Improving Google Buzz Subscriptions

Maybe someone at Google will stumble across this. Ah well, here goes:

Some of my friends/followers on here don't care or want to see everything that I end up publishing. For example, Carlos really has no interest in seeing what I share on Reader. But others might be interested in that stuff. I'm not claiming anyone is, but it's possible. Similarly, not everyone cares to read what I post on Twitter. Right now it's an all or nothing game. I could potentially make custom groups for each stream I publish... removing people from greoups when they don't want to be included, but that's a lot of hassle. I have no idea up front who cares about what.

There's an easy fix for this though. The publisher side doesn't really need any changes: let me publish my various streams, each with its privacy settings, just like I do now.  But on the subscriber side, give my followers a list of the streams being published, and let them filter the ones they don't want. Let them subscribe to any subset of what I publish. Then they can decide for themselves if they're interested in general buzz and flickr posts, but not my talk status or Reader shares.

With this capability, a subscriber can start out subscribed to everything, but then drop the streams that turn out to be of no interest or a bother.

Using meld as your external merge tool for subversion (svn)

updated 2/19/2010
 
I don't know about you, but I am not a fan of SVN's built-in merge tool. Nor do I much care for GNU diff3, which subversion's tool seems to mimic. The diffs are presented inline in a simple text editor. It's simple, it works, but it's not exactly user-friendly.

So maybe you've used Meld. Meld provides a great, easy-to-use GUI for doing merges. If you're familiar with it, then you know what I'm talking about. If you're not, check it out Meld's sourceforge page, which includes screenshots. The key for me is the side-by-side view, but there are other great features like single clicks to move changes between files, syntax highlighting, and line numbering, to name a few.

So the question is, how can I use Meld to manage all my svn merge conflicts? Luckily, subversion allows you to call upon an external editor, as they explain in the subversion book (Using External Differencing and Merge Tools in Chapter 7).

Despite the examples provided in the subversion book, I wasn't quite sure how to get this to work. I was even more confused after following some examples I found on the web, not understanding the problems that arose. So that's why I'm writing this blog entry. I hope it helps.

Hit the jump for the complete solution: