An online notebook
FeedDemon 2 has a cool little icon on each post you read to link to it in your del.icio.us archive. I’ve actually started to use this now for a few things. Here is the RSS feed, if you are interested.
It would be nice to have a ‘blog this’ icon too. Currently it’s either going through the menus or hitting ctrl-shift-b.
Robert Scoble has an old blog hosted at UserLand, or rather had. It’s now gone.
Oh, UserLand, where did my old blogs go?
Yikes, the first couple of years of my blog are gone. UserLand took down those blogs. I don’t remember getting an email warning me about that, but I might have (junk filters catch a lot of that stuff).
My old site used to be at http://scobleizer.manilasites.com and the stuff is just gone.
Lots of old blogs used to be stored there. That’s a lot of history that’s gone. Hopefully I can get it back, I just sent them email.
This is a serious problem, I guess. At least by hosting your blog yourself, you know what’s happening to it. People who write their blog posts offline with an editor can save backup copies on their own machine.
I ought to look into backing up this blog, and the others I host. Hmmm – I guess this is done by just backing up the MySQL database. I wonder if there is a way to save a flat HTML file of the site, with all the content in it?
Analyst claims so: “We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we’ve dubbed ‘Google Tunes. We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced.”
Hmmm. Does anyone know of a non-evil, non-megalomaniac search engine I could use?
This is my first post from digg, and it seems pretty cool. digg puts the links (the ones inside the quote) right at the bottom of a post, but I think I prefer them inside the quote, certainly above my comments, which means an edit. Still, I have to do that anyway to add in the categories, and the real time saved is in copying and pasting the links.
This is going to mean I will hardly write any original posts in the WordPress editor at all! When I am at home I tend to use the Performancing Firefox extension for writing posts, when browsing with FeedDemon I use BlogJet. Both these products automatically quote text and links for me, speeding up the process a good deal.
In fact, while I am at it, something that annoys me about the editor in WordPress 2 – when I select text and hit the link button to make that text a hyperlink, it doesn’t automatically add in the http:// bit for me, which was a real time saver in previous versions.
Also, it would be good if you could define a set list of links, which if that word was used in a post it automatically parses it into a hyperlink. You could make is case dependent, so camel-casing would prevent many mix-ups. So, everytime I typed WordPress, on publishing the post, that word was made to link back to wordpress.org everytime, meaning I don’t have to bother. That would be cool.
Couple of interesting points from MJR:
Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images
Just tried to leave a comment on Sasquach wears a yellow hat at blogger.com – it has one of those annoying “type the letters from the distorted image” screens (which don’t work well [w3c]). Even when I switch images on, I can’t get the letters accepted. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the site or my eyes, but it’s really annoying.
Quite right! Though what is worse is blogger blogs that will only let you comment if you register with blogger. That really is just rubbish.
Google Problems: China; and World Economic Forum TV
25 Jan 2006: google is taking a lot of heat online for agreeing to Chinese government content requests. I won’t criticise the actual decision too much, because it’s typical corporation behaviour: follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum. If you’re buying Chinese products just because they’re cheaper, you’re part of the reason they have the money and part of the reason that google is following them – corporations are seldom held accountable. If you don’t like that, maybe you should Boycott Made In China as well as google?
I think most people’s problem is that it is such hypocritical behaviour – MSN and Yahoo! have had this sort of thing in place with China for ages, and no one batted an eyelid – but perhaps many people – naively – expected better from Google. At least Bill Gates never pretended to be anything other than evil… And fine, it is typical corporation behaviour. But isn’t it nice that at least once people kick up a stink over it?