WWW

Arky over at Playing With Sid posted a few months ago on “Reading RSS/XML feeds in Elinks Line Browser”, which he does by running raggle in server mode, inside a screen session. Then he directs Elinks at that via http://localhost:2222 (the default Raggle web UI port). Clever idea — I expect you could do that over SSH and have Raggle running centrally on a server you could access from wherever.

Raggle is a swell console/terminal-based RSS client I mentioned a while ago (nearly two years ago to the day — weird!). Like any RSS program, it will allow you to open a link or feed item in a regular web browser. Since it’s in the terminal, that may not work as desired, opening them in a console web browser like ELinks or not opening them at all.

On Mac OS X, getting Raggle to open up those links in your default web browser is easy thanks to the /usr/bin/open command.

Raggle preferences and other files are stored under ~/.raggle so navigate there in your terminal. It doesn’t create your custom configuration file automatically, so just start a new text file there called “config.rb” (Raggle is a Ruby program, thus the .rb).

(You can change pretty much any behavior you want using this file; check out the doc/default_config.rb that came with your Raggle download for full examples.)

Customizing the browser is really simple. Here’s all you’ll need in the config.rb file:

$config = {
    'browser_cmd' => ['/usr/bin/open', '%s'],
}

And that’s it!

The “Robert moves from Flickr to Picasa” countdown starts…now.

NEW YORK, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Friday that it had offered to acquire Yahoo Inc. in a proposed cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.

Microsoft said that it had offered to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, which it said represented a 62 percent premium above the company’s closing stock price on Nasdaq on Thursday.

NY Times

UPDATE — crap, I forgot del.ico.us is a Yahoo property, too. Blar.

UPDATE 2 — Yahoo’s board rejected the offer, but Microsoft is determined. Google weighed in on the hypothetical deal. To be continued.

Via osxgnu.org, a Universal Terminal and Finder-clickable Lynx package (self-contained), currently at version 2.8.6u.

I linked to this a couple of years ago, but happened across it today and thought I’d show it again. This is from Jakob Nielsen on his useit.com site: “Report From a 1994 Web Usability Study”.

The report is of some historical interest, both because it includes screen captures of several famous early websites and because it is one of the first formal usability studies of the Web. In fact, it is remarkable how well the findings and conclusions in this report hold up in the light of the current state of the Web. People often talk about how the Web changes on “Internet time”, but usability issues seem to change much more slowly since they stem from human capabilities and interests.