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purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Miro, PyBlosxom, Python, GNU/Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Thu, 27 May 2004

Meerkat

Most of the time Meerkat is really intensely cool! It's one of the few places I read day to day. Anyhow, there are a bunch of sites for which they provide totally bogus links which is irritating. I don't know if it's their fault or the fault of the sites--and I don't really care a whole lot....

What's really irritating is that on the about page for Meerkat (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/rss/2000/03/17/about_meerkat.html), they have a section the bottom that ask for suggestions, bugs, comments, and other feedback and point people to their O'Reilly Network RSS forum. You click on the link to discover the forums are closed indefinitely and "new improved forums will be coming in the near future".

How irritating. How am I supposed to help out and make the service better when there is no feedback mechanism I can use to tell them there are problems?

[ tags: life | category: /content | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 2 ]

Comments:

Posted by Adam Shand on Fri May 28 06:24:37 2004
I know this is going to come across as me being a smart ass and that's not actualy how I mean it but ...

After your Pyblosxom rant about all the silly places people report bugs to ... how about you let Rael or someone know? :-)


Posted by will on Fri May 28 09:05:51 2004
Well, yeah, you're sort of right on.  This post is less about the fact that there are issues with the Meerkat system (though like I said, those issues could be just data issues in the feeds and not the fault of Meerkat at all) and more about the fact that the only feedback mechanism they have for Meerkat is closed indefinitely pending a new improved system at some point in the future. 

That's just stupid and it's unfortunate because there's no official channels to point this out to someone so they could fix it so that the world is a better place.

I'm hesitant to just start firing off emails to "random people" when there's no clear indication they worked on Meerkat or that they are currently working on Meerkat.  I don't want to add to the noise of the world--people clamoring at the top of their lungs at whoever happens to be nearby.  I want to throw my suggestions in the suggestions boxes.

In my previous post I was complaining about people who whisper into their pillow despite the plethora of options for feedback that people on the project would definitely see.

So I see a pretty clear difference between the two posts, but maybe it's not as clear in the text.

Regardless, I appreciate you pointing this out.  :)


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