In the days before Sharp NewsReader, killing time meant hitting reload on a few of my Favorites Menu, like CNN and Slashdot -- sites that were regularly posting new content.
But not now.
With Sharp, as I encounter interesting, low-frequency blogs, I just toss them into the subscription list. Once an hour, Sharp polls them, and highlights new blog items to me. It's a great way to cover blogs that unpdate on a slothful schedule but which are otherwise interesting.
So this morning, I noticed some new articles in the Slashdot feed:
So I think, "what the hell is this?" and then find a link in one of these warning feeds.
Well, I'll tell you that their algorithm must be fucked up.
My newsreader is only tuned to check slashdot once per hour. Usually when I flip over to Sharp, I hit manual refresh. I might do that six times in a day? So the 24 regular checks + 6 manual checks = 30, which is less than 48, the sworn limit-per-day.
Or perhaps they're stupid, and they really do check "have you pinged me within the last 30 minutes?" whenever I make a fresh ping. What sense does it make that, in one day, I cannot hit reload at 12:30 and then again at 12:35 and then not again until the next day?
The whole thing is ridicuolous anyway.. So they are concerned about me hammering them with page requests from a NewsReader, but they don't seem to care about a regular web page reload. Have you ever checked out the RSS feed from Slashdot? It's awful! The text is often almost truncated before it's managed to mention both the subject and predicate.
trystanu writes "If Microsoft Built Cars, occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason; you'd accept this, restart and drive on -- at ...
thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your ...
These worthless feeds are tiny compared to the slashdot web page anyway.
Furthermore, if they think I am going to waste a lot of time tracking down my ISP administrator and working out proxy issues between them, slashdot, and myself, they are sorely mistaken.
These guys have always been pricks anyway, as 31die experienced, they're haughty and aloof when you send in any remark about bugs/feature-requests, regardless of how good or simple the idea is.
But now that I can get enough content from many small interesting blogs, I'm not beholden to these jagoffs anyway. After all, it is generally a second-rate collection of second-rate comments. Plus, fleshbotand boingboing are much more interesting anyway.
Fuck You, Slashdot.
=========
Update:
ahahah I am pleased to see that I am not the only one who feels this way about Slashdot.
Posted by Nils Blutig at November 30, 2003 10:03 PM | TrackBack