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decafbad.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2008

Les Orchard writes about web tech, Firefox, feeds, bookmarks, and Commodore 64 nostalgia.

What HN saysHN commenters link it for practical references, such as a Twitter-faves-to-OPML tool and an early write-up of HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox.
19HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
14stories submitted
95story points
6 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Queue everything and delight everyone
    7 people · 48 points · first shared 2008 · 14 comments on HN
  2. 2
    HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox 3.5
    3 people · 30 points · first shared 2009 · 2 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Firefox Sync server on Google App Engine
    1 people · 8 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
  4. 4
    Let a million bookmarks bloom
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
  5. 5
    What happened to feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4?
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    Reviving my Commodore 64 history with a uIEC/SD
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    Getting Laconica up and running
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    Social Media Cyborg
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    Newly Digital in 1983
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
  10. 10
    Tags do work for me at least
    1 people · first shared 2009
  11. 11
    How to use feed auto discovery in firefox 4
    1 people · first shared 2020
  12. 12
    Moved to jekyll
    1 people · first shared 2012
  13. 13
    Homepage
    1 people · first shared 2010
  14. 14
    Twitter friend faves opml
    1 people · first shared 2009

What HN people wrote when they linked it

apostacy · 2020-05-17
> Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar. https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-rss-icon.png Is that from Firefox 3.6? I would have to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure they started de-emphasizing RSS around 2011 with Firefox 4.0. It was many years ago, I was looking at some discussion about it here: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-use-feed-auto-discovery-in… I remember being rustled about it back then, also.
crabasa · 2012-01-02
I'll +1 everyone who is recommending Jekyll. I've rolled my own blog engines (first one was Java/Struts 10 years ago) but I'm loving the zen of blogging via creating and pushing Markdown files to GitHub. It's simple, provides me with a versioned and easily portable archive and doesn't require constant security updates. Here are some tips from migrating from WP: http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/06/08/moved-to-jekyll
dsims · 2009-04-03
I used this http://decafbad.com/2009/01/twitter-friend-faves-opml/ to create an OPML file, and then edited it so it contained status feeds instead of favorites. I just stumbled up on this too, which is probably a better idea: http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?p=408
mbrubeck · 2010-02-18
Here are my top ten, mostly web-related in some way because of my interests. These are the "loud alpha geeks" - the ones who broadcast their interests via regularly-updated blogs or curated links. (There are plenty of "quiet alpha geeks" who are just as "alpha" but not as easy to follow online.) Brad Fitzpatrick (http://brad.livejournal.com/) - creator of LiveJournal and Danga, now at Google working on PubSubHubbub, the Social Graph API, etc. John Resig (http://ejohn.org/, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeresig) - jQuery, Mozilla, lots of other JavaScript and browser stuff. Paul Bucheit (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul) - creator of GMail and FriendFeed, now at Facebook. Ryan Tomayko (http://tomayko.com) - Ruby, Sinatra, now working at GitHub, has an excellent linkblog. Simon Willison (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw) - Django, Python, also has an excellent linkblog. Leslie Orchard (http://decafbad.com/) - Previously at Delicious/Yahoo, wrote books on JavaScript, Dojo, RSS, now at Mozilla. Follow his bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/deusx Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/) - Atom, HTML5, Linux, Python, Greasemonkey, formerly at IBM, now at Google. Bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/wearehugh John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) - Apple news and punditry, linkblog. Sam Ruby (http://intertwingly.net/blog/) - Atom, Python, Ruby, Rails, XML, HTML5, SVG. Read what he reads at: http://planet.intertwingly.net/ Kevin Kelly…
gojomo · 2010-05-12
Drag and drop from the desktop is an HTML5 feature, but support elsewhere may not be as strong as in Chrome. Here's an earlier article about support in FF: http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/07/15/html5-drag-and-drop Last I checked, one weakness of the FF support is that it can only read a dropped file into memory in its entirety -- not by fileBlob slices. That may not be fatal for typical-sized email attachments, but is a serious limitation for one of my desired applications. (I'm not sure I'm even reading the HTML5 drag-and-drop spec right about reading ranges... but they wouldn't spec a feature that could only work with files that easily fit in the browser's memory, would they?)
mgriffith · 2010-04-15
actually, they are most likely using part of the new drag and drop API in HTML5. firefox and chrome both provide a `ev.originalEvent.dataTransfer` object as part of the DragEvent interface. additionally (and importantly), they allow the drag/drop to originate from outside of the browser. see: http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/07/15/html5-drag-and-drop and: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/07/html5-drag-and-drop/
asksol · 2010-02-10
Point taken. I have to add something like that. A good article on queueing used in a web context is http://decafbad.com/blog/2008/07/04/queue-everything-and-delight-every…
simonw · 2009-01-25
Les Orchard (who used to work for delicious.com) has a good response to this article. Part of his argument is that Flickr is a really bad place to start a tag analysis, since people generally only tag their own stuff (the big win for tags comes when lots of people provide their personal tags for a single entity, meaning you can look at the data in aggregate). http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/01/18/tags-do-work-for-me-at-least

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