Another blog bites the dust

Scott Adams has decided he’s going to blog less. That seems reasonable. But now he’s also gotten rid of the full feeds, because the ad revenue just isn’t worth it for him. That’s right, the guy who created one of the most successful comic strips and has multiple best selling books isn’t making enough money off of his blog, so he’s decided inconveniencing his readers will help.

Listen, I get it. Advertising makes the world go round. But that doesn’t change the fact that every ad on his site is already blocked by – surprise, surprise – Adblock Plus. It also doesn’t change the fact that he could simply toss ads in at the bottom of his feeds anyway. And it certainly doesn’t change the fact that a very successful man is complaining to someone who is struggling with a mortgage that I haven’t bought enough of his books to support his financial demands. I’m not about to claim that I’ll never read or buy another Dilbert book again, but he put quite a bit of effort into showing just what his audience means to him all while painting himself as a martyr.

Oh well, that’s one less feed for me to keep up with…

All your livejournals are belong… nevermind

Along with my limited online presence of late has come an almost indifference to posts by my friends on Livejournal. No, it’s not that I don’t care what you have to say or don’t care about you at all… wait… no, that’s definitely not it. It’s that the Livejournal friends page is absolutely horrendous. If a few people write a bunch of entries one day, I end wasting a bunch of time just trying to figure out where I last left off. And as time goes by, that gets worse and worse.

So my goal had been to read my friends’ Livejournals just like any other decent feed – via Google Reader. The problem is that Google Reader doesn’t support digest authentication, which means that I miss out on any protected posts. And for some people, that would mean pretty much all posts. But along comes Scatman Dan and his wonderful and imaginatively named LiveJournal For Google Reader (now with v1.3 flavoring). This magnificent tool translates the protected LJ feeds into some horribly complicated URL that totally fools Google into displaying all of your personal secrets protected entries. And now I know everything going on in your lives again. W00t indeed!

I even get to rename all of the feeds with your real names so I don’t mix people up – very confusing for some of you married couples! It’s so refreshing to see everything like my other feeds – now if you people would just start writing more. Not that I can complain…