Gareth Simpson

I don't really like to mention my job or where I work, but just this once I'd like to say how pleased I was that ZOO agreed to host Sheffield's 2017 Django Girls event last weekend. We use Django for all our software so it was good to be able to give a little something back to the community. A few of us from the Software Engineering team went along to volunteer as mentors for the day.  It was a lot of fun. I'm impressed with the tutorial we worked through.  If you're looking to learn Python or Django it's a great place to start, even if you can't get to one of the events.

Apple has announced some extensions to RSS to add podcast-specific features.  Of particular interest to me is the ability to group episodes into seasons and specify the play order of those seasons. Users will be able to download full seasons, and the Podcasts app will know if a podcast is intended to be listened to in chronological order—“start at the first episode!”—or if it’s more timely, where the most recent episode is the most important. This sounds great to me and I hope that podcast players other than Apple's embrace it.  Diving into a podcast mid-stream is not handled well by players today.  I got so frustrated by the experience that I made a service to manage my catch-up experience .  I (and a couple of dozen Germans) have been using it for years, and while I'm not ready to retire it just yet, I am hopeful that I might have to use it a bit less soon.

I have always loved RSS. Since way back when, RSS readers are what I have made in my spare time.  You, or rather I, spend so much time reading the internet, you want the be experience to be tailored to you. I have been using the current version of my hand-rolled web-based feed reader FeedThing  for something like 7 years.  After the initial burst of activity to get it working, I haven't touched it much except to fix the occasional bug or annoyance.  I got it going to the point that (and only I) could use it and then just tailed off. During those 7 years, RSS and feeds have become way less popular.  Obviously they were always very niche, but even amongst the small corner of the internet that ever liked them they have fallen by the wayside in favor of Twitter and Facebook and the relentless onslaught of the social. So it was a pleasant surprise to have a post announcing a new feed format pop up. I don't know if JSON Feed will take off.  What I do ...