The local newspaper for Sioux Falls, SD contains an article about an online service called Feed Rinse. The service “can rinse your feeds by keyword, author, tag, etc, or filter profanity and more.” According to the article, the service is making national headlines on their Feed Rinse product. I’ve never used the service, so I can’t really give it thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Some excerpts from the Argus Leader:

Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick said of FeedRinse: “A very nice feature that we don’t have to hack and work around to make happen anymore.”

The Associated Press dispatched a favorable review this week. Technology writer Brian Bergstein said, “I can see where the site could be a little simpler to use, but for the most part, it was clean, easy to figure out and worked as advertised.”

That review appeared on dozens of prominent Web sites, including washingtonpost.com and ABC.com.

Ok so it may be a great product, but I think many reading the newspaper still do not quite get what a Web Feed is exactly. The following is a little bit of my explanation on what a Web feed is all about.

You’ve probably seen this symbol on the left posted on Web pages. That symbol is considered a “community mark” for letting everyone know that the Web site offers a Web feed (though I like to call them News Feeds). You may also see other symbols that contain either RSS or XML. These too are symbols to show that a Web Feed is available. If you click the icon your browser will be forwarded to a page with a lot of programming code that may not make a lot of sense to you. This source code contains the RSS Web Feed for Like that Idea’s?own headlines.

If you have a Web feed capable browser or application…the data can be read in a way that makes sense to you. The Mozilla Firefox browser and the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft have the ability to read these Web feeds. My favorite application to read news feeds is the same I use to read my e-mail, Mozilla Thunderbird.

The problem is that Web feeds can give you hundreds?of headlines which at times are difficult to sort though. The Feed Rinse service tries to help solve this by trying to give you only the Web feeds you likely only want to read. I can think of other ways to solve this problem than using the Feed Rinse service, but those without the technical background likely would benefit from such a service.

By the way, Rinse Feed is a product of a Sioux Falls company called Electric Pulp. The first I heard of Electric Pulp was a number of years ago when they first sponsored the annual Sioux Falls JazzFest. Over the years, they have built a pretty impressive portfolio of Web sites that they have developed for a number of regional organizations and businesses. I only mention their company because I’m a huge Blues and Jazz fan. Any company that helps sponsor a free music festival such as JazzFest deserves some?credit and attention in my opinion.

Based on an original story posted at our sister site, CMS Report.

For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We’ve been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet’s filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.

Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org:

After several days of work and tests at phpMiX.org, I’m proud to announce the immediate availability of about 2000 lines of code compiled into Akismet module v1.0.0 for Drupal 4.7.

You are encouraged to visit the Akismet site to learn more about it. In just a few words, when new content is submitted to your site, the akismet module sends a real time request to Akismet where hundreds of tests are applied to get a thumbs up or thumbs down kind of response. It may finally that tell us if the content is spam or not. If it isn’t, the content is published, if it is, then it is placed on the moderation queue. Moderators may opt-in to receive e-mail notifications for all content, just content needing approval or nothing at all. The module is fully customizable, almost everything is optional. It also keeps track of a counter that you can use to show your visitors how many spam has been caught by Akismet in your site.

Also announced, was a module for the phpBB forum software. You can visit either Akismet or phpBB for more information. If you check out phpBB, you’ll likely get a kick when you see that they are calling the mod the “Akismet Spam Butcher”. Hopefully both Drupal and phpBB users will find the Akismet modules as useful as Wordpress users have found the plugin for Wordpress to be at their sites.

There is one caveat to using the Akismet modules though. You’ll need a WordPress.com API key that is available, as far as I know, only by opening an account at Wordpress.com . I’m not really sure why the API key is only available at Wordpress.com and not Akismet’s own site, but that’s what they’ve chosen to do. For non-Wordpress users, Wordpress.org is the site you can download the actual open source software and Wordpress.com is a service that provides users a free Wordpress blogging account.

Reposted from our sister site, CMSReport.com.

I can’t say we truly like this idea since during the pre-cellphone days we were apprehensive about seeing phone jacks in the family bathroom. However, this still deserves some attention for at least a few laughs. iPod users rejoice…you can truly take your iPods wherever you go! Karen and our boy are probably more open to this product than I am.

At this time, no word on the price. So would you put an iPod toilet paper holder in your bathroom? Feel free to comment here at Like that Idea.

Here at Like that Idea, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We’ve been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet’s filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet module developed for our Drupal sites. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their applications.

Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org:

After several days of work and tests at phpMiX.org, I’m proud to announce the immediate availability of about 2000 lines of code compiled into Akismet module v1.0.0 for Drupal 4.7.

You are encouraged to visit the Akismet site to learn more about it. In just a few words, when new content is submitted to your site, the akismet module sends a real time request to Akismet where hundreds of tests are applied to get a thumbs up or thumbs down kind of response. It may finally that tell us if the content is spam or not. If it isn’t, the content is published, if it is, then it is placed on the moderation queue. Moderators may opt-in to receive e-mail notifications for all content, just content needing approval or nothing at all. The module is fully customizable, almost everything is optional. It also keeps track of a counter that you can use to show your visitors how many spam has been caught by Akismet in your site.

Also announced, was a module for the phpBB forum software. You can visit either Akismet or phpBB for more information. If you check out phpBB, you’ll likely get a kick when you see that they are calling the mod the “Akismet Spam Butcher”. Hopefully both Drupal and phpBB users will find the Akismet modules as useful as Wordpress users have found the plugin for Wordpress to be at their sites.

There is one caveat to using the Akismet modules though. You’ll need a WordPress.com API key that is available, as far as I know, only by opening an account at Wordpress.com . I’m not really sure why the API key is only available at Wordpress.com and not Akismet’s own site, but that is what they’ve chosen to do. For non-Wordpress users, Wordpress.org is the site you can download the actual open source software and Wordpress.com is a service that provides users a free Wordpress blogging account. We’re having too much fun running Wordpress on our own server that Wordpress.com isn’t really for us. However, if you would rather write content than look at the code…Wordpress.com likely would be a good solution. Either way, happy spam hunting!

We’ve upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.0.3. This release addresses security issues, bugs, and a few performance enhancements. As you’ll find out when reading the announcement from Wordpress.org…they’ve backported into 2.0.3 a number of security enhancements from the yet to be released Wordpress 2.1.

The latest in the stable 2.0 series, 2.0.3, is now available for download. This is a bug fix and security release, and is recommended for all WordPress users. In addition to an issue that was raised on Bugtraq a few days ago, we?ve also backported a number of security enhancements from 2.1 to further enhance and protect your blog.For the curious, this release includes:

• Small performance enhancements
• Movable Type / Typepad importer fix
• Enclosure (podcasting) fix
• The aforementioned security enhancements (nonces)

Upgrading is fairly simple, just overwrite your old files with the latest from the download. When you go to your admin it will give you a link to update your database.

Note: The below message was cross posted with our sister site, CMS Report. After you read the post, we would be interested in hearing from you whether you see this site, Like that Idea, as a Family 2.0 Site. Do we have a future? Please write you comments below this post! Thanks!

Taking the term of Web 2.0 further, CNET has an article about Family 2.0 sites:

Cook is one of a growing number of parent-entrepreneurs who are putting their time and money behind their familial interests and starting a new generation of Web sites for parents and older people–sites that borrow many of the social networking concepts, such as photo-sharing and the wiki, that are found on well-known destinations like MySpace.com and the aforementioned Wikipedia.

Call them “Family 2.0″ sites–places for people who may feel a little strange hanging out with the teenybopper set on MySpace. While big family-friendly sites have been around for a long time, few of them have taken advantage of newer Web technologies, even things as widespread as RSS feeds and mapping links.

The owner of CMSReport.com and his wife has a site of their own that would likely qualify as a Family 2.0 site, LikethatIdea.com. The intention of Like that Idea is to point out good ideas and products for the family. The site is intended to be less IT oriented, but Bryan has the tendency to let his geek side prevail from time to time!

When the days are less crazy, we’ll write more about a sister site of ours, the CMS Report. The site is still in it’s iniitial stages with content somewhat limited. The site currently provides content through a news aggregator and an occasional original article. The theme also needs some work. For now though, we’ll just say if you have an interest in web content management systems you’ll likely find something that interests you.

The site covers most open source projects including Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, etc. Also covered is the propriety side of CMS. In the near-future, discussion will also include the broader topics of information systems and system adminstration.

CMS Report currently runs on Drupal 4.7. While CMS Report will allow for comments and submission of articles, it is not expected to introduce a forum-type format. If you like forums, we recommend another CMS-focused site we are associated with…the WebCMS Forum.