Some people know that I’m writing a web-based RSS reader in Ruby on Rails. One of the very stupid details that I have been pontificating is favicons. It seems that Yahoo’s reader just blindly links to the server’s favicon URL by default. I’m not sure that Google’s Reader does anything useful with them. In my opinion, I think it’s best to just cache them on the RSS Reader’s server(s) because the originating site may be unavailable. This got me to thinking about what if some HTML contains an img tag pointing to an external server. Should my server cache those thumbnails as well? The offsite image thing could burn through more of my bandwidth, however, it would safeguard against external server availability.

Another thing I was thinking of is somehow managing Livejournal cookies on my server. It kind of gets to me that I can’t read all of the secret LJ posts with other RSS readers. The secret posts are usually the good stuff that injects much needed drama into my life. Basically, my Livejournal friends page is my RSS reader right now for this reason. I use NetNewsWire on OS X too, but its not really doing what I want. This is really the first time that I’ve ever been annoyed so much with current software that I’ve tried to roll my own solution.