Coffee notes for July 30, 2019
·What I’ve learned in 20 years of blogging, by Anil Dash: “Most people in tech want to do good, but tech history is poorly understood. As a result, many in tech don’t understand how tech can have negative impacts when they think of themselves as good people.”
As much as it pains me to say it, Facebook Marketplace is a better place than Craigslist to sell used household merchandise. Items seem to sell more quickly and some that never sold on Craigslist find buyers on Facebook. My success rate has gone up tremendously. And it’s probably safer than selling on Facebook. I guess Facebook will do to Craigslist what Craigslist did to newspapers.
Every state has an infamous crime – and a book about it.
The 10 best web scraping tools.
I’m working with SimplePie to create a website and it’s working great, but it looks like active development on the code has stopped. SimplePie is written in PHP, so it pretty much runs on any web host without problems. But I’m not sure what the future holds for the application since it seems like the developers have moved on to other projects.
On a related note, I’ve played in the past with David Winer’s River aggregator, but have always found it to be too fiddly. Other people have had success running it, so this probably speaks more to my comfort level with some of the software’s dependencies.