I ranted recently about how having advertising on my blog made me feel dirty. After saying that, it’s been kind of bugging me, especially since someone whom I deeply respect provides marketing and branding creative for companies.
I’ve been thinking about it, and the part that made me feel dirty was because I had changed the rules of my blog. I’ve always considered it to be nothing more than just my own personal outboard brain - a core dump indexed by Google. Changing the nature of the beast to become a “monetizing engine” would have subtly altered what/how/when I posted. Perhaps not right away, and perhaps not even visibly (to anyone but myself - hey, another circular reference - if it’s primarily for me, wtf do I care what anyone else thinks? :-) ) but it would have altered it enough to become less useful to me. I would have started writing for accumulation of Google Juice™, rather than just documenting thoughts and actions.
In the light of the recent weblogsinc.com sale, with each blog being given an insanely high “value”, there’s this handy utility to guestimate just how much your blog is “worth”, using the same formula used to calculate “value” in the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal.
My [blog](https://darcynorman.net) is worth **$60,970.32**.[How much is your blog worth?](http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/)
Stanford on iTunes will provide alumni—as well as the general public—with a new and versatile way of staying connected to the university through downloads of faculty lectures, campus events, performances, book readings, music recorded by Stanford students and even podcasts of Stanford football games. At launch, the service will contain close to 400 distinct audio programs, and the university will continue to add new content as it becomes available.
My first reaction to Flock was “holy crap!” - after using it for awhile, I’m still very impressed, but also a little surprised. I’d thought that the tighter integration to my blog, del.icio.us and Flickr accounts would have totally changed the way I worked with those tools. I suppose there is still the potential for that, but there isn’t really anything that I couldn’t replicate in other browsers using some decent bookmarklets. My del.icio.us account is already one click away on any browser I use (for adding, querying and viewing), as is my blog (again, for all CRUD tasks), Flickr, and lots of other handy tools. And my current blog posting utility (using the popup window in any browser) doesn’t give me the crappy-HTML-code-generation problems, or disappearing-post problems that Flock’s built in editor appears to suffer from.
I’ve got a project that will require the use of Drupal (or something like it, but it’s looking like Drupal at the moment - I’ve got a mockup running for the project, and it’s solving about 90+% of their defined needs just using a stock Drupal installation with a handful of plugins), and one of the things that the users will have to do will be to upload files (images, .doc, .zip, whatever) into the system for reflection/commenting/review. They would also like to use these uploaded files outside of the system (for instance, on their own web pages, in an “ePortfolio”, whatever), and we’d like to provide a solution that wouldn’t force them to upload the files separately into two locations (their WebDAV volume for “regular” use, and into the Drupal system for review).
Between Flock and BlogBridge, this whole online-community stuff has completely changed for me in the last 24 hours.
BlogBridge: I blew through my RSS feeds this morning so quickly that I thought I had missed most of them. Nope. It’s just that much faster to check feeds now, and the items are nicely sorted by my Starz ranking on the feed, so I read the more “interesting” stuff first. Nice.
Flock: Loving the del.icio.us integration. Less enthralled with the blog-managment integration, but it’s still pretty nice. I’m going to try it as my default browser for awhile to see how it works out.
So, Flock looks cool. A custom build of Firefox, with direct tie-ins to social stuff like del.icio.us and weblog posting. Has a handy blog manager built in, like a MarsEdit Lite. This could be one handy tool… It’s pegging my CPU right now, so I’m not going to play with it as much as I’d like…
First, BlogBridge is a great app. It works very well, and fits into my RSS workflow better than anything else I’ve ever used. I can totally see myself using this app for a long, long time. With that in mind, here are some ideas for making it even better…
Better MacOSX integration?
run as normal app with menubar in system’s, and app icon, etc… (as opposed to a generic java app)
accept feeds passed by other apps (safari’s RSS icon now spawns a fresh copy of BlogBridge, and then does nothing with the result)
Perhaps show a different dock icon when there are pending new items to read? Don’t have to show the count, just a flag to say “hey! there’s new stuff!”
Insane amounts of RAM (real and virtual) are being used on MacOSX.
When viewing a link in the browser, it should (optionally?) open the link in the background, rather than bringing the browser to the front.
No search field?
creating a “SmartFeed” for a simple search isn’t ideal
Article Cache
no option to save items for 30 days or 6 months or forever. Only an “Articles remaining after purge” setting. What does that mean?
Image feeds
if I have a SmartFeed that pulls items from other Image Feeds (Flickr subscriptions), the items show in linear chronological view, even if all feeds are set to be “Image” feeds. There’s no way to set that for the SmartFeed itself.
If I have a feed that I manually set to be an “Image feed” by setting that flag on the subscription, the images are dimmed out unless the mouse is over the image. That doesn’t happen if I create a new SmartFeed for a Flickr tag. Inconsistent behaviour.
If I set a feed to be an “Image feed”, if I click on the image, nothing appears to happen. I have to right-click and select “open link in browser” (say, if I want to mark a Flickr image as a Favorite, or comment, etc…)
Smart Feeds
I set a SmartFeed to use the parameters: “Feed Tag contains ‘Flickr’” and “Status is ‘Unread’”, thinking I’d get a handy SmartFeed for all unviewed Flickr images. But it didn’t find anything. I changed the first parameter to “Feed title contains ‘Photo’”, and it works fine. Hmm…
And then there’s the “synchronization” feature - where it syncs your settings with a server using an XML-RPC api. Very cool feature. But it hasn’t worked for me yet. Each time, it gives me a “communication error” message. Doh. Then, there’s the dialog that controls synchronizations:
It’s not perfect, and performance isn’t quite at the level of a “native” app (but the java penalty is totally acceptable), but man, is BlogBridge one nice aggregator! It’s got the great all-in-one-page combined view, and some great filtering/grouping tools. I’m loving the Starz feature, and tagging feeds. And, it’s got a special view for “image” feeds - like my Flickr subscriptions - that looks like a photo album rather than a linear list. Rock on.
I’d noticed in the last few days that requests to my blog (for pages and feeds) seemed to last forever. I mean, the page would load, but the activity monitor would show the page as still loading. If I viewed details in Safari, I’d see that the images and stylesheets had all loaded, but the HTML source was still appearing to be downloading. If I stopped the page loading, all appeared fine, and the complete source was there (including the footer at the bottom of the page when viewed by source).
I’m preparing some stuff for a workshop I’m doing on weblogs and RSS next month, and am gathering some links to aggregators I could recommend to the people coming to the workshop. Obviously, Bloglines and Google’s RSS reader are good online aggregators, but desktop tools are just plain cooler.
But, it’s got a LOT of nice little touches. You can tag feeds. Star them (and filter views based on star ratings). Create smart listings of posts. It also does something cool that I haven’t seen in another aggregator - it creates a little thumbnail indicator bargraph for the activity of a feed over the past few days. You can also give it a list of keywords, and it automatically highlights these words in every post.
I just installed the HTMLArea module for Drupal on the weblogs.ucalgary.ca server. Wow. That’s one nice WYSIWYG editor! And I’m someone that usually hates WYSIWYG editors because of the craptacular code they typically spew out (like the last 2 I’d tried on that server).
This one appears to create nice, clean, semantic markup. And offers a “full screen” mode to give you essentially a “Dreamweaver Lite” experience - OK it’s more like “Dreamweaver Extremely Light”, but more than adequate.
