First past the post

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.

The end of an era, kind of…

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!

Clough to Forest?

From the Guardian‘s perennially unreliable Rumour Mill:

And we’ll usher in the weekend with a long-awaited bit of good news for Nottingham Forest fans after more than a year of Gary route-one Megson: Nigel Clough is rumoured to be tempted by a return to the City Ground.

Hmmm. I have long said that Clough Jnr would be mad to take the job – but maybe, just maybe, he is the man to bring the club a bit of self respect back, if not the glory days like those enjoyed under his father.

Two Opinions on Google’s Page Creator

Google’s recent page creator has drawn some conflicting views. I’ll pluck two out here.

Scoble is broadly in favour:

I see a lot of bloggers saying “so” about Google’s new Web Page Creator. I think bloggers often miss the larger conversation that we should be having: the Office Live team tells me that 45% of small businesses don’t have a Web site at all.

Congrats to Google for trying to do something to bring more people onto the Web. That’s the conversation we should be having.

While Dave Winer states:

This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It’s a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn’t it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.

Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities. Give me a ring when there’s at least some rudimentary content management in there.

I’m actually with Scoble on this one. I think a lot of the criticisms are missing the point. Some people don’t want a blog, they don’t want to update their sites on a daily basis. I think this is a good, easy to use solution for folk who just want to have a few photos up on the web, or a message to pass on to friends or family. Issues like CMS and RSS would mean nothing to these people, and nor should they.

In truth, the new Google service simply isn’t for people like Winer, or indeed Scoble. I myself can’t think of a reason why I would need to use it. But for the thousand’s of non tech-savvy web users out there, it could be really helpful.

Stikipad

Stikipad, which I mentioned in my brief round up of wikis recently, has now made it’s free account have unlimited edits. Thank goodness sanity has prevailed – 5 edits would be nowhere near enough for someone to work out whether the service was worth paying for or not. A good example of a company listening to their users’ views.

Thanks to Matt at Stikipad for the email informing me about the change – I’ll be giving the service another try soon.