Apple Foot

More power

Ladies and gentlemen, we have broadband.

More Rojo Follies

As of July 27 at 10:13 AM EDT, I find that Rojo is available--minimally. At this point, you can only reach the Rojo corporate blog, where you'll find this entry, dated July 25 at 1:30PM:

"The Rojo service came offline yesterday due to a power outage in San Francisco that impacted our data center. We are working hard to bring the service back online, but don't have an ETA at this point."

That's the last official update from them on system status--an update nearly two days old, when we're now starting the fourth day of a complete service outage. They also didn't bother to tag it, so if you pull up the "System Updates" category, the last update listed is from September 2006.

They did, however, manage to post their weekly Zeitgeist (dated July 27, 6:00 AM) in which they mention in passing:

"This week's power failure in San Francisco's SoMa district took out several brand-name Web 2.0 sites, including Yelp, Craigslist, NetFlix, SixApart, Technorati, Second Life and, yes, Rojo."

Notice how they don't mention that Rojo's still down, although the other sites mentioned have all recovered. I'm glad I've got their summary of important events this week, since I can't read my feeds.

Service outages of any flavor are inevitable. Service outages of this duration deserve thorough explanations. Rojo has failed to communicate with users.

When they are back, I'll be logging in just long enough to get an OPML file of my subscriptions so I can take it to a different aggregator.

[UPDATE: At 5PM July 27, an explanation appears on the corporate blog (still the only part of Rojo you can reach).]

Aggregator Woes

Sometime last fall, I think, I got tired of some service problems Bloglines was having and switched to Rojo. This spring/summer, Rojo has had numerous outages or weirdnesses (you know, suddenly you've got several hundred unread posts in a feed that hasn't generated that many posts in its entire existence?) Last night I tried to login and got the infamous "Nooz: Coming Zoon" message (because apparently Rojo expects befuddled users who can't reach the service to know that Nooz is another product by Rojo). There was a big power outage in San Francisco yesterday afternoon/evening, though, and many services (for example, Six Apart's various blogging outlets) were down. Rojo, however, is still unavailable 24 hours later.

Anybody have an online aggregator they like? I've been considering Google Reader, even though that means when I read (job-related, of course) feeds at work, I've got to juggle Google accounts, since we have a webmaster account for the company.

Girl Geeks

I realize this item is a week old, but I'm just catching up with a pile of stuff in my feeds. CNET published a list of the "Top Ten Girl Geeks." It goes without saying, of course, that no one is compiling a "Top Ten Boy Geeks" list, but if anyone did, would the list consist of five dead people (Ada Byron, d. 1852; Grace Hopper, d. 1992; Rosalind Franklin, d. 1958; Mary Shelley, d. 1851; Marie Curie, d. 1934), including two dead for 150 years, one fictional character, a "borderline autistic" actor whose claim to fame is playing an android prostitute, and a dumb-as-a-post perennial bad joke like Paris Hilton?

According to this list, almost no women have made any geekly impact in the current century. After all, the blogosphere has hardly any girl geeks, right? And apparently, CNET has forgotten its own history.  That's just a few web-related girl geeks off the top of my head--surely CNET can do better.

RSS Madness

This evening I logged into my Bloglines account to find that the Official Google Blog had 4,294,967,294 new entries (see screenshot). When I actually looked at that feed, it only had one post, on summer health tips-- which, since I hear the California heat wave has broken, comes a little too late.

It's not just me, but I haven't found an explanation yet. What's the number of web pages Google estimates it has indexed now, anyway? It's gotta be more than 4.3 billion.