Thu, August 9, 2007

I just got e-mail from John Gruber! This is like the blog nerd version of getting to go backstage and say hi to the band. I'm almost disgusted by how much this made my day, except I'm in this new phase of celebrating my dipshit idiosyncrasies, so I say, "Go blog nerd! Celebrate all you want, and don't forget to change your underpants after!"

Gruber is the writer of Daring Fireball, a blog about computers and interface design (usually Mac-related). I read it more often than Kung Fu Monkey, but I link to it less often, because I know my audience – people for whom this stuff falls somewhere between, "Huh?" and "Who gives a shit?" But it's a very excellent blog, and often very funny if you follow that kind of thing.

Anyway, he wrote in response to a brief message I sent him in praise of his newly adjusted RSS feed. I wrote Kottke about the same issue a few months ago – it's rare for me to bother the few mega-bloggers I read, so I hold my tongue until I can add value. (I have the same policy with real-life celebrities.) Of course, I'm on record as generally anti-RSS – so it's sort of ironic that I care about this.

I told John:

The "link" field on the Linked List items in the newly-free feed is now populated with the actual URL, meaning I can open them from NetNewsWire [RSS reader] with just a right-arrow click and continue my reading. This is a beautiful thing. Thanks as always for caring about the details.

It really is a beautiful thing. (Kottke made the opposite change in January, and was non-responsive to my pleas for a do-over. I finally had to create a Yahoo! Pipe to take care of it – you're welcome, Internet!)

The response, which actually made my heart leap:

You're quite welcome. Thanks for noticing, and glad you enjoy the change.

1) You're welcome. (Polite!) 2) You're a smart guy. (You noticed!) 3) I care about you. (Enjoy!) That's a lot of affirmation, packed quite efficiently in a short message. What a man!