Archive for June, 2006

Sadly, This American Life has asked Jon Udell to take down his podcast feed. And he has, while asking them to explain why posting links to publicly available mp3s is a copyright violation. It seems likely that the TAL tech people didn’t realize how easy it would be for people to download and play their files now that they’re in mp3 format.

Personally, I love This American Life (I even used to have a prized TAL coffee mug), but I’m not always home or in the car Sunday at 6:00 to hear it. They really should offer their own podcast feed. It could be limited to the most recent show, to discourage people from sucking down their entire archive*. C’mon, TAL, help us fans out. I think having shows available for free on mp3 is ultimately good for This American Life: just yesterday Hannah introduced her little brother to the show by playing him an episode off her iPod.

* as I’m doing right now while iTunes still has a cached copy of the old rss feed – got to grab those mp3’s while I can!

As an experiment I started using Flock Beta 1 instead of Firefox today. So far it’s going well, with one major issue.

Firefox (at least up to the current 1.5) has a close button over on the right hand side for closing the current tab. It looks like this:

To close the current tab, you click the X on the far right.

Flock, on the other hand, has a close button for each tab, like this:

To close the current tab, you click the X on that tab. Easy, right?

Unfortunately, after a couple years of using Firefox I’m pretty used to clicking that X on the far right side. And when you have a bunch of tabs open in Flock, there is an X on the far right side: the close button for the rightmost tab. So I see it, click it, wonder why my current tab is still there, and then realize that I just killed the rightmost background tab. Doh! I’ve done that about 10 times so far, and sometimes I don’t even remember what I had there other than that I was planning to read it.

Suggestion for browser developers: If you’re going to change the way tab closing works, add an “undo close tab” feature at the same time. That way people can at least recover from accidentally closing tabs until they get used to the change.

I’m sure glad I read through to the end of this Jon Udell post. Buried at the bottom is an amazing link: Jon’s home-brewed This American Life podcast! Apparently TAL episodes are now available as MP3s. That’s good news in itself, because they’ve always been RealAudio-only unless you paid through audible. They don’t offer an RSS feed though, so Jon whipped one up himself.

Here’s the link to the feed: http://udell.roninhouse.com/tal.xml. I’m subscribed! (iTunes users: Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast, paste in that link).