Technology: April 2003 Archives

This website is now available for trading on the BlogShares fantasy blog shares market. At this moment, 4000 stocks are available at $0,20 each.

I am convinced that this is a very good investment, since the site is still under development, so quality (and thus incoming links) will surely increase.

Now that I have a wonderful new CMS able to produce RSS feeds, I have been looking for a way to use it. My idea is to create a page showing the latest headlines from some news sources (see the list in the side bar), so that I don't have to visit each site.

I have found some applications (so called news aggregators) which do this, but until now I haven't found a good web service offering the same service. I don't want to install an application, since I want to access this information both from home as from my work as well as when I am on holiday. My idea is that I don't have the same bookmarks on all those locations, and by offering a web page the information is always available.

NewsApp is the closest to my ideal I could find, but it lacks configurability and has the layout of an early alpha release.

You might have noticed the BlogShares logo on my web site. This is because last week I started trading on their fantasy blog share market. The principle is very simple:
Instead of buying shares for companies you virtually buy shares for weblog sites. The value of a site depends on the incoming links. This very sites has no incoming links from other weblogs, so that leaves my website worthless. However, my outgoing sites are worth a little bit, so by linking to other sites, I add value to these sites. The rest functions just like the normal stock market. Everybody starts with $500 and can buy virtual shares. At this moment my assets are worth $745, which I think isn't bad, but compared to some big players this amount is insignificant.

Yesterday I started installing Windows 98 on my computer WITHOUT A LICENCE!!!
I know that it is illegal, but I have some reasons for doing it. First of all I think that I will only use Windows 98 temporary, and will be able to swith to Linux or FreeBSD soon. Secondly, Windows 98 is a product that is not supported anymore by Microsoft, and I doubt if I still can buy a licence. But even if I could, I wouldn't buy it.

So today I entered the world of serialz, my god how I hate this! Especially since I was doing it on my old laptop which was slowing down with each pop-up showing.

Now that I almost finished installing the operating system, it is time to start thinking about the applications I need. I have made this small list:

• Microsoft Office 97
  Also highly illegal, but I think my computer is just too slow for OpenOffice;
• WS_FTP Pro
  to copy and synchronise files for my websites;
• HTML-kit
  to edit my web sites;
• TopStyle Pro
  the easiest way to edit CSS files;
• Mozilla or Phoenix
  Everything is better than IE, but I am not sure whether my system is fast enough to support Moz;
• ArgoSoft mail server
  Since my ISP doesn't allow me to send mail from my @jeroensangers.com or @fimcap.org e-mail addresses.

As I have stated before, this site has been created in a very short time, expecting that soon it would be transfered to a better place with better posibilities. As this has not happened yet, I decided to redisign my site. I will do it in the Zeldman way, so I will strip the whole site to its bare bones and after that start trying out the new design. So expect the site to change once in a while...