K4 Bulletin Board entirely made in ajax, first forum to be fully transformed with ajax requiring no refreshing.

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Looks interesting – site is suffering from being dugg at the moment.

New FeedDemon beta released – actually, twice. Two versions came out on subsequent days this week.

Beta 2 of FeedDemon 2, the RSS aggregator for Windows, was released this week. If you’ve been testing FD’s development versions since release 1.5, this latest beta is worth getting.

I’ve just installed it and the first thing I notice is how much faster the application seems to be overall compared to beta 1. The release notes outline a long list of additions, changes and fixes since that first beta.

Sweet.

Another good move is that there is now a button on each post to blog that post, as well as sending it to del.icio.us. Sad thing is, the same button is used for both, and a little menu pops up to let you choose from blogging or del.icio.us. Couldn’t we just have two little buttons?

Qumana Beta 2 has been released and it addresses the WordPress issue I (and many others) mentioned earlier.

I must say I have been hugely impressed with the way the Qumana people have engaged with those offering feedback on their product. So, to keep it coming, here’s some more suggestions:

• Get Qumana to integrate with FeedDemon – the ‘blog this’ function doesn’t copy the text of the blog post like BlogJet does.
• For users with multiple blogs, the default is always the first blog you set up. Perhaps the options could be to set either a constant default, or for the default to be the last blog you posted to.
• It would be nice to be able to add a title element to hyperlinks.

Well, just three for now. But I am going to use Qumana to write the posts for a new blogging project I am working on, so I will be able to test it out some more.

I returned to BlogJet to write this post with, and noticed that several new versions have been released since I last checked. Not sure which features are new, but one I hadn’t noticed before was that it includes an auto-replace feature, that can be used to create the automatic parsing of links I mentioned in another post. Nice one!

So, I had a quick look last night at the bottom of my Gmail window – where it says how much space my emails are taking up. Was shocked that it was 25% of the 2695 MB available.

I thought this was pretty shocking – there’s no way I have that much email. Then I had a thought – for a long while a friend of mine had been forwarding those joke emails with huge attachments – up to 10 a day sometimes. After about a week of this I set up a filter to shove them all to ‘archive’, so my inbox didn’t get clogged up.

So, I searched for all these messages and deleted them all (now, that was a pain in the arse. Not least because I had to select them, delete them, then remove them from the trash; but because in search view, only 25 messages appear per screen, rather than the 100 per screen I have normally. That’s just idiotic.) And what was the result?

I am now down to 11% of my available space. More than half my quota was filled with these joke chain emails! I changed my filter from ‘straight to archive’ to ‘straight to trash’.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that it is a good idea for a blogger to have his or her email address easily accessible. But what about when that email address isn’t one that a reader would want to use?

I clearly mark the email link under my photo on the right as being a Gmail address. Some people don’t like Gmail, for a variety of reasons. So, really, you should offer an alternative. I try to do this with my Email page.

So far, so good. But what about the people I email? Remember, one of the problems people have with Gmail is that it stores mails more-or-less indefinitely. So, if I email them from my Gmail account, they are being forced into having their reply stored for ever more on a Google server somewhere, being used for God knows what. Now, I personally don’t care what Google do with my emails, and I like the interface so much I want to stick with it. But what about those that do?

So, I have amended my Gmail signature to include a line saying “Don’t want to reply to Gmail? Try me@davebriggs.net instead!”

This way, if people want to reply, but don’t want to have their email sucked into Google’s information empire, they can do. Sorted.

Well, this is my first post with Qumana (Version 3 beta 1), a free desktop offline blog post editor. It’s pretty cool, though I do have some issues with it.

Feature wise, it does everything you would expect, offering a basic editor with the ability to format text, add links and images and so on; as well as more blog specific stuff like adding categories to posts and trackback URLs, etc.

Setting it up is very easy, and BlogJet could learn a thing or two from Qumana on this aspect. There’s no need to tell it what platform I am using, nor the location of my xmlrpc.php file. It sorts all that out for me. Cool. Also, the speed at which posts are visible on the blog is a lot quicker than BlogJet – which for some reason takes ages to appear.

Two features of Qumana stand out. One is the ‘droppad’ which sits on the desktop while Qumana is running, and onto which you can drag text and images. Then, the next time you create a new blog post, all that stuff appears automatically. Fairly cool idea, but in reality you are going to spend more time sorting out the formatting and layout of all this stuff you have dumped than you would if you had don it manually from the off. Second, Qumana offers a bespoke blog advertising programme called AdGenta which fills your blog posts with contextual adverts. Hmmm. Not one for me, I must admit.

The main problem for me with Qumana is the speed. It takes too long to load in the first place and then there seems to be some sort of weird delay when typing, which may have something to do with the spell checker. Also, for some reason, ctrl-backspace doesn’t delete a whole word. Grrr.

Overall, it’s interesting. For those who aren’t sure whether they need an offline post editor it is a good bet to try first, as it’s free. But BlogJet will still be my number one choice for speed and simplicity.

Powered by Qumana

I have been playing with the daily post setting on del.icio.us and tonight I’ll find out if it is going to work…

Basically, the daily post spits out a post to your blog containing all the sites I linked to on del.icio.us that day, at a set time. You can read up on how to configure it to work with WordPress on the support forum. The url to visit to create this for your own blog is http://del.icio.us/settings/yourdel.icio.ususername/daily.

So, check here after 22:00 GMT to see if mine has worked – it will save me a job creating link blog posts, anyway…

• Listable is a Web 2.0 thing for making tagged community lists. Hmm. They do have a rather nice list of Web 2.0 sites though.
• Dave Winer notices how slowly Gmail is recently. It’s a nightmare – think the Google Talk integration must be clogging things up. Strangely (or, actually, not) things are much quicker in FireFox.

That’s it for today. Pathetic! Must try harder.

I have needed a simple wiki solution for a little problem of mine, and I have found just what I was after.

I just needed a page or two that could be easily edited for the handful of people who are attending the Palimpsest Big Day Out in May – usually this stuff is handled on the forums, but this can be a nightmare when you are hunting through pages of messages. Installing a whole wiki on my webspace would be overkill, so I needed a hosted solution.

Steve Rubel yesterday pointed to StikiPad which I have a go, and it was ok, but the free version only allows for 5 revisions! Rubbish.

In the end I found PBwiki through Google. And it is perfect. Simple to set up, a simple method of user authentication, revision histories and everything else you might need. OK, so the free version has adverts and certain limitations about the number of pages you can have, but it is perfect for almost any simple wiki needs.

This is the strangest bit of comment spam I think I have ever got:

You are no way on the 300th page of Google – in fact, your on the first and number 2 for my search “successful blogging” – your last one made me laugh because I just started this whole blogging thing and I keep trying to convince myself that I don’t care if no one reads it – but sadly, I do care – thank you for your post 🙂

It linked back to a site with ‘blog’ in the URL but I didn’t fancy clicking it…

after a particularly nasty bout of the winter vomit flu, which has obviously spread from the West Midlands to the Welsh borders.

The few things I have read on the web recently have been posted to del.icio.us. I’ll try and carry on as normal from today.

• How to Make Wikipedia better
• Deliciousing – Scoble wonders how to use del.icio.us best. I had a think. Why not post anything you find interesting to del.icio.us, then later on, review them and post the best of the bunch on your blog? I might try this out tomorrow.
• Microsoft backs off on blog censorship
• Introduction to RSS
• By popular demand, Parsnip now has a forum.

Pinch, punch, first of the month.

• Seamonkey released
• The one that got away – Philip Cowley on Blair’s defeats last night. Mr Cowley was my tutor at university in Hull.
• How to Manage Your Draft Blog Posts
• Council mumbles Microsoft benefits
• GeoURL – websites near me
• £9m Technology Breakthrough – more government IT waste

WordPress Development Blog › 2.0.1 Release

Summary of changes:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

Ah, payday at last. December’s pay came before Christmas – this has been one hell of a long month.

• Blogs versus the NY Times in Google
• Graham Parsnip relaunched in blog form
• Jody Digger has started blogging recently
• The winds of change are blowing – the interesting Office Weblog is moving
• Home Page Goals
• Peter Dawson’s Naked Conversations Project
• Suprglu is quite interesting. It allows you to cobble together all of your RSS generating online content: del.icio.us, flickr, blogs, etc etc. Here’s mine.