Sam Wilson's Website

March 2022

  1. Feedburner Seems to be Dying

    Many years ago Feedburner was a useful service. It proxied the RSS feed of your blog and gave you analytics of what happened with it. Now feeds using Feedburner randomly give HTTP error 404s. The Feedburner Twitter account is inactive and recommends that people Tweet at Google instead. It seems that Google wants to get rid of the service and random 404s probably aren’t a high priority for them.

    I’ve just gone through the config for Planet Linux Australia and changed as many Feedburner URLs as possible to direct feed URLs. I did this by loading the Feedburner feed, getting the URL for the site, and then guessing the feed URL (usually just appending “/feed” to the domain name).

    I recommend that everyone abandon Feedburner, it’s not reliable enough to use and doesn’t seem to have any active support.

  3. Posseing to Flickr

    I’ve been trying to get some work done on how my website does Posse, because I want to be able to pushto other sites as easily as possible. I’ve had it working well with Wikimedia Commons for ages, and find it much quicker than othet means to get my photos uploaded there. Now I’m trying to get it sorted for Flickr, and (probably easier) for Twitter.

    The general process is to a) edit a post to satisfaction; b) open it in one of the Posse forms and change any metadata as appropriate (this doesn’t get saved locally); c) send the post to the remote site. This will upload the post and also create a local syndication record pointing to its remote URL.

    So far so good, but it’s really a post-by-post operation — I wonder if its worth figuring out a bulk cross-posting system?

    The other part of the Flickr Posse feature will be to do a bit more work on PhpFlickr hopefully including releasin a new major version (with all the deprecated code removed at last).

  5. New bike chain

    I replaced my bike chain on the weekend. I’ve been thinking I’ve needed to do this for a quite while, based on the 12-inch chain pin-to-pin measurement. That length was over the “small weird imperial measurement” that the literature recommends — it’s about 2 mm I think, but “2 mm in 12 inches” feels like a strange way to put it. So I bought a chain gauge! And it’s great: clean the chain, plonk the gauge on, and immediately know whether the chain needs replacing. The new chain (a Shimano HG93 9-speed) was $27.90, which is less than that plus a new cluster and maybe chainrings, so it feels like it’s worth doing regularly.

    While I had the wheel off I thought I’d repack the bearings, which turned out to be annoying. I’ve not had a bike with a rubber dust cover before, and couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to get the cone spanner on while keeping the dust cover in place. Of course, it’s not meant to be done like that, and thanks to the Park Tool website I learnt that the rubber cover could be stretched into place after everything else had gone back together. Much easier. I am however still pretty bad at getting the position and tension of the two bearing cones correct, and had to put it all together and take it apart again about three times before I got it right! Oh well, all is running well now.