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Wednesday, August 07, 2002

Less Filling, Tastes Great

Blitz Lite is probably the fastest way to get your BlitzMail, especially over slow connections. It is built atop NetBlitz and uses the RSS hooks Dave put in over the past two days. It has absolutely no features at all, and there are no plans to add any.

Try it out (works for students and alumni now):
name:
password:
studentalum


Again, thanks to Dave for making this possible; he really did all the work. "Blitz Lite" is written in about 4 lines of PHP and uses a couple perl libraries. It was developed in 15 minutes and debugged in about half an hour.
Send any complaints here.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 3:03 PM (0 comments)

Alternative Media

Tired of the standard liberal-media? Be sure to try www.taliban-news.com

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Rollo at 2:35 PM (0 comments)

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

BlitzMail via RSS

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post.

First, what is an aggregator? An aggregator is a piece of software, often used through a web browser, that checks a bunch of sites for new content, usually every hour. These sites can range from the New York Times to the BBC to more or less any weblog to FARK to this site (a few thousand of the more popular feeds are listed here). For each piece of new content, the aggregator will display a headline, a snippet or summary of the article, and a link to the full article. Radio and Amphetadesk are aggregators for Mac and Windows.

Well, thanks to Dave Marmaros, your BlitzMail inbox can also be one of these news feeds, albeit a private one. And, it's really easy to set up. First, click this link. After you've signed in, just copy the link and paste it into the subscription form of your aggregator (here for Radio or here for Amphetadesk). That's it.

Now, why would you want to do this? First off, using an aggregator makes a lot of sense if you spend more than 20 minutes online a day; it will save you time, keep you better informed, and point you to a lot of interesting stuff you might not have otherwise found. Second, if you're using an aggregator anyway, why not throw email in there too? Especially for alums, email through an aggregator means there's one less thing to check: you can get your email more easily and less intrusively.

Dave's been really great about putting this together. It's a neat service and, so far, possibly unique. Maybe if Yahoo Internet Life Magazine hadn't gone under, Dartmouth would be it's number one college again.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 1:08 PM (0 comments)

Monday, August 05, 2002

Randoms

John Bradley '81 edits Arab News. Is Arab News anti-Semitic? Bradley says not, and if you disagree, you must be "unable to distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism" like all the rest of his critics, too.

Gore MIA in NH:
But New Hampshire�s political territory may not prove all that welcoming for Gore. WNTK talk-show host Arnie Arneson, whose broadcast is a must-do for would-be presidential candidates (Kerry put in a call to her show while he was canvassing the state last week), says New Hampshire voters are still frustrated by Gore and the exhausting demise of his 2000 campaign. "We were around him forever," she says. "It�s not like he didn�t answer every question at Dartmouth College, for forever, including [one] from the guy sweeping the floor with a broom." His Granite State supporters remain disheartened that the candidate with whom they spent so much time couldn�t seal the deal. (Boston Phoenix)

On the recent Princeton-Yale admissions snafu:
"This report reflects the heightened craziness about admissions decisions," said James O. Freedman, a legal scholar and the former president of Dartmouth. "It probably wouldn't subvert the Constitution, but it is competitiveness taken to a dastardly length." (NY Times)

NPR on Animal House:
Miller wrote mostly adolescent, and sometimes futuristic stories -- one presaged Back to the Future. Once, under deadline pressure, he dusted off a chapter from his abandoned memoirs and turned it in. That story was "The Night of the Seven Fires," in which Miller recounted his college fraternity days. Those Alpha Delta Phis served as inspiration for the Delta Tau Chi brothers of Animal House's Faber College.

But I thought we were a College?!

Larry, Darren, Ryan, Rollo, Harry, Charles, Maru, etc. - are you all still alive? Sober?

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 11:46 PM (0 comments)

Recognize this Joke?

This one here.

Maybe that's because we published it.

Update: Fred Ware gets some credit.

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Posted by Andrew Grossman at 11:00 PM (0 comments)

David Marmaros is way cool

I emailed Dave earlier today about adding a new feature to his already-cool NetBlitz. Why is it cool? Because it is the fastest way to check BlitMail from a computer without a BlitzMail client, and it offers some neat additions to the official BlitzMail clients.

Anyway, it's now 4 or 5 hours later and the new feature is already useable. If Dartmouth worked this fast, there would have been an OS X BlitzMail client a year ago.

So, what's this great new thing? Well, if you use Radio or Amphetadesk, you may never check your email again. Students might still stick with their BlitzMail clients, but I think that administrators, faculty, and alumni will find this to be much more useful than vanilla BlitzMail.

This will be the first substantial addition to the BlitzMail infrastructure since Dartmouth added file attachments. Well, at least since Dartmouth stopped shutting off the servers every night at 3 A.M. to fix them...that was pretty substantial and only five years ago.

If you don't use Radio, Amphetadesk, or another news aggregator, you should: it's a waste of time not to. Try Radio for 30 days for free.

Mac users can also try News XPress, but it isn't as nice as Radio or Amphetadesk.

Somebody could do a lot of neat things with this.

Thanks, Dave.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 10:35 PM (0 comments)

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