Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 15 Dec 2006 03:13:32 GMT
What is it with Seattle weather this year? Until a month ago, my worst commute ever was 1:30, tied a couple times in the 8 years I’ve been living in the Seattle area. Now I’ve broken that twice in a month. First there was last month’s freak snowstorm that gave me a 3:30 commute, and tonight it took me 1:40 to get home, just because of rain. I mean, I can understand Seattle being unable to handle snow, but rain? What the heck? Admittedly, it was a lot of rain–our office’s underground parking garage was filling up, and the parking lot was about to overflow into the lobby when I left at 5:15, but still–we’re supposed to be able to cope with water around here.
Sheesh. I’m tempted to call in sick for the rest of the winter.
Tags seattle, traffic | 3 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 03:43:42 GMT
One of the great problems with RSS is that it’s really hard to know how many readers you have. Feedburner is supposed to be able to help with that, but I’m reluctant to outsource my RSS feeds to them–I’m not really sure how I’d get them back if I decided to can Feedburner. So, while I know that I’m averaging around 1,300 JavaScript-enabled page hits per day on my blog, I have *no* idea how many people are reading via RSS. On one level, it doesn’t really matter, but I find that I’m more willing to write when I know that people are reading, and the more readers I have, the more time I’m willing to spend writing.
The problem is that there isn’t a 1:1 correspondence between RSS downloads and readers, like there is for normal web pages (modulo caching and a few other issues). Bloglines is helpful enough to tell me that it has around 60 subscribers, and I know that I’ve served up around 24,000 RSS and Atom feeds so far this month, but I have no easy way to know if that’s 1,000 people with a slow refresh set or 11 people refreshing every 5 minutes, or even 50,000 people all reading via a portal. Plus, there are at least three “planet” sites syndicating one feed or another (PlanetRubyOnRails, PlanetTypo, and Planet Foo), and I have no clue how many readers they have, either via HTML or RSS.
I’ve been tempted to integrate a 1-pixel “web bug” into Typo’s RSS feeds more then once, but I don’t really like the privacy implications. Fortunately or unfortunately, I get the same effect any time I post an image here. The Flickr montage that I posted almost 8 hours ago has resulted in 347 image hits. Of those, 150 have no referrer, so they’re probably from standalone RSS readers, like NetNewsWire. Another 95 are from scottstuff.net, followed by 42 from Planet Ruby On Rails, then 24 from Bloglines, 16 from Planet Typo, 3 from Planet Foo, 3 from Google Reader, and a couple that are either comment spammers or internal feeds from stealth companies.
Does anyone have any good leads on how to track this sort of thing on a more regular basis? While we’re at it, does Feedburner just play session cookie games, or are they doing something clever? Finally, it seems clear that embedding images into RSS feeds works most of the time, but I’ve never heard of anyone using web bugs with RSS–did I just miss the discussion, or are people avoiding them?
Tags rss, traffic, typo, users | 5 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 07 Jan 2004 09:41:19 GMT
Well, it snowed today. They were calling for up to 6 inches, but I can only see 3 inches on the ground here. As usual, the forecast overstated the amount of snow to expect.
They didn’t overstate the traffic problems, though. I drove in to work around 9:00 today, and it was a piece of cake. 405 was clear and mostly dry, and 520 was only a little slow. 5 was slick, but there was no traffic. It wasn’t until I got off the freeway that the real fun began–I tried driving down Columbia. From 6th to 5th I mostly slid, but there was no one in the way, and I managed to stop only slightly into the crosswalk. From 5th to 4th I did a bit better, but I was still sliding slightly sideways by the bottom of the block. I had a green light so I continued through the intersection and stopped to see what to expect between 4th and 3rd. Good thing I stopped–there was a 3-car wreck sideways on the road, leaving only one lane open. Fortunately, there was a metered parking spot open right in front of me, so I parked and walked to the office.
I was the only person in the office. Everyone else was working from home today, apparently. Around noon, I checked on my car, and the wreck was clear, and the road was closed. There was a freezing rain rumor going around, and the snow was still coming down hard, so I decided to get out of downtown before I was stuck waiting out the storm. The commute home was mostly uneventful–I slid down Columbia to 3rd, which was a little slick, and then took University back uphill to 5, then on to 520. The bridge was deserted–at one point, I couldn’t see anyone in front of me or behind me–but the traffic picked up as soon as I reached the east shore. From there to 405, it was stop and go, on ice. Every time I started, I slid a few inches towards the divider. Great fun. 405 was bumper to bumper as well, at least through Kirkland.
So, what does this prove? Seattle can’t drive in the snow. Except for the downtown hills, none of the roads seemed particularly bad. The real problem was all of the other drivers, and the accidents blocking lanes and causing rubernecking. More plows would have helped, too.
Posted in Seattle | Tags seattle, snow, traffic | no comments
