prolific.org

Eleven years ago, I saw British comedian Eddie Izzard perform a show in Amsterdam. Not long after, I set up a website about him, which ran in various incarnations from ‘95 to ‘2000. It was my most succesful website, at least until we set up Whedonesque.com.

I hooked up an old HD to my computer yesterday, and found the most recent backup of the site, made just before I took the site off line in 2000. Among the files were two original pieces I wrote. They are a review and an interview, both of which I’d like to share with you again, starting with the review.

I’ve also put part of the site back online, not originally created by me, but given to me to host. It gives me great pleasure to present: Pantscat!, an early Izzard creation.

The review follows after the break. I haven’t followed Izzard’s career the past five years. I stopped ‘believing’ and thought he was a bit too calculating, too eager in the quest for fame. Not a lot of soul. Then I just lost interest. But this was written at the height of my comparatively brief obsession with the man who said ‘Jam!’

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So many new web apps, so little time.

Kinja is a new weblog syndication web app weblog portal thought up by Meg Hourihan (Megnut, of Blogger fame) and Nick Denton (Gawker, Gizmodo, Moreover). Apparently Meg’s leaving the company at the end of this month, but her site’s down at the moment.

It was a bit creepy to find someone had already made icons for Whedonesque and prolific.org. Who are you? Where are you? Why are you reading me through a portal? Eeep. But anyway…

Kinja’s lovely interface gets all confused by people’s different rss feeds. Sometimes the title becomes the header, sometimes it’s the date. (click image to enlarge)

And it does absolutely crazy stuff with my own feed, because it picked both the quicklink feed and the main blog. (See Kinja in action live, scroll down to prolific.org posts)

Update: Matt at Kinja tells me Kinja looks at HTML first. If the HTML parse fails, it falls back on the rss feeds. There’s a little bug in the post title parsing, but a fix is in the works.

• NickDenton.org: Kinja is Live. Does a good job explaining what it is and who it’s for: “Kinja is an RSS reader for people who don’t know what RSS is, who don’t know what a reader is, for that matter, or don’t care. ”