John August

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More about the RSS feeds

Geek Alert

A few readers wrote in asking about the RSS feeds for the site. Some wondered why clicking on the links just brought up a page of gibberish, or asked for recommendations about which applications worked best with them.

Although the addresses look the same (starting with the ‘http://’), RSS and Atom aren’t web pages like you traditionally think of them. Rather, they’re feeds. Think of them like magazine subscriptions. You subscribe to National Geographic, and every month you get an issue. RSS works the same way, except that rather than getting a whole “issue,” you get each article as soon as it’s posted. This means that rather than having to visit johnaugust.com every day to see if there’s anything new, you can sit back and let the articles come to you.

netnewswireClicking on the image to the left should probably make this a little more clear. This is a screenshot from the newsreader program I use, NetNewsWire. In the left-hand column, you see my subscriptions. (Subscriptions, by the way, are almost always free.)

Right now, the one highlighted is “ja with comments.” In the center column you see the titles for 15 most recent entries in the ‘ja with comments’ feed. Clicking on any one of these headlines brings up the text for that entry.

As you can see, I use a completely separate program to handle my RSS feeds. That’s because most browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox aren’t set up to handle them well, although the forthcoming version of Safari is supposed to use them extensively. Also, notice that the RSS feed is pretty basic, with no fancy formatting or graphics. It’s just the content, none of the bells and whistles. This is part of what makes it so fast.

Why would you want to subscribe to a site, rather than just visit it? In a word, efficiency. I’m sure every reader out there has sites sitting in his bookmarks that he only visits every once in a while. Sure, you could stop by every day, but what if there’s nothing new? As you can you can see in the screenshot, I’m subscribed to 54 feeds. There’s no way I could or would visit those 54 sites every day, but with RSS, I’m getting the same information I would if I did.

Hopefully, readers will be able to recommend good newsreaders for Windows or Linux.

Fatter RSS feed now available

Geek Alert

If you’re subscribing to this site via RSS, there’s now an RSS 2.0 feed that includes the full text of articles, along with any comments posted images and some formatting.

I’m in the process of revamping a lot of things on the site. Pretty soon you should be able to subscribe to a variety of new feeds, including just the comments on a particular entry. And if you’re not using RSS yet, try Googling it to find a good newsreader for your computer. It’s the closest thing yet to an IV drip for information.

UPDATE: The Feeds section is now working.

Digital cinema gets a little closer

Geek Alert

A while back, Sylvain from Quebec wrote in to ask, “Will digital ever replace film?” My response (“yes, eventually”) drew a fair amount of discussion and disagreement, particularly in terms of distribution, with some readers trumpeting film-based technologies such as Maxivision.

An article on CNET today does a nice job explaining how the studios are working to pick a standard for digital video distribution, with the hopes of saving themselves $800 million a year:

A technology consortium called the Digital Cinemas Initiatives (DCI), created by the major Hollywood studios in early 2002, is finally nearing completion on a set of technical recommendations that is intended to rally the industry around a single technological standard […] based on the JPEG 2000 video format.

I think it’s encouraging that they chose the relatively open JPEG 2000 standard, rather than Microsoft’s Windows Media 9.

Short films and writer’s assistants

Film Industry, QandA

I made a near-zero-budget short film to act as a calling card, a comedy entitled “Mr. Game Show.” It’s no “Terry Tate, Office Linebacker,” but I think it’s pretty funny and have gotten some good feedback on it.

One obstacle, however, is that I cannot submit it to film festivals because I don’t own rights to all the footage. So, my question: would you have any suggestions on how to get this so-called calling card “out there”?

Second, everyone’s heard of your writer’s assistants who have gone on to great success. I’ve also heard this is a great career path for television writing. Salary-wise, do these positions pay enough to be someone’s sole means of support? Or are they more like internships which pay little or nothing (aside from experience, opportunity)? In other words, would you also need a day/night job?

–Kevin
Sherman Oaks

One way to get people to see your short film is to get it mentioned on a website. So, well done.

I always applaud people with the zeal to make a short, rather that just fret about how they’re never going to get into the industry. Your short features a nice, straightforward idea, and makes smart use of today’s off-the-shelf editing technology. I hope you get good feedback from it, and hopefully some meetings.

Writer’s assistants don’t make spectacular amounts of money, but it certainly should be enough to keep a roof over your head. Obviously, you want to treat it as a learning experience, but it’s a job, too. If you’re working on a television show, you’d probably be making a fair amount of your money on overtime, because there are inevitably long hours involved. Working for a feature writer, the hours would probably more regular, because we’re so damn lazy.