Monthly Archives: April 2006

Links for Thursday, April 26, 2006

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Whoa, That’s a Big Annual Report

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I got home from work today and quickly flipped through the pile of snail mail on the table. A huge envelope caught my eye, and I opened it up. Inside I found the largest corporate annual report I’ve ever seen:

That’s a full-scale copy of Will Iverson‘s Real World Web Services next to it for comparison! Note the already-quaint reference to oil priced at $58.47 on the cover.

Not to judge a book by its cover, but from the looks of this thing it appears that W-H Energy Services had a really good year. Indeed they reported net income of $48.9 million, up from $17.9 million the year before. By the way, I’m the last person you’d want to look to for investment advice, so don’t read anything more into this post.

Links for Wednesday, April 19, 2006

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Boston Herald RSS Feeds

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It is always fun to see something come full circle, even if it takes half of a lifetime.

Way back in 1972 or so, I was 12 years old and living in Framingham, Massachusetts. Somehow (the details escape me at the moment) I became the proud operator of a small paper route. I would get up at 5 AM 7 days a week, get dressed, push my bike up the driveway to the street, and find my daily pack of papers. They were secured with a wire, and I had a pair of wire cutters stashed near our mailbox so that I could cut the wire, load the papers into my bag, and pedal off to deliver my 15 or so copies of the Boston Herald Traveler. I had a long route, probably 2 miles or so. I do remember stopping to read the front of each section; this was probably the start of my career as a news junkie, and in some way led to my interest in RSS and syndicated content.

Since I only had 15 papers to deliver I didn’t keep any paper accounting records; most everyone paid me each week and it was easy enough to remember the 1 or 2 customers who hadn’t paid from week to week. I wasn’t one of those entrepreneurial types who started small and then grew the route to a gargantuan size. My job, as I understood it, was to get people their papers before they were awake, and I did my best to do this.

So, where am I going with this? Glad you asked!

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg noted that the Boston Herald (the Traveler suffix was dropped a while ago, according to the Wikipedia article) now has a bunch of blogs and RSS feeds.

I have added all of the feeds to Syndic8, which means that, 34 years later, I am still helping (in a small way) to deliver the Boston Herald Traveler. Its a lot easier this time, but somehow I am still doing that same job, but in a different way!

Way Too Much Fun — Remote Control for Charity

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My friend Alek Komarnitsky is on sabbatical from his job, and he’s having way too much fun.

In support of his efforts to win a $7,000 prize (which he will immediately donate to a Celiac Disease Research center, he’s participating in an SEO (Search Engine Optimization Contest). Alek is trying to end up at the top of the search engine results for the phrase “V7ndotcom elursrebmem “. While he’s home, he’s built a very cool web-controlled display of lights, fans, a bubbling cauldron, a clock and more, all visible via a webcam. Take a look here to see this first-hand.

Please feel free to help our Alek’s cause by visiting the page and consider linking to it per the directions that you’ll find there.