The reason I never get tired of talking about the how part of meta is I’m hopeful that some student will learn enough for them to continue or contribute.
I must admit the Yahoo News format change on Tuesday has proven a bit of a stumper for me. What seems to have happened is that they removed the likely categories (Top Stories, World, U.S. News, Politics, Business, Science, etc.) and dumped all their wire service stories into a big basket, in fact making it tough to distiguish which of the 3 main services- AFP, Reuters, or AP you were sampling.
Over the last 3 days I’ve been able to assemble a collection of Bookmarks that approximately cover the last 24 hours of output. The problem is numbers. There are too many of them.
At 25 a page there are over 1,375 headlines to look at and while I’m not sure what the current Soapblox limit is, dk could only handle 60 or so which means I need to adjust my filters somehow so I can get the cut to 4%. It’s harder and more time consuming to write short.
Not to mention on your computer. Ubuntu 10.4 is keeping windows open in numbers that bring my XP system on the same hardware to it’s knees, but it does slug down and I have to concentrate.
Right now I’m finding it takes 2 – 3 hours to cover a single service by starting at 24 hours ago, clicking each promising headline into it’s own window, checking for interest and length, and shrinking it to move on to the next. Only at the end in the last 45 minutes or so am I assembling it with cut and paste and formatting, completely different from my previous practice of picking and choosing as I went along. By starting at the end and moving forward in time I create a stack of stories that I unload into the text in roughly chronological order.
There are certainly some other interesting organizational things I can do that may ease accessibility for you, but I’m trying to disdain them because of their time wasting qualities. I realize my News Digests are probably the most valuable thing I write, but I feel sometimes they distract me.
So below you will find some links you can turn into bookmarks for your private amusement and I shall struggle on trying to make this a manageable task.
| AFP | Reuters | AP |
| 10 | 14 | 31 |
| 9 | 13 | 30 |
| 8 | 12 | 29 |
| 7 | 11 | 28 |
| 6 | 10 | 27 |
| 5 | 9 | 26 |
| 4 | 8 | 25 |
| 3 | 7 | 24 |
| 2 | 6 | 23 |
| 1 | 5 | 22 |
| 4 | 21 | |
| 3 | 20 | |
| 2 | 19 | |
| 1 | 18 | |
| 17 | ||
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| 11 | ||
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