April 16th, 2009
Anything from 10 to 20 percent of all users on the web still use IE6 and the general consensus seems to be that it is too early to drop support for it. But what were the statistics like back when the world dropped support for IE5.5? (or 5.0 for that matter)
My guess is that a significant amount of people were still using IE 5 when sites just stopped working for them and they were forced to upgrade, but a quick search comes up with no dates or statistics.
Either way, with the previous 5 major versions of Internet Explorer and 4 major versions of Netscape Navigator, people upgraded either because a newer version was bundled with their operating system or because sites stopped working. People aren’t upgrading their pirated copies of XP, so what does that leave?
What else changed between then and now? Why were sites allowed to break on older browsers when we all moved to IE6 as the new minimum, but now that we need to move to IE7, it is unacceptable?
Pidgin’s “Highlight misspelled words” functionality doesn’t even recognize the words in their own example text:
Just added OpenID support to Feed Me. Feed readers are pretty much the perfect use case for OpenID: You really only need identity and nothing more.
It was actually a bit more complicated than I thought, but that might just be because of the learning curve. I think the Python OpenID Library could do with a nicer tutorial, examples, etc.
I tried two different Django implementations (django-openid and django-openid-consumer) and neither of them worked properly with the version of Python OpenID in Ubuntu. I had to apply some patches but in the end still had to patch it manually. Then I realised that I’m not using all the middleware and views, so I just made my own basic library based on that that just implements OpenIDStore and it is now part of the Seymour codebase.
It just felt a bit frustrating, because in the end I had to learn quite a bit about how OpenID works internally (although I’m still no expert) just to act as a consumer..
Anyway.. hope it works - I’ve only tested with myOpenID so far.
You can now rename feeds in Feedme.
I made a slight change to the indexer - if an item got updated I used to clear the list of accounts that have read that feed so that people will see the update. The thing is.. feeds are very unreliable in which fields they support, so I have to check if the title, link or body changed in order to know if it got updated. For some reason for many feeds the body keeps changing even though the content didn’t actually change. This is incredibly annoying because every 6 hours when feedme indexes again you get the same old items. So.. for now I just don’t clear that list anymore. If an item was marked as read, then it is marked as read forever. If it got updated before you read it, then you still get the latest updated version.
Otherwise.. I am really happy with it. I don’t actually want to add anything to it, really - I’m going to keep the minimalist nature. The only thing I now plan to add is a way to export your feeds to an OPML file. I decided not to support importing OPML files. After that I’m going to effectively consider this app done except for bugfixes and maybe a nicer homepage.