Vegard Langås

BazQux feed reader

I have been testing @BazQuxReader for about 1 month and I am starting to get over my fear of loosing gReader. gReader hit the bucket early after it started to tear apart (sharing stopped working). BazQux will most likely be my permanent feed reader for a long time. I love the minimalistic ui that have more vertical space for reading than any web based reader currently on the market (while keeping required navigational ui). At the minimum price of $9 per year it’s an awesome deal for a sustainable software/service. The fact that the developer(s) are encouraging an open reader api is also good signs of a quality solution.

I plan to up my subscription to the $29 option to encourage the developer to put the solution on a redundant server solution. Server migrations should not need to cause service downtime. Reliability is of the uttermost importance for my level of usage.

I also have a wishlist for improvements:

• Auto updating subscription list. Currently you need to reload the page to update the unread count when there are new articles crawled.
• Drag and drop subscription list. This was extremly buggy in gReader but it is an intuitive ui solution.
• Share to RSS. Like the old share function in gReader but usable in all feed readers. All shares have to be public, some extention to RSS might be required to include the source feed.
• gReader for Android (or better) style web interface at m.bazqux.com. No funky redirection and annoyance on the regular site.

They might have gone a bit too far with keeping the reading area a reading only area. The settings menu should maybe have been a page instead of a menu. The settings page should also include a feed management section for adding, removing, moving, organizing and exporting subscriptions.

I am currently using “Expanded view without comments [2]” (which feels very gReader ish + being a bit more vertical efficient). The comments feature is a bit strange. It’s nice on short articles with low traffic, but it gets messy really quick. And as a differentiator is it a really “meh” feature.

Something strange I noticed when moving from gReader to bazqux was that my twitter feeds started working again. I think they are doing some crawling via the twitter api and would love to know if there are any more hidden feeds/features. I think they are missing some information pages, that also would work as promotional material. Their sign in page is also overly sparse, and inaccessible when signed in. I understand that this might be a result of heavy core focus and not much focus on a flashy promotional site.

tl;dr: Try BazQux https://bazqux.com, it’s awesome!

Evangelion 2.22 og 3.33

Vel, jeg har tydligvis blandet Evangelion 2.22 med End of Evangelion og det var langt mer cgi i den enn jeg kunne huske.

3.33 var en gigantisk brainfuck og jeg kan ikke si jeg likte veien den tok, men på lik linje med Harry Potter er det slik kilden er. Målet er vel å røre på sterkere føleleser enn de komfortable. Mengden cgi var skuffende og previewen av 4 var bare cgi, ikke helt lovende. Får håpe det ikke blir helt “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse”.

How to be a ethical spammer

• Don’t buy/sell/create/use random lists. Email addresses should always come directly from the user (verify it with an email loop).
• Never put someone on a list without giving them having an option of not being on it (default checked checkbox is ok, but don’t hide it).
• Always include the following in you emails:
• Email address the spam was targeted at.
• User readable unsubscribe link with no further action required than clicking on it eg: https://companyname.com/settings/unsubscribe?email=user@gmail.com&tolken=##### (no login, you may redirect the user like a mofo to crazy urls after landing on this page)
• Provide a ‘List-Unsubscribe’ header

Someone might call this bacon, I think this is how all bulk email should be.