I have been using Google Reader for about two weeks now. It’s an awesome piece of work. As I was reading one of feeds I was subscribed to, I noticed that I am able to scroll down to very old items in the feed. I wondered if this was due to some RSS element that I haven’t used before. So I did some digging around in the RSS2 spec but I was unable to find anything. I took apart the feeds that were showing older (as in posted before I used Google Reader) items. Nothing.

I looked around in the GoogleGroups discussion thread for Google Reader and found the answer. Clever, yet so simple.

Apparently, it’s not really “infinite”. There is no magic RSS2 tag. What Google Reader does is cache items for each specific feed URL. When other users subscribe to the same feed at a later date, Google Reader fetches older items from the cache. Sites such as Slashdot.org appear to have items from way, way back because this feed has been initially subscribed to a long time ago.

I just noticed yesterday that connections to private SMTP servers appear to be blocked on my SmartBro connection. It was very irritating because I was testing out a new SMTP server I set up for one of my clients. I kept tweaking the configuration of the new SMTP server as well as my router settings thinking I did something wrong on my end.

I tried telneting to the server, then I tried it on another SMTP server I set up a few months ago. It appears that packets sent to port 25 are being blackholed and I get no response from the SMTP server. I began digging into the cause of this because I am quite sure that just a few months ago, I had set up Berger’s Mail.app to use the SMTP server at PhilWeavers.net and he was behind a SmartBro connection. A few minutes of searching and I found the answer.

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