some netscape stuff

I really like working for Netscape. I wish I could talk about the insanely cool stuff that's coming up, but I've already said too much.

Instead, I thought I'd point out this nifty widget we have for people who are interested in tracking what's on our homepage. If you're not interested in the homepage stories, but want to see exactly what I am submitting, you can use this spiffy little widget to see my latest submissions.

Here are the widgets in action. They use flash, and you probably can't see them if you're reading via RSS:

Comments

[GeekessDaisy]

Looks like something that could really come in handy. Thanks for this!

[Darth Paradox]

The widgets came across great in RSS over LJ. Conventional RSS readers, probably not so much.

[Bitt Faulk]

Seems to me that this is solving a problem with semi-proprietary technology that's already been solved by RSS.

[Wil]

There's nothing proprietary about it; this is just the work that someone else did, using the RSS feeds made available from Netscape.

If I, for example, would like to put a scroller like this on one of my blogs, I could spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it myself, or I could copy-n-paste someone else's code, which is easily viewable and open.

Maybe I'm missing something, but where is this proprietary?

[Sandra L.]

Not sure if this is what Bitt was talking about, but as incredibly lame as this sounds, apparently there is some company running around claiming it has the patent on vertically-scrolling Flash item links like this. The (fairly large) company I work for is getting sued for doing the same thing on some of our pages. (Ours aren't even RSS feeds - they use a custom XML format developed by Yours Truly.)

As ubiquitous as these things are, the suit would never hold up in court in a sane universe...but when you have technologically-ignorant judges making rulings on this stuff, who knows?

[gev]

Awesome RSS readers like Newsfire handled the flash with aplomb.

[Neil Greenwood]

Liferea on Ubuntu displayed the flash perfectly.

[LaurenC]

I can see them in Feedreader 3.09