Monday morning thunderstorm
Wow. Madrid had a kick-ass thunderstorm this morning. We had the windows open, but thankfully the rain didn't enter, but we could hear the claps of thunder clear as a bell and smell the ozone. It was great. What a nice way to wake up... perfect timing, too, about 20 minutes before my alarm went off. That means that I woke up, got to hang out and enjoy the storm for a bit and then get up and start my day on time (for once).
I was up until 4 a.m. again last night messing with BlogAgent. I ripped it apart into smaller components, added the logging and started seeing if I could get several Message Services (IMs) to run at the same time. I copied the wrong Log4J library into my lib path and spent literally 4 hours debugging a problem that wasn't a problem. DAMN! Anyways, I'll keep at it tonight and publish the code later.
The original AOL BlogAgent code that was launched on Saturday seems to be running okay. About 11 people are using it right now (not as many as I thought - I don't think Dave's post was specific enough about it using AOL) and I've gotten a few emails with suggestions which is nice. I don't have their names right now, but one person's idea (and in hindsite a good and obvious one) is to be able to say "who blogroll" and get a list of your watches and the other people who are watching the same blog. That's a neat idea, though it might be a bit expensive on the agent side to do. Another person told me I should post the code to a project on SourceForge so it's easy to CVS the code down. That's a good idea. I'll fill out the form today and see how long SF takes to get back to me... sometimes it's a few days.
Do you EVER get nervous looking at your aggregator? I do sometimes. I see ALL this content that I want to internalize and I sometimes get anxious trying to figure out where to start. The cool thing about the BlogAgent (and BlogToaster) is that the updates come to you over the day. As a site changes, I just click over to it to see if it's interesting, and if it's not, continue doing what I was doing. Most Blog posts are pretty short, so it doesn't stop my day or anything and instead of spending an hour or two a day reading all the news in the aggregator, I instead spend that time dispersed through out the day. It's really like getting interesting emails all day, but nothing that you ever need to respond to. ;-)
Okay. To work.
-Russ