There is a bit of a buzz around ajaxWrite, a new Web2.0 word processor, like Writely. Much of the buzz is around the fact that the guy reponsible for it is Michael Robertson who was previously behind Linspire, the user friendly Linux distro.

The first thing to say about it is that, at the moment, it is bloody slow. I guess part of the reason for that is the big demand on the servers at the moment as everyone tries out the new toy. People like me, then.

So what’s it like? It’s ok. It’s made to look like a desktop app, rather than the friendly colours of Writely and other AJAXy sites like that. It deliberatley sets out to take on Microsoft Word, in fact Microsoft Office according to the blurb on the pre-loaded document:

The look, feel, and functionality of Microsoft Word in a AJAX platform. This means you can load it in seconds from a web browser.

Did we mention it’s free? That’s right.

Microsoft Office Professional 2007 – $499

AjaxWrite – $0

Erm, ok. Well, for a start, there’s a little bit of a difference between what Office does as a whole and what AjaxWrite does. Even if ajaxWrite was the best word processor ever designed, it still wouldn’t be comparable, would it? What a bizaare claim to make.

Feature wise, it’s ok – better than Writely. It can open .doc files, and save them too, as well as PDFs which is great. However, it looks to me like you can only save files to a local disk – you can’t save them online or share them with others. This is a straight competitor to a desktop word processor.

One of my pet hates with software is non compliance with standards – especially on keyboard shortcuts. ajaxWrite meddles with the standards – like making bold text a ctrol-shift-b rather than just ctrl-b as normal. It’s all academic, anyway, as I couldn’t get any of them in any combination to work this evening.

In all honesty, I don’t like it. If you don’t want to use MS stuff, use OpenOffice.org, or AbiWord (both of which are just as free as ajaxWrite) or even WordPerfect or StarOffice if you don’t mind paying. ajaxWrite claims to have the functionality of Word, but it doesn’t come close – nor indeed to OOo Writer, and what’s worse it seems to me to fail to take advantage of providing a WP service online.

Update: the Office rather than Word comparison, according to this post, is because other parts of an office suite will be released in time. Ah yes, if I had read the post on Michael Robertson’s blog that I linked to above properly, I would have known that. So, that’s that cleared up then. Sorry, all.

Well, starting up a new blog has certainly made it clear to me the steps that are needed to try and get things settled and moving quickly.

1. Install WordPress. Ok, so I am a WordPress guy, and most of this will be WP specific. If you don’t have your own server or hosting, use WordPress.com.

2. Get a theme. I think settling on a theme early is a good idea. Too much messing and switching about can make you think more about style than content. Actually – work out which theme you are going to use before you set up the blog. Then the decision’s made.

3. Set up a FeedBurner account. Using these guys to handle your feed makes life loads easier – and provides heaps of useful info on how people are accessing your site, and how many are reading your feed. Oh, and to make life even easier, install and activate Steve Smith’s FeedBurner plug-in.

4. Install and activate the Akismet, Simple Tags and Email Subscriptions plug-ins. Each will either make your readers’ lives, or yours, simpler.

5. Start reading, quoting and commenting on blogs. Find an aggregator you like, subscribe to any feed you find that might be interesting. Link back to articles, quote people, comment on blogs. make sure it’s all relevant and traffic may be increased to your site.

6. Claim your blog on Technorati. This will increase the liklihood of your posts popping up in searches. Using tags will help here too.

No doubt more things will occur to me later. Check the comments for those.

[tags]blogging, wordpress[/tags]

One of the recommended actions for any blogger to take is to tag their posts, inserting appropriate links at the end of the post to a service like Technorati, say, which might be of use to a reader and will help increase the numbers of those visiting your blog. Hopefully.

I’ve been looking at a few ways of doing this. Some of the offline blogging tools allow you to do it – Qumana does, as indeed does Ecto. Most of my posts are made when I am away from my PC at home, and are therefore through the WordPress admin panel on the web. I had a crack, as Lorelle suggests, with Ultimate Tag Warrior, and found it a total pain in the arse – far too complicated for my liking.

Then Neville Hobson, who is clearly the King of WordPress plug-in recommendations, put forward the suggestion of Simple Tags – the title of which was music to my ears. It works beautifully – simply by adding the tags at the end of the post surrounded by the word tags in square brackets – like those you’d use on most forum systems these days.

Mega!

[tags]tags, wordpress, technorati[/tags]

Thanks to Neville Hobson for pointing out the Subscribe to Comments 2.0 plug-in which allows readers to click a tickbox to receive email notifications of when replies are made to comments they have posted.

A great little WordPress plug-in.

Kiko is another online calendar service. It’s filled with lots of lovely little AJAXy tricks and generally looks lovely.

One of the cool features include having a text box which allows you to quickly add appointments using a human readable syntax, which is nice.

The problem with the site at the moment is that it is soooo sloooooow. Until they get that sorted, I will still be a HipCal user. But I shall be keeping a close eye on Kiko.

The question that everyone is asking, of course, is whether Kiko is named after the footballer:

I think we should be told.

I have just been playing with Bloglines this morning – it has been a while since I looked at it, as I have been doing all on online RSSing in Newsgator of late, because the sync with FeedDemon is so handy.

Anyway, I won’t be using FeedDemon so much when I get the new PC, so I thought it might be an opportunity to try out Bloglines again. There aren’t many changes, really, some of the graphics are a little sharper and nicer, and there are some AJAXy touches to the management of feeds, which makes it much easier to manage than Newsgator. Generally, though, it is a lot friendlier than Newsgator.

One thing I would like to see in an aggregator is some sort of a cleanup/purging tool, where one could find feeds that haven’t been updated in a while, so you could choose whether or not to be bothered with them. I have around 150 feeds in Bloglines and I am certain that some of those are deceased. But can I be faffed to hunt them down myself? No.

The Performancing blog is a useful resource for bloggers, often with some good advice. This selection of tips includes some interesting stuff. Here’s the first 5 as a taster:

1. Claim your blog at services like Technorati. Fill in all keywords for every single blog!
2. Use Ping services like PinGoat (important changes announced!) or Ping-O-Matic. These two and more are optional services are integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
3. Use FeedBurner for your RSS publishing. They offer nice optimization, publishing and statistical features.
4. Bookmark every article at del.icio.us (and other appropriate bookmarking services). That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). As PFF is not giving the option to fill out the del.icio.us ‘notes’ field it is a good idea to edit that bookmark manually and add some excerpt to it! The question came up if linking every article to del.icio.us would be aggressive? Remember that you post your article link to your personal del.icio.us profile. What can be wrong about that?
5. Use extensive tagging and keywording inside your articles and on services like del.icio.us. Del.icio.us bookmarking and Technorati tagging is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). I get pretty much of my traffic through people who are subscribing or
   clicking on certain tags and also some traffic from certain tags in my personal profile.

YouOS, an online “operating system” looks really interesting. You register, then load it up in your browser. It’s best to maximise the browser window as much as you can. I’m at work, so am stuck with IE.

They describe the system as being “Still wayyyy alpha”, so I guess we shouldn’t expect too much. Still, they are blogging and have a forum, so are obviously interested in the thoughts of early users. They write a bit about what they are trying to do in their “manifesto”:

There is a glaring weakness to all traditional operating systems, however. They are, at the root, designed to run on one computer. Extensions like NFS and remote desktop alleviate this weakness to some extent, but they do nothing to enable collaboration on a larger scale between users on different computers. Imagine what you could do if every one in the world could work and play on the same “virtual computer”.

So, le’s give it a go. At first, you are presented with what appears to be a blank screen. I really wasn’t sure what to do at first, still I notice a small button in the top left of the screen:

Which revealed the stuff menu:

So there are a few apps on there already. Some of them are a little specialised, however, like FlickRSS. You load it up, and a window with a text box pops up, which you fill in and hit the ‘Get Feed’ button, like I did with ‘Cats’. You then get a list of flickr photos tagged with the word cats.

Anyway, Chat I couldn’t get to work; RichTextEditor works fairly well, if a little slowly, though is obviously nowhere near to, say, Writely:

TubeRSS, I hoped, was going to be some sort of RSS aggregator, but actually does for YouTube what FlickRSS does for Flickr – woo, and indeed, hoo; YouBuddy is, I guess, some sort of YouOS internal IM system, though as I don’t have any buddies I couldn’t check; YouFiles is a rudimentary manager for the files you have stored on YouOS; YouMail lets you email other YouOS types; YouShell lets you type in Javascript commands (!); YouSticky does the obvious sticky notes on the online desktop.

One of the issues with YouOS is that it looks so ugly. Gmail’s interface has shown that a largely text based service can still look good, and friendly. YouOS is very, very unfriendly looking. Also, being in alpha, it crashes an awful lot. I wouldn’t bother with it much at the moment except for the novelty value.

The notion of the online desktop is an interesting one, that conjures the image of computer boxes doing nothing other than handling the keyboard, mouse, display and internet connection; and where you can log in with any machine anywhere in the world and get your own desktop. I suspect, though, that the route that YouOS is taking is the wrong one. What the online OS needs to do is not provide the applications, just the means of accessing the applications, which can be developed by other people on other sites, and the means of storing data to be used and shared between those applications.

Interesting discussion on Palimpsest about Web 2.0 services, ownership, and standards.

IRows is an online spreadsheet, a competitor with NumSum, in other words. One of the criticisms I have always had with NumSum is that it is just so damn ugly. Not something that IRows can be accused of, which is much prettier:

As you can see from the crappy test sheet I created, it’s easy enough to enter data and tot columns of numbers up with a SUM function. There are a load of other functions included too, which should serve for most people’s needs in a portable spreadsheet.

File exports come in three flavours: Excel, .csv and HTML. Of these, the Excel one works fine – it keeps formatting; the .csv seems ok though it obviously loses the formatting; and the html one looks pretty good and is the only one that keeps the graphs. There is no provision though to export to OpenOffice.org which seems a shame.

IRows, then, is very easy to use, easy on the eye and features most of the functionality one might expect from an online spreadsheet. Like Writely – with which IRows has much in common, not least in its interface – it offers a useful alternative to a desktop app, especially for the casual user and for those who need to collaborate over the web on a single sheet. Unlike Writely, it isn’t (yet) owned by Google, and so I don’t have to feel guilty about using it.

So the two main parts of the traditional office suite are now online and usable. Given the plethora of calendars and webmail systems out there, it should be possible for a user with a reasonable internet connection to get by without needing to buy or install bloated office suites. The one issue remains in getting them all to talk together. This could be solved in two ways: by one large company buying up a selection of these tools and forcing them to work together exclusively; or by some open standards being developed and adhered to by all concerned. No prizes for guessing which is the most likely.

I just activated the Akismet anti-blog comment spam plug-in. Let’s see how well it works – I am not being flooded with spam right at the moment because this blog is so new. We’ll see how it goes.

I am pretty sure I read something on MJR slating this plug-in, but couldn’t find it on a quick trawl of his site. Maybe I misremembered and got it confused with Spam Karma 2.

Lorelle on WordPress is a great blog for people who use the universe’s greatest blogging app.

Her last two posts are both pretty interesting and I’m going to investigate them both a bit further:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin Update Released
• Adding RSS Feeds to WordPress

K2 seems like a really interesting theme for WordPress. It is still in beta at the moment, but I have installed on World of Dave just to see how it works and looks. I actually really like the feel of the Contempt theme I have in place on here, so it will take something special for me to move away from it.

One thing I need to add to Contempt is an edit link on each post – having to go through the Admin panel each time I want to correct a typo is a pain in the neck.