Tag Archives: review

Only 2% of Web Users Use RSS?

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Depressing but not surprising.

A Reuter’s article titled “Untangle the World Wide Web with RSS” by Robert MacMillan explains what RSS is and goes on to discuss why so few people use it:

So, why are so few people using it?

Only 2 percent of online consumers bother, according to Forrester, and more than half of that group is 40 years old or younger.

For starters, the name is deadly for attracting “average” Internet users — people who use the Web and handle e-mail, but quail at inscrutabilities like “service-oriented architecture” and “robust enterprise solutions.”

Then there are the orange buttons you find on Web pages. Clicking one produces a jumble of computer codes. It’s hardly the path to popularity.

I have my own thoughts about this. After all, I’ve only recently developed my own way to use RSS effectively after several false starts with the technology. Here’s what I think (for that it’s worth):

  • Too many feeds have excerpts only, thus requiring you to go to the Web site to read the whole article. I admit that I’m guilty of setting up my feed the same way. (Two reasons: some of my posts are so long that they simply don’t “fit” in a Feedburner feed (which has a limited size) and many of my posts are format-intensive, making them less easy to read/understand in an aggregator window.) I’ve since resolved that issue by using my aggregator as a sort of “index” to new articles, allowing the ones I want to read to load in Firefox in the background while I browse new topics, and reading them when I’m finished browsing. That’s my technique, but it might not work for everyone.
  • Posts aren’t always easy to read in the RSS aggregator window. Much of a site’s formatting is lost — at least in my reader, Endo) and sometimes that formatting helps readability.
  • Not everyone likes to learn how to use new software that might make them more productive. I’m like that. After wasting so much time learning software I wound up not using, I’m very hesitant to learn new software I might not use either. That’s why it took me so long to get an offline blog editor, despite Miraz’s glowing praise about MarsEdit. (I wound up with Ecto; go figure.) And for the record, she was right — how could anyone maintain a WordPress blog without an offline post editor?
  • Some sites have simply too much content. I subscribed to RichardDawkins.net for a full 36 hours before I was overwhelmed with the number of new posts. While I find his area of expertise interesting (atheism), I simply cannot devote that much time to it. This, by the way, is the same reason I don’t subscribe to mailing lists.
  • If you don’t check your RSS aggregator regularly, you can easily be overwhelmed with the number of new articles to review/read. This is what caused my first few false starts. I solved that problem by deleting all of the preprogrammed subscriptions and adding just the ones I found and liked. (Which is why an article I wrote on Monday asked for suggestions.)

And, of course, I agree with the Reuter’s article author that RSS simply isn’t user-friendly enough to attract less experienced computer users. Clicking an RSS link or “orange button” doesn’t subscribe you to anything. It just displays the feed’s source code on the screen. How can that make any newbie comfortable?

But, given time, I think RSS will catch on and attract more users. It has to. With all the content out there, anyone serious about keeping up has to have a good tool to get all the links and summaries in one place. It finally sucked me in.

And, by the way, I now know why I don’t read the news on Reuters.com: they split each article up into so many pages that you spend more time clicking links for the next page than actually reading.

The Firm

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Better than I thought it would be.

The FirmThe other day, The Firm with Tom Cruise, arrived in my mailbox from Netflix. This 1993 “thriller” is based on a book of the same name by John Grisham.

The movie was a lot better than I expected. (I have very low expectations these days.) It was about a newly graduated lawyer (Cruise) who accepts a too-good-to-be-true offer with a Memphis-based law firm. Unknown to Cruise’s character, the firm’s clients are the Chicago-based mafia. It appears that there’s no way out of the firm.

There’s lots of suspense that, in all honesty, is softened by the soundtrack. In other words, the music is all wrong. With the right music, certain scenes would have been a lot scarier than they were. Oddly enough, I’ve never picked up on this kind of problem before — it was just so darn obvious in this movie that even I couldn’t miss it.

It was interesting to see Tom Cruise so young again. It reminded me a little of his Risky Business days. The movie also features Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, and Gary Busey (in a short-lived — pun intended — role).

Zorro: A Novel

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by Isabel Allende

Zorro: A NovelI just finished Zorro: A Novel by Chilean author Isabel Allende. It’s the story of Zorro before all the other stories: the story of his parents, his birth, and his upbringing. It covers the first 20 years of his life, from California to Spain, and back to California by way of New Orleans and Cuba.

It was an interest read — and not just because of the author’s skill. Originally written in Spanish, the author writes in very long paragraphs — sometimes more than a page each — which can cover a huge span of time and many events. This is very different from the way American authors write in short paragraphs, punctuated with lots of dialog. The pages look dense and forbidding, but the story jumps out of those paragraphs and proves very entertaining, with lots of historical facts to add realism.

I recommend this book to others who like a good adventure with a familiar character.

Two Interesting Restaurants

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Suggestions for dining in the Mesa/Tempe, AZ area.

I flew into Williams Gateway Airport in Mesa the other evening to drop off my helicopter for maintenance. My husband, Mike, who works in Tempe, came to pick me up.

It was 5:30 PM and we were both famished. Not in a hurry to drive home in traffic, we decided to have dinner. As we drove past the strip mall on Power Road at Ray Road near the airport, I spotted a restaurant called Dual. We stopped there for dinner.

The menu was interesting, the prices above average but not outrageous. The decor was modern, almost industrial. Our waitress was friendly but goofy (why is it that I always end up with the airhead servers?) and provided good service. Mike and I sipped mint julips and shared a baked brie appetizer. Mike had short ribs (which the waitress told us Dual was known for) with gnocchi and I had the roast duck breast over risotto. We finished off the meal by sharing a flan.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Yesterday took me back to Williams Gateway for a last-minute charter before maintenance began. I met Mike for lunch in Tempe. He took me to one of his favorite lunch places on University Avenue in Tempe: Cornish Pasty Company.

A pasty, as I learned just the other day during our Bradshaw’s Grave excursion, is a collection of ingredients wrapped up in a pastry shell and baked. They were popular with miners who prepared them in advance and took them down into the mines with them for their meal breaks.

Cornish Pasty Company has a long, narrow space in a strip mall with some tables and bar seats. We sat at the bar and watched two workers prepare batches of pasties. Mike had the Portobello Chicken (Chicken Breast, Balsamic Marinated Portobello Mushroom, Fresh Mozzarella, Roasted Red Pepper, Fresh Basil, served with a side of chilled Marinara) and I had the Porky (Pork, Sage, Onion, Apple, Potato, served with a side of Red Wine Gravy). Both were served hot and were excellent.

It also reminded me a lot of the restaurants I used to grab lunch at when I worked in Manhattan: small places that didn’t put on airs, had great food at a fair price, and were filled at lunchtime with local workers.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Three More Movies

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And three more movie reviews.

Over the past week or so, Mike and I have seen three movies: one in theaters and two on DVD.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale Movie PosterWell, it’s about time. Finally, a James Bond who is believable. I’m not just talking about the actor, I’m talking about the characterization. This bond is not perfect in almost every way. He’s vulnerable and makes more than a few mistakes.

Unlike all other Bond films, this one seems dark and real, a more accurate (but still probably quite far from truly realistic) dramatization of the spy business. It wasn’t a fun movie, like all the others are. It was a spy thriller with plenty of twists and turns.

I had a little trouble believing the love interest part of the story — too much emotion, too fast — but I believe it was included to develop the character. After all, Casino Royale was the first Bond adventure, the one that takes place right after he gets his “double-0” rank. One can argue that the events of this story are what make the character what he is in later stories.

I have never read Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, but would like to. It would be interesting to see how closely this movie follows the book.

WordPlay

WordPlay Movie PosterIf you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m particularly fond of words. It probably has a lot to do with writing for a living. The way I see it, words are my tools and the more tools I’m comfortable using, the better I can get my job done.

That said, I’ve been wanting to see WordPlay, the documentary about the annual crossword puzzle championship, since it was released to theaters. It didn’t come to Wickenburg — I didn’t really expect it to — so I waited until it was available on Netflix and moved it to the top of my queue.

The movie was relatively entertaining and provided lots of insight into the creation and solving of crossword puzzles. I used to do crossword puzzles daily when I worked for the New York City Comptroller’s Office. In those days, there was so little work to do, I had to do something to stay awake. So I did the puzzles in Newsday, the New York Times, and the Daily News every single day. I got pretty good at it, but not anywhere near as good as the competitors in WordPlay. These are people who can finish the New York Times crossword puzzle in less than 5 minutes with no errors. Egads!

The movie included interviews with puzzle creators and solvers, as well as with Will Shortz, the New York Times Puzzlemaster. Some of the solvers are people we all know: Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, and Ken Burns, to name a few. It was interesting to get their insight.

My husband watched the movie with me and didn’t seem terribly interested throughout. I think his take on the puzzle solvers in the competition was that they were a bunch of geeks who needed to get lives. In some cases, I think that may be true. But it was interesting to see that some people have taken this skill to such extremes.

The Ladykillers

The Ladykillers Movie PosterThis is a 2004 remake of the 1955 movie of the same name starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers (among others). This newer version starred Tom Hanks. Like the Da Vinci Code, this was a complete waste of Mr. Hanks’s acting talent. But in this case, the acting wasn’t the problem — he did quite a job acting out the character of a rather wacky and over-educated caper mastermind. The problem was the movie. It was so bad that it wasn’t worth his efforts. In fact, his acting was probably the best thing about it.

In the story, the Hanks character rents a room at an elderly woman’s house. He and his henchmen then proceed to tunnel their way into a nearby casino’s cash counting room from the woman’s root cellar. Their cover story is flimsy — as it was in the first movie, which I also saw — and the whole thing is so far-fetched that the movie makers can’t possibly expect the audience to believe any of it. But rather than allow it to play out as a farce, it’s taken a bit seriously, so there’s really no fun in it. And the frequent use of the f-word in all of its forms (including the all-to-popular mother-f-er) makes it a movie that might make it uncomfortable to view with kids — or your parents.

My advice: avoid this one. It isn’t worth the rental fee.