Internet

Back now

Well, I am back now and should be posting again more often.

Here’s a few things I have been playing around with recently, some of these things may never see the light of day.

  • I’m looking into trying to do for football discussion what Palimpsest did for books. Still not sure on the title. Stewart, who is helping me out, suggests Goal Mouths but my original idea was the slightly clumsier My Cultured Left Foot. Any thoughts would be appreciated. The site is hidden away here. It’s running on phpBB at the moment, as I doubt numbers will be great enough to warrant the investment into VBulletin, say.
  • I have installed a version of Drupal, which lifts various stylings and user accounts from a Vbulletin install. I had the idea as I wanted a CMS that could create some sort of directory of authors, with biographical information, bibliographies, appropriate links and whatnot. Am not entirely convinced just yet, as Drupal seems to be more of a blogging platform than anything else, but more playing might reveal a way in which it could be used. The work in progress is here. Drupal is being used in the interesting Open Source Theology project.
  • I received a job lot of Ubuntu CDs at the weekend. 32 and 64 bit ones, and some Mac ones too. If anyone would like one, email me your details and I will post it through.

Glypho

Glypho logo

Glypho appears to be a site offering collective authorship. It looks quite interesting, but at a guess I would say the quality of writing is probaby variable…

The problem with MyPimp, Bookmarking update

Have started to use MyPimp as I need a calendar and it makes sense to have one online. The contacts bit might be useful too.

However, there is a big problem with it at the moment and that is that it only supports american date formats, i.e. today on MyPimp is 11/5/05, wheras my brain thinks it is 5/11/05. I didn’t think this would be that much of an issue, but it genuinely is very annoying and I can’t see myself using it until that is sorted.

On the bookmarking front, there’s just no way I can do it. I know I only set myself the challenge to record my site visits for one weekend, but I am already bored. It just ain’t for me…

Bookmarking

On the recent discussion about browsers on Palimpsest, talk turned eventually to bookmarks, as one member had recently had a problem with Firefox deleting them all. Not sure how that happened, but it is a useful reminder that in Firefox you can back up your bookmarks by saving them to a HTML file. This is doubly useful, for not only can you load them back in in the event of a disaster, but you can also lob them online and be able to access them if you use a different computer.

That, of course, is if you use bookmarks at all. Which I don’t. I think I might have done when I first started using the web in 1997, when they were part of the fun of using Netscape for the first time. But now? Never. It came as a real surprise to me that anyone still uses them, but apparently they do.

So what do I do? I rely on the keyboard – either by using my own browser’s history to autocomplete URLs for me, or by using Google. It’s just quicker, as far as I am concerned. I don’t even bother with the links on the left hand side of this site. When I set up my Google portal, I put in a few links, but never click on them. I do click on the links for the sites with RSS feeds, though, so maybe that says something.

I have tried some of the various bookmarking sites, like del.icio.us and My Furl page is linked to from this site, but everytime I start to use it, I just get bored. Sites I want to share with people I link to from here. Filling in countless fields for every site I find interesting just isn’t something I want to do! And is there an option on Furl to display a simple list of all the sites I have bookmarked? That might be interesting. But the main view is just too damn complicated for my liking. If there was an option to click a toolbar button and the site was recorded, with no other interaction required, then that might be useful too, it would become second nature to Furl sites and maybe have a look through once a week to see if there are any gems there. But it’s all just too time consuming at the moment.

Update: Having said all this, though, I am going to experiment for the next couple of days of using both Furl and del.icio.us to log the things I look at. Links are over in the sidebar, under ‘Me’. Let’s see which is best and whether I can actually be bothered with either.

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