Blogger is dying more quickly than expected

I've been expecting Blogger to die, but since Google has been porting it to the "new look" I thought it had a year or two left.

Today when I search in Blogger I'm getting results sorted from oldest to newest, and search ends at 2006. I'm seeing this in both the old and new UI. In the new UI, of course, search is very limited; in particular you can't navigate large numbers of results readily.

Blogger is showing more of these inconsistent and failed behaviors. If Blogger were human, I'd say it had an untreatable cancer.

The good news is that WordPress.com's Blogger Import works fairly well -- though it omits all draft posts.

The bad news is that blogging is tracing the same trajectory I remember with web site authoring. In the 90s web site authoring tools were accessible to relatively non-technical amateurs. By the 00s that market had gone away, and quality "content management systems" were aimed at professionals and businesses. I'm seeing the same thing happening with blogging -- it's becoming a professional activity dominated rather than an amateur form of communication. The number of interesting blogs expressing personal opinions rather than muted convention is also diminishing.

These things are easier to understand if you live in a climate that has ice and snow and darkness.

Lion: Only 3.5 stars on Apple's App Store

I have no compelling reason to move our family accounts from MobileMe to iCloud, though Find My Friends might be nice. Still, I'd probably do it -- except that I want to keep my iPhone and OS X Contacts in sync. Moving to iCloud for my iPhone means I need to move to iCloud on the desktop -- and i have only one Lion machine. Two others are Snow Leopard and a fourth won't run Lion at all.

I'd need to put Lion on the dual core MacBook, where it will run slowly even with encryption off. It should be fine on my i5 memory loaded desktop.

The bigger problem is that I'll need to upgrade software. FileMaker for sure, and probably a few other odd apps need Rosetta. The experience is guaranteed to be painful and expensive.

Apple's App Store is not encouraging. Lion gets 3.5 stars there, and the negative comments (only ones I bother with) are persuasive. That is, they complain about issues I know are real (such as software upgrades).

Meh. I'll wait until March or so. Maybe Lion and iCloud will both look better then.

Standard feeds for G+ Profile streams

When G+ Profiles first appeared, I recall that public posts had feeds.

Those feeds disappeared. Now G+ is more of a walled garden than Facebook.

Russell Beattle created an RSS feed app for G+, but then Google's AppEngine price increases put him out of business.

Now Jeff Turner has one ...

Google+ to RSS Feed

This site is still in beta so it might go down from time to time. If you have any issues please submit a issue to Github Issues. I had to up the cache to 60 minutes so we don't run out of API calls in a single day.

Here's my (100% public) John Gordon feed via nodester: http://googleplusrss.nodester.com/107785880910936077757.

It renders in GR. Next I'll try using http://ifttt.com/  and Feedburner to turn my G+ posts into something I can own and others can consume. I hope Jeff can make a business of this somehow.

Markets route around aberrations, and the Net is routing around Evil+.

Update: I tried a feedburner version of Jeff's converter but IFTTT didn't like it. It complained "Feed has items without valid urls".

On the other hand, ifttt will share G+ Posts to Tweets using yet another G+ to feed service - Plu.Sr. Looks like there are more than a few of these! Talk about routing around evil.

So here I am on Plu.Sr, where first sentence becomes feed title: http://plu.sr/feed.php?plusr=107785880910936077757&short=true.

From this ifttt creates posts on my unused Posterous blog: http://jgordonshare.posterous.com/ -- but only if autopost is turned off.

I tried this one with Feedburner, but it complained: "The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 77: The reference to entity "T" must end with the ';' delimiter."

It's just for play at the moment, but it looks like we'll have some options. At least until Google terminates my John Gordon Profile.

I've also set up a ifttt action to http://twitter.com/#!/jgordonshare from my G+ shares.

Next step will be to get my wordpress microblog working. Then IFTTT will create wordpress posts, and that will in turn have a feed and a twitter stream.

iOS 5 on a 3GS - not bad

I wiped a 3GS, installed iOS 5, and restored my son's apps and data.

I did it primarily to get iMessage - part of our assault on AT&T.

It's better than I thought. I expected more UI problems. I'm sure there are problems, but I expect those will improve with later versions of iOS 5.

If you have a 3GS I think it's worthwhile, but I'd wait until 5.1.

iMessage use on an AT&T iPhone without a SIM card (iPod Touch mode)

iMessage is a very intriguing product. It's available as part of iOS 5 for iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone 3Gs, 4 or 4S.

On non-phone iOS devices iMessage provides non-SMS (iMessage) texting services to other iMessage users over either WiFi or, if supported, 3G services. That's like WhatsApp.app, but WhatsApp only works on a iPhone with an active voice service!

On iPhones iMessage has two modes.

In standard mode it supports SMS/MMS messaging as well as iMessage texting. iMessaging is the default when it's supported by the receiving device; you can see what will be used before you compose a message.

In an optional mode you can disable SMS/MMS messaging and go purely iMessage. You may want to do this, for example, if you choose not to pay for AT&T's extortionary "unlimited" plans. You will still receive SMS messages (20 cents each, including spam text), but at least you won't send any. (You can tell AT&T to turn off all but 'administrative texting' if you want to avoid spam SMS and spam SMS fees.)

In a world where SMS fees exceed AT&T's mandatory minimal $15/month 200MB/mo data plans, iMessage is subversive [1]. For our family, discontinuing our $30 month texting plan and using a combination of iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Google Voice/Text more than pays for my son's data plan and old 3GS.

Siri is nice (more on that in Gordon's Notes, soon), but iMessage is the biggest thing in iOS 5. I would love to know what AT&T thinks of it, and whether those thoughts are printable in a family blog.

Alas, not everything is quite perfect in iMessage and iOS 5.01. Apple's Discussion groups have many complaints about "waiting for activation". For example:

iMessage waiting for activation: Apple Support Communities

... To update on my iPhone-off contract, even though it says iMessage is waiting for activation, I can still iMessage my friend in Australia (and I am in the USA) So I don't know how it's working, but it's working great!   Also, another one of my USA friends has an iPod touch with iMessage. It is working flawlessly..

We had no trouble at all with 3 iPhones with functional SIMs. In an SIM-free iPhone 4 in use as an iPod Touch, however, we got stuck at "waiting for activation".

The first time I used the device I think it sent messages, despite the notice. The next day, however, it could not send. I tried various tricks to no avail, including:

• reboot phone
• remove and restore my son's iCloud credentials and account.
• play with location and time zone settings
• create a contact card in iCloud with his migrated iCloud ID (@me.com) and specify that in iMessage

Nothing worked. A day later, however, his phone could again send and receive messages -- despite showing "waiting for activation".

I don't know how long it will keep working. Apple doesn't truly support use of a SIM-less iPhone as an iPod Touch, which further reduces the (suprisingly) low value of a used iPhone. I'm somewhat optimistic, however, that the current flaky behavior is a bug or a reflection of overloaded systems. I'll update this post as I learn more.

[1] If Apple integrates it with iChat on OS X, and provides a Windows 7 client ... hmm.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Giving your old iPhone to your kid: working around AT&T's mandatory data plan 11/3/2011
• Gordon's Notes: AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay 11/3/2011
• Gordon's Tech: AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless is almost worthless 11/4/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Turning an iPhone into an iPod touch - keep the original SIM! 11/28/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Porting a mobile number to Google Voice 11/21/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Testing Facebook Messenger as a texting alternative (4 and 3G) 11/5/2011
• Gordon's Tech: iPhone alternatives to AT&T's texting fees 11/11/2011
• Gordon's Notes: AT&T’s secret Nov 2009 mobile contract change – Elegant Evil 6/2010
• Gordon's Notes: The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies 11/7/2011
• Gordon's Notes: iPhone micro: How SMS pricing is accelerating the smartphone transition 11/24/2011

Martin's WordPress plugins

I think my microblogging experiments will likely end with WordPress. It's a complex world to learn however. For one thing, there are hundreds of "plugins" available for WordPress, and no obvious way to tell the useful from the disastrous.

So I'm grateful to Martin Steiger for sharing the ones he uses on different sites ...

Essential:

- Chunk Urls for WordPress
- Germanix URL (probably not necessary for you)
- WordPress Database Backup
- WP Super Cache

Essential for sites with comments on:

- Akismet (default WordPress plugin)
- Antispam Bee (in addition to Akismet)
- Subscribe To 'Double-Opt-In' Comments (if you provide comment subscriptions)

Useful / additional features:

- Better Delete Revision
- Better WordPress Recent Comments
- Comment Form Quicktags
- Comment Whitelist
- Contact Form 7
- Country Filter
- Exclude Pages from Navigation
- Get Recent Comments (depreciated)
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Intypo
- Limit Login Attempts
- No Self Pings (maybe no longer necessary)
- Optimize DB
- Posts By Tag
- WP Minify
- WordPress Popular Posts
- Yet Another Related Post Plugin

On the way out:

- AbsoluteRSS (no longer necessary)
- AntiVirus (too many false positives)
- Flattr
- Google Analyticator
- Google News Sitemap
- PubSubHubbub
- Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons (sharing buttons slow down any site)
- Save Post. Check Links.
- RSS Cloud
- WP SUP

On my latest WordPress-based site, steigerlegal.ch, I use as few plugins as possible. Some are essential and some are needed if you wish certain features. In any case, I carefully read the reviews on WordPress.org and I try to use only plugins in active development. I have trust in some reputable developers such as Sergej Müller. I cannot review each plugin from A to Z but I never get plugins from dubious sources. Up to now, I have never had a security problem with any of my WordPress-based sites (although being careful cannot rule such problems out but it's a start).

iPhone cables and like things - Monoprice

I advertised AT&T's $6.50 iPhone cables on a corporate social site, and a colleague responded with an even better deal from Monoprice: only $3.55 each when QTY 50 purchased. They're a big $4 for less than 10. Monoprice sells a $7 wall charger too.

These aren't no-name or counterfeit cables, Monoprice specializes in this sort of product:

Monoprice, (DBA. MonoPrice.com) Inc. is an eCommerce leader specializing in high quality cables, components and accessories for computer and consumer electronics. Established in 2002, we have built our reputation by the word of mouth of our customers. The Monoprice brand's greatest claim to fame is our consistent ability to deliver premium quality products on par with the best known national brands at prices far below the retail average along with unmatched speed and service...

I'd be willing to try them. I'm told Monoprice's thunderbolt cables are less reliable, but those seem hard for everyone to make. I'll be looking at them for future purchases.