Jack Hardcastle

Why is it actually impossible to add RSS feeds to Safari when all you possess is the URL? Don’t believe me? Try it.

Other RSS readers let you happily “Add a Subscription” to you heart’s content. In Safari, you can’t do it, no matter how hard you try. As near as I can tell, Safari’s only option to add RSS feeds is to browse to the site the RSS feed is hosted on and pray that the webmaster is smart enough to have done the necessary code to put the blue RSS button in the address bar.

Seriously, if I know what RSS is and I want to use it, you can bet I know how to handle a real URL and locate the proper feed for the site I’m browsing. And what about sites like, oh, I don’t know, every major publication, TV station, and news corporation, that offer dozens or hundreds of sub-feeds based on the category of news: local, breaking, sports, etc.? How does that one little blue button help me at all?

So, Safari, you earn an F as a news reader. You also earn an F for being stupid about your Google search key command. And those are two reasons that you won’t find the compass icon in my Dock.

I just googled Houlihan’s restaurant to see a menu as we’ll be eating there Sunday night. I’m blown away by their site. Not only does it come with it’s own jukebox (I’m downloading half of the songs on iTunes now) but the site is incredibly informative and well designed. I can’t find the name of the firm that designed it, however.

Wow.

I got tired of manually deleting all of the SPAM comments that I get on this site, so I’ve decided to try a little bit of proactive prevention. Instead of letting just any random mindless computer program post a comment, I’ve added a simple Turing Test. It should be absolutely beneath every human being who comes to this site (it asks you to press a single key), but unintelligible for any computer. If you fail the test, you don’t get to post a comment and junk up my site with totally useless advertising.

In other news, Kudda is coming along swimmingly. I’m very excited about the whole project. I do wish I had set my deadline for April 1, not May 1, but that’s my own stupid fault. I’ve been to a half dozen parties and dinners in the last week, and I’ve got a dozen left, but I still have to finish this site before Saturday.

Alright, I think I’ve got my problem licked, thanks to some help.

On Win32, the FastCgiIpcDir directive takes named pipes. I have no idea how to configure that (because I’m not exactly sure how named pipes fit into a CGI handler), so I left the default (i.e. comment out that line). So, before my <VirtualHost> sections, I have this:

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

Then I have this line for my Typo app, outside my <VirtualHost> but immediately after.

FastCgiServer "C:/path/to/app/public/dispatch.fcgi" -idle-timeout 120 -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 2

BAM! It all works perfectly! Suddenly, I’ve seen a 100-fold increase in my application’s speed. It’s fantastic. Now I can change my environment.rb file back to the default.

I’ve spent the better half of today working on getting this blog up, and I have finally fixed the problem but not in a manner with which I’m satisfied. Specifically, I can’t get my Virtual Hosts to have different RAILS_ENV settings. I tried SetEnv RAILS_ENV production in the httpd.conf and .htaccess to no avail. If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong, I’d love to hear it.

Edit: This has been fixed.