Thank you O'Reilly

How many times have you emailed the "webmaster" at a site, only to never hear back? Most companies have a generic webmaster address (if they bother to list it), but that address may never see the real webmaster's inbox. Worse, said webmaster might not care that his pages aren't compatible with Opera... Still more common is when a doofus like me can't figure something out, emails the webmaster, and gets either a form letter or nothing in response. Well I just wanted to thank O'Reilly for apparently taking an interest in its users. See, I'd been missing Meerkat, O'Reilly's newsfeed, which was an aggregated feed of some great sites out there. They quit "broadcasting" Meerkat's feed last month. Luckily, they put the OPML file up, sort of, for mass consumption (the link opens a page of the XML, which you copy/paste into Notepad, then save as OPML). But something in the file prevented RSSOwl from using it. So I hit up Justin, the webmaster, using the email provided right there on the page. And guess what? A couple of email exchanges later, and Justin had fixed the OPML file so that it works in RSSOwl. Wow. That, folks, is customer service. Big shout out to Justin and the rest of the team at O'Reilly for doing a great job and actually caring about the user experience. Wish we saw more of that in the technosphere...

Tags: aggregate, freeware, meerkat, newsfeed, o'reilly, opml, rss, rssowl, xml