NATION TIMES is a hub of daily headlines that affect our nation. Visit the main site and revisit this info page for updates and events about the website and its news services.


LINKS
NationTimes.net
NT Blog


RECENT
Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
I Just started up Nation Times on Newsvine
Just added a 'back to Nola' blog
Had to ditch the Digg feed for the time being
FeedBurner RSS & Email
Just added: another hot feed to NT
Access from anywhere
WOW! Someone at NYTimes.com heard to me
I just yanked the Yahoo! News RSS feed from Nation...
Known issues


ARCHIVE


Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

Is this email not displaying properly?
View it in your browser.

Dear Google user,

We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.

We believe this stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/policies. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.


One policy, one Google experience
Easy to work across Google Tailored for you Easy to share and collaborate
Easy to work across Google

Our new policy reflects a single product experience that does what you need, when you want it to. Whether reading an email that reminds you to schedule a family get-together or finding a favorite video that you want to share, we want to ensure you can move across Gmail, Calendar, Search, YouTube, or whatever your life calls for with ease.

Tailored for you

If you're signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you've expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We'll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you're searching for and get you those results faster.

Easy to share and collaborate

When you post or create a document online, you often want others to see and contribute. By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.


Protecting your privacy hasn't changed

Our goal is to provide you with as much transparency and choice as possible, through products like Google Dashboard and Ads Preferences Manager, alongside other tools. Our privacy principles remain unchanged. And we'll never sell your personal information or share it without your permission (other than rare circumstances like valid legal requests).

Understand how Google uses your data

If you want to learn more about your data on Google and across the web, including tips and advice for staying safe online, check out http://www.google.com/goodtoknow

Got questions?
We got answers.

Visit our FAQ at http://www.google.com/policies/faq to read more about the changes. (We figured our users might have a question or twenty-two.)


Notice of Change

March 1, 2012 is when the new Privacy Policy and Terms will come into effect. If you choose to keep using Google once the change occurs, you will be doing so under the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Please do not reply to this email. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered. Also, never enter your Google Account password after following a link in an email or chat to an untrusted site. Instead, go directly to the site, such as mail.google.com or www.google.com/accounts. Google will never email you to ask for your password or other sensitive information.



Thursday, March 15, 2007
I Just started up Nation Times on Newsvine
I saw a good when I got to work today so I took the occasion to do something I've been intending to do for a short while, i.e. add NT to Newsvine.

Till now I'd been using del.icio.us as the social bookmark handler for Nation Times, meaning I'd integrated the del.icio.us/nationtimes feed with the rest of Nation Times so that news items that I came across personally would post right to the main site along with the other headlines. And although that functioned fine in a technical sense, it didn't really work 'socially' because few other people linked to those same pages. Plus it seems that del.icio.us is best for cataloging good web sites that folks should check out anytime.

But time sensitive news matters need different context and I'm finding that Newsvine caters more to such an approach. So now I'll see if I can import my existing del.icio.us links so that you can get a sense of the 'editor's picks' I chose already. And moving forward, you'll get even more of a sense of the news we can use with Nation Times on Newsvine: nationtimes.newsvine.com

Labels: , , ,



Thursday, March 01, 2007
Just added a 'back to Nola' blog
My friend has started a blog to record her trials as she moves back to her hometown of New Orleans and rebuilds the house that she'd purchased only months before Hurricane Katrina hit. I think it is perfect for the NT blogroll and it's actually the first link, till now I've listed only the news sources that NT pulls syndicated feeds from, but this type of thing works great. The actual blog is "The Wheels On The Bus..."

Labels: , ,



Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Had to ditch the Digg feed for the time being
There was too big of a mix of wanted and unwanted content getting in there. Seems like Digg is very much still a tech site dominated by tech news even in its other categories. Digg began with a huge tech news audience and later opened up to try out larger politics and entertainment and other audiences. But it is still such a magnet for tech audiences that the news they post in other categories is like tech news with a political or entertainment slant. In this case the filter was just weak enough to not be able to distinguish between news about black people and news about black products. So from my 'blacks' keyword based RSS feed, Digg was turning up too many instances of headlines like "iMac in black" and "Cingular offers free battery for BlackJackers" and "Best XP Theme Ever - in Black and Blue." I can't have that. We're going to lose some good headlines but they should still get picked up by other filters. Keep watching.

Labels:



Sunday, February 18, 2007
FeedBurner RSS & Email
I checked out FeedBurner's features. They offer some pretty decent enhancements so I submited the Nation Times feed. Now I can better track reader uses and activity (and compare the stats to the info I already get from Google Analytics).

So now FeedBurner helps deliver Nation Times content. The RSS feed is the same, however FeedBurner will now do what I hadn't yet made time to do — i.e. build an automated daily email. There are many ways to do this, many many solutions out there, but I just went inside FeedBurner and got that big project off my to-do list in a few clicks so I'm not mad at that at all and you ought to enjoy it too.

Labels: , , ,



Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Just added: another hot feed to NT
Now Nation Times draws from Digg.com using its keyword-based RSS feature. I dig its search results better than those I turned up by using Reddit. It is likely that using this particular feed will result in repeat posts on Nation Times, but what this'll mean, in essence, is that the given articles are really being talked about and shared. This will be interesting to observe so I'm going to welcome it as they create an organic effect on Nation Times.

Labels: , ,



Monday, February 12, 2007
Access from anywhere
I graduated from the deprecated frameset feature of HTML, mainly because use of a frame (for design reason) limited my ability to let people view NT through a mobile browser. So I moved the real index over to the root and now you can check Nation Times on your web-enabled handheld device. The existing HTML displays okay in my mobile browser but I will definitely develop a mobile markup version.

Labels: ,



Saturday, February 10, 2007
WOW! Someone at NYTimes.com heard to me
Two days ago I submitted a scathing but well-informed error report to NYTimes.com's tech squad and whadayaknow, they fixed the problem in one day's time! Now Nation Times will get another great feed.

The whole idea behind my structuring Nation Times as I have has everything to do with maintaining a site that I don't actually have to maintain, y'know by hand. So I figured out how to automate its updates (for the most part). There was only one set of info that I couldn't access automatically, i.e keyword-based search results from NYTimes.com. So instead I setup NYTimes.com keyword-based email alerts. When I received those I'd post to del.icio.us and I setup that feed to update Nation Times with whatever news items I bookmarked. But I felt that that process still defeated my real purpose.

Then by chance two days ago I realized that I hadn't been looking for that info in the right spot. It turns out that NYTimes.com offers a Times Topic right along the lines of my keywords, complete with a feed URL and everything. So I got all excited thinking my last problem in life was solved, but then I noticed that the feed was displaying last week's news. So I got heated and sent in a detailed complaint (as all good consumers do) and to my pleasant surprise it looks like they fixed the thing at some time yesterday because I just checked it this morning and it's all up to date! So now Nation Times can get NYTimes.com feeds automatically and be a little better for it.

Of course I'll still keep the bookmark method intact, but that's intended for deliberate editor's picks, not some kind of pseudo-feed.

Labels: , ,



Friday, February 09, 2007
I just yanked the Yahoo! News RSS feed from Nation Times
I am very hands-off with Nation Times content but I have monitored and monitored the Yahoo! feed for months and man, their news filter is just not sophisticated enough at all for my purposes. There is definitely such a thing as 'too much information' and that's what Yahoo! keyword-based news feeds are good for. Google's are a little better.

I kept seeing too many instances of non-news items slipping in there and quite often they'd even repeat two or three times as redundant posts. What Yahoo! grabs straight from PRWeb is usually the cause of the drama. I'm doing all I can to build a credible news resource here and this example from Yahoo! explains itself, shamefully. I checked Nation Times today just before going into a meeting about the abilities of RSS so I figured I might demo Nation Times as a good example. But I quickly decided against that when I saw this item above the fold:

"Breakthrough, Natural Hair Relaxer Makes It Easy for African-Americans to Achieve Loose, Soft Waves (PRWeb via Yahoo! News)"

Someone somewhere actually considered this newsworthy and Yahoo! filtered this right along with serious stuff. In fact, this embarassing item was right above something fed from Topix.net titled "Genetics linked to early births," so can't do the Yahoo! thing until Yahoo! can start doing their own thing a little better.

Labels: , ,



Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Known issues
Updates to Nation Times come straight from selected news services, it aggregates what they syndicate verbatim. So the only editorial judgement I exercise is in selecting the news services in the first place or also adding my own picks when I come across something interesting that I don't see picked up by the site. So the only other way I affect the content, and this is rare, is when for some strange reason I have to remove a post for obvious undesirable content. This hasn't turned out to be anything offensive, but I have noticed a particular news item coming through the Yahoo! feed that keeps repeating: "Veteran Detective Wants African Americans to Help Solve Murders." Its resource still deems it current and timely and because of its intent I'm gonna let it keep posting. Please forgive the redundancy.

Labels: ,