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.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the applications I use on a regular basis. This was obviously on the Windows laptop I am using right now. This is going to change in a major way pretty soon, when I make the big switch to Linux.

So, I thought it would be pretty interesting to make a quick list here of the desktop apps I use on a regular basis, and then in a few weeks time I can compare back. There may be fewer changes than you might think, as I have stuck to the open-source option more often than not anyway!

Stuff I use now:

• Openoffice.org
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• FeedDemon
• BlogJet
• Gaim
• Filezilla
• 1st Page 2000
• The GIMP
• Limewire
• ITunes

…and I am bound to add more when I think of them. Of course, one type of app I am certainly going to be using a lot less of are anti-virus and -malware programs.

So, what made me want to change things round? Well, there have been, or are going to be, several changes to the way I am doing things generally, IT-wise.

One thing is that I really wanted to move away from using things that I don’t really consider ethical. The obvious one there is Microsoft, so, when I get my new PC delivered (hopefully) next week, I will be immediatley over-writing the default Windows installation with Ubuntu Linux. Expect to read a lot about my trials and tribulations in getting used to things over the next couple of months.

The other one was Google. Their actions over the latst few months have become ever more disturbing – or maybe, they are just starting to act like every other propriatory IT company out there. Anyway, stuff like the China thing, the plans to archive people’s entire hard drive on their servers and the rest of it have really put me off them. I still think that some of their products are pretty good – Gmail is a great, great interface, but attached to a very creepy system, for example – but generally I felt less and less comfortable relying on them in any way.

How do these things affect my blog? They don’t, really, except that I wanted a new URL to start up a new email address on, and that this change in my attitudes could be used as an excuse for a wider change in my blogging. The split between Tech and non-Tech is a good one, for I really can’t believe that people who like looking at some of my links and stuff to current IT stories really want to see photos of the snowman I built today.

Anyway, this is a bit of a rambly start to the new blog. But this is where I am starting from, and it will be interesting to see where I end up.

Right, so I have put in place the new blogs.

The tech blog, which is what most people will be interested in, is now at http://da.vebrig.gs and the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/davebriggs.

The ‘personal’ blog is at http://da.vebrig.gs/worldofdave and the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/WorldOfDave.

So, that’s it for this site. Update your aggregators to the ones you want and you’re away!

Thanks for reading.

Dave

Here’s the first post, taking over from where davebriggs.net left off. Well, some of it.

This is where I am going to be doing all of the tech stuff I used to write about – in other words, most of what made up the previous site. All the other bits, like photos, books, music, films, footy and politics will be on another blog, World of Dave.

Here’s the RSS feed for this blog. You should be able to get it via autodiscovery in your aggregator anyway. It’s through FeedBurner now.

Anyway, enjoy the site. Hopefully it will be a bit more focussed than before.

You may have noticed a complete lack of action on this blog of late. That’s partially because of life getting in the way, but more a case of me planning to move away from it.

I am going to be starting another, new, blog soon. Probably two: one for my usual tech-trawlings and another for more personal stuff, all hosted at a new URL. It’s all part of me trying to reorganise my online life and bring some sort of order to it all.

So, this is the penultimate post to this blog. There might be a couple more del.icio.us automatic posts before the very last one, which will give the URL and the new RSS feed for my new blogs.

Cheers!