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Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts

Day: March 28, 2005

  • Email aggravations: AOL and (separately) Yahoo Groups

    AOL has blocked e-mail from my domain, which is frustrating to both me and my wife. Why? Someone in the same IP range at Verio probably sent something dodgy to AOL… or so AOL says. I hope it’s truly only temporary, no more than the 24 hours cited.

    Yahoo Groups has been more consistently annoying. I keep being told that my main e-mail address is bouncing, with a hard bounce. When I go through the process to “unbounce” my account, I always get the error message in the image you see here. Catch 22… even if the error message tells me this is error code -1132. Yahoo is usually quite good about hiding/preventing these cryptic error messages, so it’s especially astonishing that this has continued over more than a month. A picture named yahooGroupsAnnoyance.jpg
    Trying again in a few minutes — or even a day or two later — does nothing. This is the second time I’ve run into this brick wall. Last time, I connected with Yahoo Support and was told to connect with my ISP. Thanks so much. I wonder if switching from Verio to TextDrive will alleviate these problems? It’s on my to do list at some point, though I hate the DNS disruption to email, etc.

  • Category level stream pages in Newsburst

    I’ve been quiet about Newsburst for a while now, but there are a few more changes out there to enjoy.

    • Category-level stream and dashboard pages: lots of readers asked for these, and I know I wanted them, too. Stream view lets you see everything at once, but it’s nice to filter it down to a category at a time. Click on a category name to view.
    • Cleaner “Manage” page: improved Javascript and easier UI. Just more polished all around for managing your sources, whether renaming, moving, exporting, deleting, etc.
    • Simplification: the Dashboard and Stream tabs were replaced by a Home tab. Dashboard and Stream are still available, and you can change your preference — but first-time users were puzzled by the choices. Also, Today Online is a bit smoother.
    • Performance: shouldn’t be the last thing I mention, but the performance is much improved. Even a page with 100 items from various sources now screams.

    More to come, and more to do, but this is progress.