UPDATE: This post was written years ago when Safari Reader first came out. Surely it has changed by now, and people have figured out a good deal more about how it works. The important point I want to clarify here is that it is not (or no longer) dependent on RSS. Read on...
Are you a website owner? Have you seen the new "Reader" feature in Safari 5?
Basically, it allows your visitors to view a cleaned up version of the page you're viewing.
They can view your website without your formatting. Without your ads.
Haven't seen it yet?
Here's what it does.
Here's my blog...
And here's my blog with the "Reader" feature, got by clicking the "Reader" button in the address bar, where there's normally an RSS link.
It's a nice cleaned up page, easy reading. As a frequent blog reader, I think this is great. If you're cluttering up your website with ads, distractions, and poor design decisions, you're putting you first and me second. With this, in spite of you, I can read what you have to say.
As a website owner, why am I not up in arms?
I know, I know, my readers can read my page without ads. But that's ok.
Because to provide this information, Apple is using my RSS feed. This is content that I make available for syndication.
And by the way, this is what my blog has looked like for years in RSS readers.
(Actually Apple appears to do some extra cleaning up of the RSS feed to remove ads, tweetmeme stuff, etc. I'm guessing they're scrubbing it by removing anything that isn't on the website or is served from a third party.)
Want to Stop This Travesty?
If you don't want people to do stuff like this with your content, then don't syndicate it. It's that simple. If you don't offer RSS or Atom feeds, then this simply won't work.
Or switch to partial feeds instead of full feeds. The "Reader" feature won't work with partial feeds either.
Safari Reader doesn't work without full RSS feeds available for the given page.
So that's how you stop Safari's Reader. And how to bite off your nose to spite your face.
Or you can chill the heck out. Your readers have already been doing this for years in their feed readers. They want to read the way they want to read, in a browser, in Google Reader, in NetNewsWire, and now Safari 5's Reader. So let 'em.
(RSS ads don't work anyway. Other smart people have figured that out years ago.)
If they care enough to click over to this special view to read what you have to write, you should be happy. Isn't that why you wrote it? And they probably weren't going to click on an ad anyway.
I have a strange thing for logo contests. I don't know if it's the idea of dozens of people working on something for you, hoping to win the business, or if it's the chance to see so many creative people at work, or that it is just just an amazing application for the web.
The process is that you post a specification and how much you're
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A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the experiences I had with looking into grid and VPS server solutions. Here's a bit of an update on what's going on there and a look at GoGrid, a "cloud computing" hosting solution that is taking on Amazon's Elastic Computing service.
This blog is still running on a VPS at Slicehost.
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If you haven't checked out Coda, it's a beautifully designed and useful (looking) web development tool for OS X. If you do web development, you have your arsenal of tools... text editor, FTP program, terminal application, source code revision management.
Coda does it all in one window. Pretty sweet.
Maybe I'm just in love with their
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August starts an exciting time of year for us at my company. Our biggest website is a Web 2.0-ey Social Costume Shopping Site, CostumZee. It does well all year, but we get some mad traffic come halloween time. October is sort of like our Christmas.
Of course that's fun that we plan for and look forward to all year. But as the de facto
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You ever get the feeling that every idea in the world has been thought of already?
It happens to me every day. My brain's always working on the next "big idea" for us to work on. Once in a while I get that killer idea that I know could be a huge success.
It happened again to me yesterday. I had an idea for a fun website. It would also
...It's New Year's Eve. Have you thought about what your website is going to look like tomorrow?
The most common new year gaffe appears in the footer of thousands and thousands of websites, an outdated copyright notice.
Webmasters dutifully put the copyright message in the footer of their website template, but most hard-code the text, so that
...Warning: I'm geeking out for a bit here with a technical entry about editing apache configuration files in Cpanel. I barely found anything out on the Interwebs about this, so I thought I'd document what I learned.
All of our web servers run the CPanel host management software. It's nice having so much of the server configuration options
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We use memcached on lots of sites. The beautiful thing is, once you've got a bunch of servers running memcached, it's really easy to cache queries and save some serious database hits.
We use it sometimes when we probably shouldn't. Or at least we should be caching a little differently. Case in point, our costume site, Costumzee.com on
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After working through my OS X sandbox setup post earlier today, which involves manual setup of the Apache configuration files, I was alerted to a nice little application called Headdress.
Last week I wrote about the benefits of setting up a local web development environment, or what developers call a "sandbox". In web developer speak, a sandbox is a server owned by an individual developer where he or she can do all development and testing without affecting anyone else (or be affected). Once changes are developed and tested,
Effective web development depends on having a good environment for working on code, and seeing your changes immediately, while making it easy to test and deploy changes.
There are a number of ways to accomplish this:
1. Develop on your live website
I'd guess that the vast majority of website owners build their website on their live
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I've been developing web sites for many years now. As my aspirations grow, so do the sizes of the projects. And along with that comes more people. For the past few years, I've been working side-by-side with my business partner Damien. Sometimes we're working on our own projects, but many times we're collaborating on the same project.
When
...We should all be lucky enough to have performance problems due to heavy website traffic.
"Plan for success" is one of my favorite cliches, and in that spirit, I'm trying to get/stay ahead of the curve on a website that's growing in popularity, BUMPzee.
It not so much BUMPzee's popularity put it in jeopardy of performance issues, it's that
...I just realized that I am listening to Cake while developing with Cake. I recommend the combination highly.
I think Marie Antoinette was on to something. or, maybe not.
A few months ago, I got hooked on the concept of MVC (model-view-controller) frameworks as a development platform. The ultra-chic framework right now, helped by the Web 2.0 craze and the limelight of a few killer apps, like 43things, is Ruby on Rails.
I spend a good month digging into Ruby on Rails, learned the framework and the essential
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