Only a year ago Bloglines beat Google Reader in my tests. Alas, Bloglines stayed about the same (save for a very flaky beta), and Reader kept improving.
Eventually my iPhone moved me to Google Reader, and I discovered the joy of shared posts.
There are still a few things I miss from Bloglines - like the disposable email feeds, the package tracking, and the very easy to share bloglist. Overall though it's no contest now, Google Reader is far superior.
Every Reader account has one 'shared' post feed. The shared post feed is dynamically created by clicking an icon while reading a post. Here’s my shared post list. It’s not obvious or well documented, but this share has its own feed (FF reveals it) [1].
You can embed the shared post feed in web pages, such as in the side bar of my Tech and Notes blog, or in conventional web pages. Alas, the embeded Gadget doesn't show the optional annotations one can attach to a shared post. Only the web view or the feed include the annotations.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to universally share the Friend feed [3], so I can only see those of people on my Gmail contacts list. Even so, it's great.
I read Jacob Reider's feed regularly, and that spares me hours of reading the tedious journals of our shared industry. Jacob reads them for me, picks out the good stuff, and shares it. I owe you some beers Jacob.
Play with shared feeds -- you won't regret it. It's a lightweight form of blogging, without any authoring anxiety. Now if only my good friends were about 20 years younger, I might be able to enlist more of them in this shared processing and shared memory task ...
[1] Reader won't allow you to subscribe to it as a conventional feed, but other clients will. The feed shows your annotations.
[2] I'd much appreciate it if one of my readers were to try adding the undocumented feed to their Google Reader -- I'd like to know if it shows up as Shared Feed from a "friend". Please add a comment to that effect. Then you can delete it of course!
[3] Apparently due to complaints about privacy?! The default mode is private, so this feels like a user error problem.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Newest Sansa SanDisk STILL doesn't support AAC - weird
File under weird.
My SONY car radio plays AAC. My Nintendo Wii supports AAC. My wife's BlackBerry plays AAC. But the newest Sansa SanDisk still doesn't support AAC ... (note the As in AAC do not stand for Apple).
My SONY car radio plays AAC. My Nintendo Wii supports AAC. My wife's BlackBerry plays AAC. But the newest Sansa SanDisk still doesn't support AAC ... (note the As in AAC do not stand for Apple).
SanDisk Sansa e200 MP3 playerYeah, right ... convert. Ever tried it? Takes ages, terrible results. I'd look at these Sansa things for my kids if they had AAC support. Does Apple pay SanDisk to avoid AAC?
... Sometimes ,there are some unsupported audio format musics you like very much,such as a favourite video movie song.So ,what can you do? Don't worry,there are a lot of audio/video converter softwares which can help to solve the problem. For example ,Xilisoft Audio Converter 2.1. provides an easy and completed way to convert between all popular audio formats, such as MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, FALC, OGG, APE, MP4, M4A, MP2, VQF etc....
Monday, September 08, 2008
Video conferencing tools - state of the Windows market
I'll claim the best low cost video-conferencing solution on the market today is iChat.
It's OS X only of course. On the Windows side, this review lists about 16 iChat wannabes. It's just a list though, it doesn't tell you which are any good and which are on life support. I suspect all but Skype will be gone in a year or so.
The real message is that affordable video conferencing may finally escape from the icky home porn and the annoying 'young-geek-seeking-mate' industries.
Now if any of the competitors can provide an iChat like experience (esp. as with the original iSight firewire), we might get to save some gas money. I have a hunch we'll need either USB 3 (I miss firewire) or on-camera MPEG-4 like compression to really get where we need to go.
It's OS X only of course. On the Windows side, this review lists about 16 iChat wannabes. It's just a list though, it doesn't tell you which are any good and which are on life support. I suspect all but Skype will be gone in a year or so.
The real message is that affordable video conferencing may finally escape from the icky home porn and the annoying 'young-geek-seeking-mate' industries.
Now if any of the competitors can provide an iChat like experience (esp. as with the original iSight firewire), we might get to save some gas money. I have a hunch we'll need either USB 3 (I miss firewire) or on-camera MPEG-4 like compression to really get where we need to go.
Nerdvana now: Our family calendar is working – and how Gmail parses Outlook invites
A year ago I was struggling to reach the nerdvana of family calendar integration.
Now the end is almost in sight.
Emily’s Blackberry Pearl syncs reliably and near instantly to her calendar in our family domain Google Apps suite. My iPhone syncs reliably but only once daily, via Spanning Sync and iCal to my family domain calendar. Our shared Google Calendars allow both of us to see a joint calendar.
Meanwhile, work/home calendar integration may be possible – someday, at some price. For now, however, some appointments need double entry.
I’m pleased to say there’s an easy way to do that – it works far better than expected.
When I create an Outlook appointment that I want on my personal calendar, I invite my family domain email address. Gmail processes the structured message and creates a meeting invite that moves with one click to my Google Calendar.
From my gCal, the next time I sync with iTunes, the appointment will move to my iPhone. It will immediately be visible on my wife’s Pearl.
Wow. We’re making progress … slowly, but it will happen.
Now when iPhone 2.1 comes out and Emily inherits my iPhone 2.0 ...
Update 1/6/10: We did reach Nerdvana, though Emily got the 3GS and I stuck with the old 3G. All of the family calendars are on Google (mixture of Google Apps and personal for historic reasons); we use CalDAV to sync to our iPhones. My iPhone has push sync wiht my work calendar by connecting to my corporate (Microsoft ActiveSync) server and through my iPhone I can integrate all family and my work calendar. I also do a one way reflection of my work calendar to Google using Google's calendar sync -- that's read only.
The Lunarpages to DreamHost transition – summarized
I’ve moved my last lunarpages hosted domain and all my web services now live on DreamHost.
It was a technically challenging migration for me, though having worked through it I could probably do the entire thing in two evenings. Below is a list of the key posts and explanations if you have to ever do this. Note that the posts are updated as I learned things, so you really do need to read ‘em through to avoid my mistakes.
- Migrating a domain with related Google Apps and hosting files to a new service: This one worried me the most, but turned out to be straightforward. I learned a lot about how DNS works.
- The DreamHost migration moving the first domain
- The DreamHost migration getting a transfer authorization code: This stuff works well, I recommend creating a spreadsheet/table to track dates and migration stages for each domain. (Ex: review email settings on domain, get TAC, unlock domain, fill out DH form, get email from DH, authorize, get email from domain host, authorize, get confirmation from DH)
- DreamHost a better Google Apps choice than Google: You get everything Google Apps provide, with more control, a consolidated domain management environment, and the ability to add additional services.
- How to move files from one web site hosting service to another: This was where I floundered the most. I could have done it all in a few minutes of my time (hours of computer time) if I’d understood the archive transfer process.
I’m very pleased with DreamHost – all of the issues I had with Lunarpages seem to have been resolved.
I do want to mention that Lunarpages was very cooperative during the migration; Network Solutions resisted one domain move a bit, but Lunarpages never kicked. They also provided the ability to download an archive of my entire Lunarpages site collection – a good example of data freedom.
Lunarpages is not, by any measure, the worst company I’ve worked with. For several years they provided reasonable service at a good price. My read is that Lunarpages failed to invest in their core business and people, and focused too much on short term returns and cash flow versus long-term health. In the end they weren’t providing enough DNS control to customers, they didn’t stay on top of Google Apps integration, they didn’t provide WebDav services, they weren’t quite honest enough with customers (ex. automatically upgrading customer plans to reflect decreasing costs would have been wise) and they got trapped in a spiral of decreasing quality and increasing support burdens. They’re in a tough spot now, where they need to focus aggressively on customer retention and quality improvement, while taking a large cash flow hit.
Now for my next set of projects: upgrading our main workstation from 10.4 to 10.5, implementing iPhone 2.1, then returning to the synchronization and calendaring wars. (Hint: Our family google calendar is really working – with help from spanning sync).
Sunday, September 07, 2008
DreamHost promotion: unlimited storage - ends 9/10
Figures. I sign up, and a few weeks later DreamHost has a big promotion:
I'm really impressed with them. I think you can do far worse for the price.
If you use my registration code (KATEVA), you might get $50 off (max discount) on sign-up -- though I'm not sure if that applies for the "unlimited storage" promo.
Web Hosting by DreamHost Web HostingThey say "$6/mo", but that's only if you sign up for several years. Really figure $10 a month or so.
UNLIMITED Storage
UNLIMITED Bandwidth
ends Sept 10th
I'm really impressed with them. I think you can do far worse for the price.
If you use my registration code (KATEVA), you might get $50 off (max discount) on sign-up -- though I'm not sure if that applies for the "unlimited storage" promo.
Google: STOP the Page Creator to Sites MobileMess
Google has at least 6 different environments for authoring something like a web page [1].
So it's not hard to understand why they want to discontinue one of them ...
Sure, Sites can embed gadgets -- but I haven't been able to make good use of their other supposed advantages. In particular the "file management" is not a significant improvement over Page Creator's very feeble solution (if you control your domain you can create a Page Creator/domain solution that works pretty well, but that's another topic).
On the other hand Sites pages look awful in Safari/iPhone. Ok, so they look lousy anywhere -- can't Google hire some graphics designers? Still, they're worse than lousy on the iPhone. On any browser the Sites "footer" dynamically expands (why?!), but on the iPhone this tricks Safari/iPhone into filling most of the half-VGA screen with an ugly, empty, footer.
Yes, you can embed Gadgets into Sites pages, but Google has done a lousy job of organizing the Gadget library. In any case, most of Google products generate Javascript code (see Custom Search Engines) - not Gadgets. Sites disallows Javascript (probably for security and CPU burden reasons). So a lot of the things you can embed in Page Creator pages, or even in Blogger posts, can't be embedded in Sites.
There are other issues with Sites -- though Google is slowly chipping away at some of them. Maybe in a year or two Sites will be an adequate replacement for Page Creator.
It's not ready now.
Learn from Apple's foot-shooting blunders Google. Don't migrate until Sites is ready.
[1] Page Creator, Sites, Blogger, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Docs
See also:
So it's not hard to understand why they want to discontinue one of them ...
About Google Page CreatorOk, that's great, but right now Google is doing a "MobileMess". They're replacing one incomplete solution with an even less complete solution.
... We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.
If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year...
Sure, Sites can embed gadgets -- but I haven't been able to make good use of their other supposed advantages. In particular the "file management" is not a significant improvement over Page Creator's very feeble solution (if you control your domain you can create a Page Creator/domain solution that works pretty well, but that's another topic).
On the other hand Sites pages look awful in Safari/iPhone. Ok, so they look lousy anywhere -- can't Google hire some graphics designers? Still, they're worse than lousy on the iPhone. On any browser the Sites "footer" dynamically expands (why?!), but on the iPhone this tricks Safari/iPhone into filling most of the half-VGA screen with an ugly, empty, footer.
Yes, you can embed Gadgets into Sites pages, but Google has done a lousy job of organizing the Gadget library. In any case, most of Google products generate Javascript code (see Custom Search Engines) - not Gadgets. Sites disallows Javascript (probably for security and CPU burden reasons). So a lot of the things you can embed in Page Creator pages, or even in Blogger posts, can't be embedded in Sites.
There are other issues with Sites -- though Google is slowly chipping away at some of them. Maybe in a year or two Sites will be an adequate replacement for Page Creator.
It's not ready now.
Learn from Apple's foot-shooting blunders Google. Don't migrate until Sites is ready.
[1] Page Creator, Sites, Blogger, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Docs
See also:
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