Friday, 17 February, 2006

Email and Blogging

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.

Thursday, 16 February, 2006

Qumana

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

Wednesday, 15 February, 2006

links for 2006-02-15

Tuesday, 14 February, 2006

de.icio.us daily post

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…

Monday, 13 February, 2006

Links 13/2/06

  • 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.

Wikis

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.

Weird Spam

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…