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If you did not already read it, there are really cool christmas news on the Ruby on Rails Blog

The Merb Framework – the highly modified framework initially based on/inspired by the rails core and made to improve speed, concurrency and a small footprint – will be merged into “Rails 3.0”.

Let’s look at the Merb feature list to see what this means:

Merb is..

• ORM-agnostic (through plugins)
• JavaScript library agnostic (through plugins)
• template language agnostic (through plugins)
• thread safe (+ multiple file uploads)
• simple and optimized core without sacrificing functionality
• improvements

what I especially like is the modularity of Merb, compared to Rails

This is a rough overview of what Rails 3.0 will look like, having the Merb features:

• Optionally a minimum and full featured core
• A lot of performance improvements
• Framework agnosticism (JS, ORM, template and testing level)
• A better, more stable API (eg. for plugins)

When will we get Rails 3.0?

I guess this is very hard to predict :) but the goal is to have at least a Beta version ready for RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas

I totally concur with the post on the ROR Weblog, Rails 3.0 will kick ass!

I was looking for some Seo extensions/plugins for my favourite browser, Opera.

This is what I found:

Seo for Opera

Seo for Opera is basically a port of the Seo for Firefox extension to opera. It enhances Google and Yahoo search results by adding additional information to each returned page.

As far as I saw it is not maintained, and sometimes unstable, but it seems to work well.

For detailed Features see Seo for Firefox.

Seobar

Seobar is a Opera userscript that can be used directly on the site in question. It adds an additional layer with information about the site you are viewing.

The information contains:

• Alexa Traffic Rank
• Google Page Rank

• Yandex CY
• DMOZ
• Yahoo! Directory
• Yandex.Directory
• Rambler’s Top100

• Google backlinks/pages
• Yahoo backlinks/pages
• MSN backlinks/pages
• Yandex backlinks/pages

It also adds title/description for some results.

Here is an image of the layer, displaying backlinks:

Data visualization is really interesting, and there are a lot of new, web-based tools coming up in the datamine sector.

I came across FeedVis recently.

FeedVis allows to visualize data from feeds, which can be divided into feed- or time-subsets.

The data is presented in a very nice, graphical way. For each word, some additional information is provided:

• Summaries
• Headlines
• Word Frequency in content
• Frequency Change (Trend)

Quite cool to play around with, and looking much better than the usual tag clounds :)

FeedVis is available for download

How do you delete a bunch of files, while excluding specific matches?

For example, all files that are no jpeg images.

General way

ls -I "*.jpg"|xargs rm

ZSH, negate the pattern:

setopt extended_glob
rm ^*.jpg

Two interesting tools to play around with, released almost at the same time:

Google Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect let’s webmasters add a social layer to their site – without any programming effort. The only thing you have to do is include the functionality in your markup.

Based on widgets it enables visitors to “sign up” for sites using Friend Connect, using a variety of authentication mechanisms:

• Google
• Yahoo
• AIM
• OpenID

Once signed up, you get the full functionality of Google Friend Connect.

This includes:

• Interaction with other visitors (making friends, shoutbox)
• Interaction on the site (sharing media, posting comments, playing games, etc)
• Invite Contacts to join the site too

An example (featured by Google) is billboardforthepeople.com

Google Friend Connect is a very general approach, trying to cover a wide area. Users can interact without really being in an existing social network (like Facebook, etc).

The only thing I missed when looking at Friend Connect for the first time, is a list or gallery of the available widgets. Please drop a comment if you know if something like this exists.

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect on the other side, enables developers to integrate the Facebook functionality into other sites.

The main features here are:

• Trusted authentication (using facebook user credentials)
• Real identity (integrate visitors facebook identities into your site)
• Friend linking (let visitors find facebook friends on your site)
• Dynamic privacy (include visitor information and privacy settings)
• Social distribution (allow visitors to share information and actions)

As you can see Facebook Connect is a bit more specific, the orientation here is towards developers that want to integrate Facebook functionalty. I think this is a great tool, not only in combination with existing Facebook applications.

therunaround is an example they provide.

Okay, currently I’m using Snownews as my main newsreader for RSS feeds. Yes, RSS, not Atom because Snownews is one of the rare feedreaders that does not support Atom feeds.

Although people keep saying that this is no problem because there is a cool extension named atom2rss I have to ask myself a question:

This extension exists for quite a while, why don’t they simply integrate support for Atom Feeds?

Besides that, I tried using this extension, which is in fact a filter based on xsltproc (...) which still fails. I know most people might argue that this is Open Source Software, which is of course right, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got the time to finish every piece of incomplete, non-functioning software I come across.

This will probably lead most people to something like “you don’t have to use it, do you?”. And that’s right, I’m using it because it’s the only textbased feedreader for linux I know that has the following features:

• VIM Keybindings (or configurable keybindings)
• Category Support
• and as mentioned, is no X11 application

But I’m frustrated by the missing atom support, and it obviously often misinterpretes the date in a feed.

I don’t want a discussion wether or not this critique is appropriate, or is based on some bugged version, my question is:

Can anyone suggest a textbased feedreader with the above features that supports Atom AND RSS?

I tried raggle, canto and nrss, but they didn’t not satisfy me, so I’m still using snownews for rss, and canto for atom – which sucks.

Edit: Using canto now, which is now almost perfect for my needs.