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I had a wonderful extra and unexpected Christmas present this year. My Dad bought a new pair of speakers just after Christmas—some lovely Sonus Faber Cremona Auditors—and offered me his old Mission 753s at very low “mates rates” to replace my ageing B&W 601s. The B&W speakers are still pretty good, but they sound a little weedy in our new—much larger—living room.

After a bit of a struggle, we just managed to fit the speakers in the back of our tiny car, so I’ve had some fun setting them up and trying them out with familiar bits of music this afternoon. Of course, I’ve listened to them many times at my parents’ house, but all sorts of variables (like the model of CD player and amplifier used, the types of cables, the shape of the room) affect the sound you get out at the other end. I’m happy to say that—despite having a much less fancy amp and CD player than my Dad—the speakers still sound great. The solidity of the stereo image is amazing, and the overall sound is much tighter, better integrated, and more detailed. It also has more of what I like to call oomph; difficult to define, but very easy to recognise.

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I used to use MagpieRSS to pull my del.icio.us links into the sidebar on this site. It worked very well, but I’ve had problems in the past when the cache directory has become unwriteable because of permissions problems. The feed is then fetched every time someone loads the page, which is obviously very bad news for Joshua’s bandwidth, not to mention contravening the terms and conditions for the del.icio.us service.

It seems that when I transferred all my files to the new server, the permissions on the cache directory got changed so that MagpieRSS was no longer caching the feed. This meant that Joshua had to ban my IP address until the problem was sorted out, as the feed was being fetched a couple of times a second. Urk. I don’t want that to happen again. Since permissions can easily get messed up (and MagpieRSS doesn’t give you any visible indication that caching is failing on the page), I’ve decided to use another method.

RSSDigest allows you to enter an URL for a feed, and automatically build a bit of Javascript which will display that feed on your site. Unlike many similar services, it’s highly configurable so that you can get exactly the look you want. It also lets you set a caching interval (I set mine to 120 minutes), so that the server for the feed isn’t overburdened. Best of all, the caching is no longer my responsibility! It’s a very useful service, and could of course be used to display any kind of RSS feed—not just a del.icio.us feed.