I head on over to the repository and submit it as a request? Not sure...

I'm guessing the popularity of SN is increasing, as I now find myself having to filter out lame ACs and 0 rated comments on a regular basis... in a way this is a GOOD thing as it shows that SN is still attracting new members, but it's still annoying all the same.

A message to the newly joined and all those ACs - this is NOT /. so please:

a) start being more polite on your comments - civility costs nothing
b) think before you comment - are you adding to the conversation?
c) refrain from tit-for-tat one line responses (such as '...and so's your mom')
d) swear freely when appropriate, but temper your language when expletives add nothing to your point - no one likes a potty mouth.

Thank you, and good night.

-Jar

Techi-challenge of the day:

I'm looking for something to convert an analog video+audio source to a http/rtsp/mms type network stream for easy pick up in any network aware media player.

Does anyone know of such a thing that doesn't cost the earth?

(See this SN comment for context)

I've just run off and registered greyweb.org (almost went with greyweb.me, then spotted that one of the 'holy-three' tlds was still available) - not sure what I'll do with it, other than maybe run a small blog talking about 'underground' net-systems or whatever.

My second idea was a no-ip.com type thing (hostname.greyweb.org) but with a built-in index on www.greyweb.org so people could find (if you wanted them to) the stuff you were hosting. I'm not a tor fan, and for some running tor is too close to the real Darknet that they don't want to - sometimes just not hosting out on the public cloud is enough.

Anyone got any other thoughts of stuff I could put on it?

(Of course the first thing to do is a robots.txt with full disallow).

-Jar

Over the past few days the submissions queue has been getting very low. Other than resolving to actually try to submit more, it led me to wonder if SN are posting articles too frequently?

Counting back the past 3 days, there were 12,13 and 14 articles per day. Some of these only had single digits for comments before being bumped off the top spot by newer article.

Surely if this site is all about the discussion and not the articles themselves then letting stories linger a bit before releasing a new one, would be more beneficial.

What's the criteria for the article release frequency, and does it need to be slowed down a bit?

This one is for the regular submitters...

When submitting to SN (and previously I guess, /.) what do you use to quickly write up your summaries and insert/check your embedded links? Do you just use the text box on the Submit Story page, or do you use something else offline or online?

Reason I ask - I've been pipped to the post attempting to submit stories a few times now as I'm clearly spending too much time formatting my submission. :(

All thoughts on this and how to improve my workflow greatly appreciated. :)

Well, that was snuck in... The SoylentNews RSS feed now has summaries in it. Yay! I only noticed as I went to check it in preparation for my own effort to build a summaries feed - I don't have to bother now :)

However, whom ever did it, has got the encoding of the <description> tags wrong; You don't escape the html inside, you wrap the whole lot in CDATA tags like so:

<description>
  <![CDATA[This is the summary text complete with <i>HTML tags</i>.]]>
</description>

Or, you do what Slashdot does, and strip all formatting and links out forcing the reader to click through to the main site (not a fan of this, but I can see why as a site admin you'd want to do it).

-Jar

One of today's 'funny' quotes at the bottom of SN pages is:

FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #31
A: Chicken Teriyaki. Q: What is the name of the world's oldest kamikaze pilot?

As a collector of such 'funny' quote lists in my youth during the early days of the Internet, I know that many of these lists are legacy and over two decades old, however in today's enlightened world, many of them are just simply offensive. This one today, is basically 'casual racism' which I'm sure is not something SN want's to be associated with.

I'd happily spend some time cleaning the quote list up (I have a large collection of similar quotes that do not offend) but I have no idea where in the SN backed it lives or even how to get to it. :(