Steve Reads

Here we go: proof that I love my readers. Let’s suppose — I realize this is ridiculous, but bear with me — that you don’t enjoy so much reading about Linux on this here blog. Well. Now I have a way for you to prevent the display of Linux posts when you visit this site: instead of visiting just http://stevereads.com/, you can now visit http://stevereads.com?exclude=/free_software. I just wrote a trivial little Blosxom plugin that will do this.

Additionally, because I am so full of love that it almost hurts sometimes, I’ve now tried to group posts in categories that people might want to exclude en masse — for instance, I took the free software category and stuck it under the tech category — assuming that if you don’t like to read about Linux on this site, you probably don’t like to read about my deeply interesting thoughts on Microsoft, either.

It has always been possible, and easy, to restrict yourself to displaying only certain categories on this site; you could, for instance, go directly to the my-life category if you want to skip any of my various rants. Until now, though, it hasn’t been possible to display everything except certain posts.

The next logical step in usability is to display a list box somewhere on this page that says “check the categories you’d like to display when you visit this site.” By default (presumptuous me) all the categories would be checked. If you clear some of them, the blog would set a cookie in your browser that remembers your settings for future visits; from then on you’d only have to visit the regular URL (http://stevereads.com/) to display the posts you want to see. That cookie idea wouldn’t work — so far as I know — in most RSS readers, but it’s probably not bad for now. And in your RSS reader — if that’s how you visit my site — you can use the “?exclude=” syntax just like you would in your browser.

Anyway, let me know what you think. I hope this helps people who are getting a bit tired of the Linuxy bits on here.

P.S.: And for additional love, I’ve added a link to the bottom of every post that helps you exclude the posts you don’t care about.

P.P.S.: You can exclude multiple topics. You could exclude, for instance, all posts about Abu Ghraib, law, media, technology, films, economics, music, civil liberties, books, science, politics, Social Security, or me. Which would basically leave you with a tasty blog about site admin or “miscellaneous.” Fun for all.