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.

I have now converted this site’s permalinks to a human readable format. This was one of those things I had thought would be really hard, so I kept putting it off. However, in WordPress 2 it’s really easy!

Just go to the Options tab and choose the Permalinks subtab. There are a list of common options – I chose the Date and Name based one. Then hit Update Permalink structure and it saves and produces a text box on the screen with some code in it. This needs to be copied into a file called .htaccess which should be in your blog’s root folder. You may have to create this file. Save that, and you are away!

Don’t worry about links to your posts that exist which point to the old numeric style URLs – these still work!

FeedDemon 2 has a cool little icon on each post you read to link to it in your del.icio.us archive. I’ve actually started to use this now for a few things. Here is the RSS feed, if you are interested.

It would be nice to have a ‘blog this’ icon too. Currently it’s either going through the menus or hitting ctrl-shift-b.

Robert Scoble has an old blog hosted at UserLand, or rather had. It’s now gone.

Oh, UserLand, where did my old blogs go?

Yikes, the first couple of years of my blog are gone. UserLand took down those blogs. I don’t remember getting an email warning me about that, but I might have (junk filters catch a lot of that stuff).

My old site used to be at http://scobleizer.manilasites.com and the stuff is just gone.

Lots of old blogs used to be stored there. That’s a lot of history that’s gone. Hopefully I can get it back, I just sent them email.

This is a serious problem, I guess. At least by hosting your blog yourself, you know what’s happening to it. People who write their blog posts offline with an editor can save backup copies on their own machine.

I ought to look into backing up this blog, and the others I host. Hmmm – I guess this is done by just backing up the MySQL database. I wonder if there is a way to save a flat HTML file of the site, with all the content in it?

• Ban Comic Sans
• grou.ps might be interesting, but is suffering from being dug at the moment.
• Google’s Anti-Spyware Project
• Flickr provides an RSS feed for comments on your photos – useful enough, as it means you don’t have to log in everytime to check for comments, but it also gives a little thumbnail of the photo being comments on – excellent!
• Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship

Analyst claims so: “We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we’ve dubbed ‘Google Tunes. We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced.”

read more | digg story

Hmmm. Does anyone know of a non-evil, non-megalomaniac search engine I could use?

This is my first post from digg, and it seems pretty cool. digg puts the links (the ones inside the quote) right at the bottom of a post, but I think I prefer them inside the quote, certainly above my comments, which means an edit. Still, I have to do that anyway to add in the categories, and the real time saved is in copying and pasting the links.

This is going to mean I will hardly write any original posts in the WordPress editor at all! When I am at home I tend to use the Performancing Firefox extension for writing posts, when browsing with FeedDemon I use BlogJet. Both these products automatically quote text and links for me, speeding up the process a good deal.

In fact, while I am at it, something that annoys me about the editor in WordPress 2 – when I select text and hit the link button to make that text a hyperlink, it doesn’t automatically add in the http:// bit for me, which was a real time saver in previous versions.

Also, it would be good if you could define a set list of links, which if that word was used in a post it automatically parses it into a hyperlink. You could make is case dependent, so camel-casing would prevent many mix-ups. So, everytime I typed WordPress, on publishing the post, that word was made to link back to wordpress.org everytime, meaning I don’t have to bother. That would be cool.