January 16, 2005
RSS feeds and copyright

This dumb ass (also known as Martin Schwimmer of Trademark Blog, has a problem with Bloglines picking up his public RSS-feed and redistributing it. Because they might at some stage serve ads together with the content.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bloglines; its an online feedreader that you can use to read most any feeds from any news source or blog on the net that has its own feed.

Martin: I have the perfect solution: Stop publishing the feed. Its that simple. Crying about copyright problems when someone distributes your content is just plain stupid, especially when you go after a service such as Bloglines. You could just as well attack Radio for making feed available, or any internet provider for distributing your content without your consent.

This "clarification" doesn't help either. More response can be found over at Scobles.

Posted by jarle at 06:17 PM
Spell check for your browser

More and more of my writing happens in the browser, with much of the text being inputed into forms. Whether it is typing articles for my blogs or commenting in others or doing most anything else.

While some online applications have spell check built in, most doesn't. That's where a browser plug-in for spell checking comes in handy.

My favourite combination browser/spell check these days are Mozilla Firefox and SpellBound. Both are platform independent, easy to install and works perfectly. Even better, SpellBound has dictionaries for both the official Norwegian languages. With the cool extension support in Firefox I had this spell checker up and running in minutes.

Opera uses GNU Aspell - a open source spell checker that is also available in a Win32 version. It was easy enough to install Aspell for Opera on Windows XP, only problem is that I have yet to figure out how to actually get it working. As it is now its trying to spell check with no dictionary at all, and I have found no way to configure it. Opera could learn a lot from how Firefox handles plug-ins.

Theres also a spell checker for Internet Explorer, in case want to use a browser with multiple vulnerabilities. Its called iespell and its also fairly easy to install.

Posted by jarle at 05:32 PM | Comments (4)