bennybox

It’s that time of year - the wrapup, the review, the best of lists…

I’ve put some thought into some special seasonal posts. Most of the ideas you can find better writing elsewhere. I don’t have much personality. But I think I will go back through the cobwebs and highlight the last 12 months - for me really. I’m always surprised how quickly I forget about all the fun stuff I did over the years. I’d better start getting some of this down.

While you wait for that, I’ve compiled a short list of songs I really enjoyed this year, mostly recently. It’s not really in an order - and I tried to keep off any songs any one I know might have heard - save Hitoshi… I think he’d know a few of the Japanese ones. And boy are there a lot of those on there. The prevalence is due to my neglect of a lot of great North American tracks on this list. Give my “holiday mix” a shot - you might like some of it. If not, no biggie. I only spent like 10 minutes compiling this list.

* Esthero is my choice album of the year. Saw her live. Really amazing. Album fun.
* Tanguy Ukulele Orchestra is an acapella/ukulele band that does videogame covers.
* The Danger Mouse/MF Doom mashup album is just good music.
* Rip Slyme is a Japanese rap collective I gather. I think their flow is just so dope.
* The Metric track is a music video, because that’s a track from an album worth buying. And Emily Haines is rather tasty.
* Mango Pirates are some Asian American band. The music is sweet. The song is pretty old.
* Mitsuo Downer Sounds is from the same Asian American compilation, and is simply an auditory overload
* The Bee Gees song is just there because the chorus sounds like “hiyo, hi yi yi yi yi yi hiyo hiyo”.
* Great Adventure is a hilarious Japanese band that doesn’t _sound_ Japanese. My sister brought their CD back from China.
* Zoo Bombs are a super bad ass mash of sound from Japan. They played at Starlight in Waterloo this term.
* A little taste of the Jet Set Radio soundtrack I talk endlessly about.
* Final Fantasy Advent Children is the most satisfying hour and a half I spent this year. And FF composer Nobuo Uematsu getting his guitar metal on is bliss.
* Tongari Kids is a Japanese videogame influenced beat track that is in a word: great. This one was a total luck find via a tip from the sister.
* XOC is a rock band that created an incredibly faithful soundtrack to Super Mario World.

All these groups are worth a google.

Benny Holiday Gift Mix - 2005 (62.5MB zip of unrestricted mp3s and one quicktime movie).

Happy Holidays!

Sorry everyone, I need to get my geek thoughts out of my head.

I monitor almost all my websites via RSS feeds. There are some 60 or 70 sites I check and read almost daily. It comes down to maybe 400 posts a day I get through… most of it is skimming. Certain sites, like of my friends I’ll read the full posts.

It’s a great way to check popular items on Digg - though I sometimes wish I knew how many diggs a post received. In fact, a comment count on blog posts is sometimes useful - the thread may be more interesting that the actual post. The problem is, posts get marked as unread when they’re new, or when they’re updated. It’s why you can’t include a comment count in your feed - every time there’s a new comment that post will be marked as unread - even if you’ve read it. It can lead to some annoying behaviour, so by convention it’s not there.

Some weblogs, like Engadget include links at the end of each post, like a link to Technorati on that post, or an “email to” link, or a link to the comments. But how do I know if there are any?

I noticed on the 43 Folders feed, which is hosted by Feedburner, a feed hosting service, there are now these dynamically generated images which tell you how many comments were posted.

I was thinking something along these lines, or a new attribute which specifically wouldn’t cause a post to appear updated. The trick is, the image URI string is actually a code, but will fool the feed reader into thinking it’s just a static image. But yeah, this is great and quite smart. Too bad you gotta use the Feedburner service for this right now. I’m sure someone will come out with a plugin for this somewhere though.

I briefly considered migrating the SLC.com feed to Feedburner - the feed was called about 19k times last month, about half of my total page views so it’s a significant part of my bandwidth. It’s almost impossible to figure out how many individual people that is - but it’s a lot of people not seeing my website-supporting ads! (jk) This feature and feed ad support makes it look even more enticing.

A couple feed annoyances:
* If you don’t provide full posts in your feed, I won’t read your site. I can’t be bothered to click through… I’d rather skim the content in my feed reader
* If you’re including content after the jump, like after a “more” tag, please tell me… it’s ok it’s not in the feed I guess, but I’d like to be suggested to click through. I do sometimes.
* I wish I didn’t have to click through on the Digg feed to the Digg page, and then click the link to see what the fuss is about. Include a link in the feed!

Um, that’s it for now. Back to work.