So what, you ask, have I been working on while not posting to this blog?

The story goes like this. I imagine a few of you reading this will be doing so from the comfort of an RSS reader. I have one too, but I keep encountering a problem. Across all my feeds, there are so many items — some interesting, some not — that I can never be bothered to read every single one. Eventually I figured that what I really needed was a way of highlighting which articles in my feeds were more important, so late one night I took a crack at concocting a way to do this.

After some polishing, I dare say the result of my endeavours might be of use to someone other than me. It is (somewhat arbitrarily) named Feedeye, and it’s a Web-based RSS reader that allows you to put feeds into “sets” and will group together items in a set when they talk about the same thing. In doing so, it gives more emphasis to stories the more they’re being posted about in your chosen feeds.

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I spent much of yesterday cutting HTML … and losing hair over weirdo bugs in Safari.

For instance: create an object or an iframe on a page, give it a CSS border, set display:none in the stylesheet, use JavaScript to set ...style.display='block', then use it again to set ...style.display='none'. Under certain conditions (I’m still not quite sure which), the included content will disappear … but the border won’t!

So just in case Google points someone here: if you are trying to use display:none on an iframe or object, and more specifically trying to change that style using document.getElementById('foo').style.display … don’t.

Instead, whack a div around your object and apply display:none to that. (This solution came to me quite serendipitously, when the validator told me I sucked for using a Strict DTD but not putting my object inside a block-level element.)

The only gotcha is in Firefox, which has a bug whereby the object inherits display:none from the div you create. Solution: run the document.getElementById pizzaz on the object itself as well.

In other Mac-ish news, I’ve just discovered the RSS reading program Vienna, and find myself feeling quite partial towards it.