After the purchase of Writely giving them onine word processing, it appears that Google will shortly be offering a spreadsheet too.

These, with Gmail and Calendar effectively provide a free to use Google Office suite. For home users with a swift broadband connection and no objection to using Google, why would they bother with anything else?

I’ve had to have a bit of a review of my online life since I started my new job. I simply haven’t got the time that I used to for administering all the sites I have managed to become involved with – at least to the extent that I used to.

So, I am going to cut down on my blogs. This one is going to have to have the non-tech life stuff in again, rather like davebriggs.net did. The problem is really that coming up with tech stuff takes time – time spent reading hundreds of blogs, often checking in several times a day to see if anything new is in, following up links and stories, testing software and services. I just don’t have the time to do that anymore, and the lifeblogging will at least be a quicker and more readily available source of content. This means that World of Dave will be dying soon, though I might look at importing the posts into this blog.

I’m also coming across some interesting stuff in my new job, and so I might like to post about that.

This should mean I have the time to start looking at Palimpsest more regularly again, which is important to me as it is a great site, and easily my most successful. I might look into spending a bit more time developing Goal Mouths with Stewart, and Impnet with Chris.

I also had the idea for an interesting photoblogging project, but that will take up a fair bit of time to set up and I’m not sure how much interest there will be in it. Then there is all made up, which is all set and raring to go, but for which I need to get a back log of stories for before I go live.

Gah! So much to do, so little time!

…has been given a bit of a face lift. Last week, Quentin and I finally bumped into each other in IM-land and between us upgraded to WordPress 2.02, installed a modified K2 theme, installed all the various plug-ins that make WordPress so much fun, and also installed a punBB forum and integrated it into the overall theme.

Now for the tricky bit: getting the content sorted and getting people engaged.

Un-Made-Up is a great little blog just started by the journalist and author William Shaw. It features true stories submitted by readers, all under 1,000 words long. Well worth a look.

Yep, I am giving you all a chance to do something that will make you better people. You’d be fools/really unpleasant not to take it!

The future Mrs Dave is to take part in Race for Life this year, raising money for research into breast cancer. Being the web-savvy individual that she is, she has a web site set up to take sponsors. If you would like to make some sort of contribution to her total, please visit the sponsorship site and do the honours.

Cheers!

LWM is a great site, one that offers a different angle on the MS debate. Rather than being rabidly pro-Mac or Linux, it instead aims to offer sensible alternatives for those people who would rather not use MS software. Solutions like switching to Linux or a Mac are discussed, of course, but LWM acknowledges that it isn’t always feasible!

After a brief hiatus, I’m pleased to say that posts are now regularly being added again, and even more pleased to say that some of them will be contributed by me! I have had the odd post published before, but now I have joined John and Quentin and become a more regular member of the team. We are currently having a review of what the site is about and what direction it might move in in the future, which is exciting, and hopefully we will help plenty more people live without Microsoft in the future!

My recent posts: The AJAX Office and Living Without Microsoft: A Guide for Windows Users.

The site runs on WordPress and if you would like to contribute, you can leave comments in the usual way, or register and write a post yourself (these will be moderated). Alternatively, if you have ideas or suggestions for the site, drop me an email.

[tags]Living Without Microsoft[/tags]

The one blog post I have written which got the most attention was on my old blog, called ‘My Ten Thoughts on Successful Blogging’. It received quite a few links and comments, and it was pretty clear that I had got a few things wrong. So, taking some criticisms from the original post, and adding in some of the stuff I have learnt over the last year or so, I thought I would give it another go.

Continue reading “My Ten Thoughts on Successful Blogging: Redux”

Today, I have been doing some work on a side blogging project that I have been thinking about for a while. I’d got the remit of the blog sorted, a name, decided (as usual) on WordPress and on the K2 theme. Everything sorted. So, I went to my webhosts domain registry page, and looked up the URL I wanted.

It has already gone, as had the other couple of TLDs I was interested in. I had a look at the one site that was up and running, using the address I wanted, and was shocked.

The blog was about what my blog was going to be about. It had, as mentioned before, the name I wanted. It used WordPress. It used K2 as the theme. And he had done it all today.

Just how weird is that? Back to the drawing board for me, anyway.

[tags]blogging, wordpress, k2[/tags]

Since Lee (who is rapidly losing my respect) has pooh-poohed my earlier attempt at a logo for B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S., and even Amsterdam-resident Neville thought it a little on the risque-side, I have attempted another one.

I thought this might suitably reflect the feelings of most Bollockers (is that the right collective noun?).

Thoughts, chaps?

AJ’s blog features a nice piece on keeping your desktop free. It’s Windows specific, but the principles could be applied to any OS, I guess.

I am with him on this one. The idea of having icons on the desktop is inefficient and, well, rubbish. I use my desktop purely as a temporary holding station for downloaded files before they are put away or deleted. By the time I switch my PC off at night, there is only the Recycle Bin left on show. Because of this use of the desktop as a place for downloaded files I don’t follow AJ’s advice that you should use the Windows option to turn all icons off – they can be handy sometimes.

I also very, very rarely touch the Start menu – again, I just think that they are rubbish, and it depressed me a bit when I installed Ubuntu and Mandriva and found that they use a similar system. I personally use a quick-launch bar, with all the apps on it I use regularly, which is displayed at the top of the screen and which autohides when not in use.

I still think the most efficient and the most user-friendly way of operating a PC is through the keyboard. When I had Google Desktop Search installed on my old PC, I really liked the little search field on the sidebar that would auto-complete and hunt out whatever I was after, whether a file or an application. This sort of thing would form the basis of my ideal OS.

Instead of having to click on a box, though, you should be able to just start typing. Where there is more than one file with a similar name, such as a word processed document, a spreadsheet, an email and a webpage with the same name, then options appear to let me choose which one I want. Likewise, an option could appear to create a new document of some sort with that name.

So, no matter what you are doing, the method of doing it is the same. This could be taken further with task based search words, so I could type “burn cd” which would locate the CD burning software on my machine. The search “type letter” would bring up a word processor. This way, the need to know exactly what bit of software performs which task would disappear.

IN MY WORLD, THIS IS HOW THINGS WOULD BE.

Lee Hopkins, antipodean blogger extraordinaire and contributor to Shel and Neville‘s For Immediate Release podcast, and I have been bantering on various posts about the lack of an offline blog editor that, well, does what we want it to. This led me to make an utterly idiotic suggestion.

There was a recent flurry among the blogging PR community recently about the International Association of Nobodies – an organisation created to provide a refuge for any blogger who has been bullied by another. My suggestion was that we take the IAN as an example and set up our own group: Blogger’s Off Line League Of Content Kreation Systems (the use of K in kreation, is not, as some have suggested, a pathetic attempt to create a childish acronym, but instead a calculated PR move that will certainly add to our appeal to the kidz).

Sadly, I had no idea that Lee was as juvenile as I am. He is certainly giving this project the serious attention it most definitely does not deserve. For God’s sake, he’s even asking for logo designs! Of course, I couldn’t possibly resist that challenge.

I felt that the real requirement here was to create a logo that represented the serious and professional nature of B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S. and this certainly does that. I mean, it would look great on a t-shirt, don’t you think?

So, how far can B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S. go, exactly? As far as we can stretch them, I say. As Lee wrote:

Whenever I next hear young men using the phrase, I shall instantly know that they are talking about offline blog editors.

My thinking exactly.

[tags]B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S., Blogger’s Off Line League Of Content Kreation Systems[/tags]