Got Wills

I think I’ve finally gotten all set up again. I’m now running OpenSuse 10.3 on VMware Server. I upgraded my computer. I’ve got the latest release of WordPress running and a theme that I really like. Isn’t it great looking… and yes, those are my three beautiful children in the header image. For those that have slow connections, I apologize for the large size of the picture (almost 100K), I couldn’t justify reducing the quality of the picture.

I had too much trouble with Microsoft Virtual Server to keep it around after my hard drive change. Almost everytime my computer had an unscheduled reboot (my power went out), it dropped the virtual network card and created a new one which drove opensuse crazy.  I’ve had no such problems with VMware server. It was also a lot easier getting the VMware tools running than it was getting Virtual Machine Additions to work properly. So now my time is syncing and all (my clock was running a little slow before I installed it). Getting the mail setup correctly threw me a little. Opensuse 10.3 uses Postfix by default, and I had only setup sendmail, and my ISP requires authentication for outgoing mail now. I eventually found the necessary instructions. It was actually a lot easier to set up than I thought it would be. I ended up using my ISP’s SMTP server as a relay and SMTP AUTH to get me logged into it. (continue reading…)

Well, I just signed up for pownce today (I forgot my usb drive and have little to do in class because of it). The service looks good, but there are still a lot of missing features. For instance, while they do let you choose your theme, you have like 4 to choose from, and it’s not customizable beyond that. Also, there is still no way to send a message via text or email (just as effective as text, of course). I like that you are able to link to your social networks from the page, but right now it really lacks anything noteworthy. Sure, they have a multi-platform Adobe AIR desktop client, so what, if I’m sitting at my desktop, I’ve usually got a browser open anyway.

Another real downer is that there are going to be ads mixed in with the messages. IMHO, this is always a bad idea (mixing the ads with the content). The ads should have their place on the page and stay there. I hate it when I’m trying to view a page and accidentally click an ad, when I’m trying to view content (although, it can’t be as bad as the mouseover popups in some blogs and forums).

I was really excited about this beta at first, but, as most things, it’s not all I thought it was cracked up to be. There is some chance it can develop into a great service, but I don’t see it gaining much traction.

Well, I got an invite to GrandCentral a few weeks ago and finally found time to set it up. There were no Holbrook phone numbers available. In fact, as far as I can tell, there were no numbers in the local Frontier calling area (Show Low, Snowflake, Heber, Pinetop, Lakeside, etc…). So I went with a Winslow number. The features on this service sound really great, so far (would have been better if I’d have found a Holbrook number). I can get any calls sent to any of my phones that I choose. I can even have them sent to a hotel phone if I choose. Also, I can listen to my voicemail online and choose to have all calls go to voicemail.

If you use the link on the right hand side of my blog, you can call me for free. It will call your phone, then mine. No charge for the connection at all. You can use it to record calls (both parties are notified when you turn the feature on) and you can use it to keep a call log. All in all, it sounds like a great tool. Maybe I’ll even start giving out this phone number to my students, since it’ll be easier to check the messages. Then I can have it go to my office phone only when I’m in the office.

You can also send emails to my phone number at grandcentral.com and they will come to me. Of course, I will not be giving out my number on this blog, but if you would like to know my number and have a good reason to know it, please use the button to leave me a voicemail.

I don’t know how this will work in the RSS, but here’s a call link in the post.

Web Worker Daily posted a nice rebuttal to PC Magazine’s article which stated that Gmail is falling behind the other major Web email clients (mostly because of it’s lack of drag and drop sorting). I find it takes far less time to archive after you read (or don’t read) a message than it does to try to decide which folder it should go in. The labels (aka tags) can provide you with any sorting that a folder could do and more. I can put more than one label on a message, but can only store it in a single folder with the other services.

On another note, Gmail provides free pop / smtp access (MSN will allow access through Outlook or Outlook Express) so if I wanted my email access to feel more like a desktop app, I would simply set it as such. I also find the little signature ads to be extremely annoying, not to mention the ad banners on the actual client page. I have simply stopped clicking on banner ads. If I find something in a banner ad interesting, I’ll Google it and access the page through a resulting text ad or the search results. I’ve decided that I, for one, am going to stop supporting and encouraging the annoying, real estate hogging, banner ads that litter, not only MySpace page, but also Yahoo! mail and MSN LiveMail.

Sphere piqued my interest two days ago, when I saw that someone had been referred to my blog from there. I immediately recognized the site… I had seen it on TechCrunch and GigaOm. When I had seen it on those sites, I thought it was just another social bookmarking or “Digg” like site. I soon found out it was a great tool for helping navigate the blogosphere.

Naturally, I went to get the code to put on my site, finding only a link to contact Sphere for more information. Sphere looked cool enough to forgo my usual distaste for a ‘contact me’ where a download link should be. I filled the requested information and hit send. Within a few minutes I had received an automatic response… great, I’m at the back of a long line. I archived the email and went about my business. Checking my email, I found, quite unexpectedly, that Tony Conrad, founder and CEO of Sphere had sent an email asking me to download and implement the new plugin for WordPress. About 5 minutes after reading the email… Sphere was running on my blog. I still had to make a small tweak to disable Snap Preview Anywhere, by adding a class, “snap_nopreview” to the link in the plugin file. So, now after each of my posts you will see a ‘Sphere it’ link. If you would like more about some topic I have written about, just click Sphere it, and you’ll be presented with a list of related blog posts. Now, if I could just get some comments… Oh well.

There’s a lot more sites cropping up that help to make the world a more socially responsible place by shaming people and businesses who play dirty. TechCrunch has a recent article on a new service, dotherightthing.com. I agree with Michael when he says this site has a huge potential to become a site where the only people using it are smug, better than you, types that are more interested in making themselves look good by bringing others down than actually trying to hold companies responsible for their social regressions.

These startups aren’t the first to hold companies to a higher standard. Before dotherightthing.com, and other similar sites, there was epinions.com and the rating and opinion system of just about every other shopping site since around 2002 (give or take a couple years). While one or two bad opinions won’t deter me from my intended purchase, a 25% or higher rate of negatives will give me second thoughts about buying from the merchant. The main difference between the two is that the latter are primarily rating online retailers, whereas the former are trying to establish a rating system for online as well as traditional brick and mortar retailers. The other real difference is that the rash of new sites are not solely focused on buyers experiences, but also the social impact that the business is making.

The sole purpose of a business is not to make money. While making money is the primary purpose of most businesses, they also have a responsiblity to build the economy. In most cases, these two objectives go hand in hand, what’s good for one is good for the other. However, all of the thievery and dishonesty going on lately is bad for the economy (and the company), while it makes the few people who are in on it wealthy. This is a horrible direction for the upper management of these large corporations to be taking us. Now, don’t get me wrong, not all CEO’s are bad. It just seems to be the way of things, that all we hear about are the bad ones, at least they’re the ones that we remember.

I just noticed the release of “Ella,” the new version of WordPress yesterday. Usually I don’t upgrade my site stuff the first week of a release, and sometimes I never upgrade it, it’s just too much of a hassle in most cases. However, after looking at the list of new features included in WordPress 2.1, I knew I had to have it.

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.

Wow, I don’t know if this was available on WordPress 2.0 or not, but I was just able to drag the “Custom Fields” box out of my way, which is great, because it didn’t move enough when I tried to expand the “Trackbacks” box (probably an IE7 bug). Anyway, my favorite feature has to be the Autosave followed closely by the tabbed entry interface, making it easier to see the code view of your post.

I meant to write about this yesterday, but it was insanely busy around here. Snap Preview Anywhere is a piece of Javascript that you put on your Web pages. It then adds an Ajaxy feeling preview box when you mouse over the links on the pages.

SPA is beyond simple to install, just copy a bit of custom Javascript into the <head> block on each of your pages and you’re good to go. It’s even easier to install on blogs, thanks to Ajay D’Souza’s plugin for WordPress and the widget for TypePad. There is also a quickstart for blogger.com.

I first saw Snap Preview Anywhere on TechCrunch and knew I had to have it for my blog. It is an excellent tool and I imagine it will help to keep people from clicking away from your site. As always, let me know what you think.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » 2007: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without

Mike has an excellent post about some of the Web 2.0 services he uses everyday. Here’s what I use from his list…

800-Free-411

I use this one all the time, especially since finding out how much Verizon charges for 411 service. I don’t mind listening to the occasional ad in order to get a simple directory listing for free.

Digg

I love Digg, it’s the greatest news site on the internet. Sure, sometimes old stories (olds??) will get back to the front page, but they’re usually worth another look. This is the direction the internet seems to be going… interaction on every level.

Flickr

I’ve been using flickr for almost a year. I started using Flickr because my family said it was too hard to access the pics through Coppermine.

GMail

I started using gmail years ago. One of my coworkers got an invite from a forum that he was a member of. He promptly sent me an invite and soon, it was the only mailbox I used. Now that box is choked with spam and I’ve been signed up with Google Apps for Your Domain since it was just GMail for Your Domain.

NetVibes

I started using NetVibes about a year ago, but stopped when Google created their custom home pages. I’ve recently started using NetVibes again, however, because I love the in-page feed reader.

Pandora

Pandora is the greatest thing that ever happened to internet radio. No commercials, no searching for a station that plays only the music you like, just instant access to great music that’s already adjusted to your taste. Just enter a song title or artist and it will create a station with music that has the same qualities. If it happens to play a song you don’t like, just give it a thumbs down.

WordPress

What can I say about WordPress. They make the best blogging software I’ve tried, hence, my WordPress blog.

YouTube

I haven’t really caught the fever for online video, but when I see something interesting on the news or something, the first place I check for a video is YouTube. Their site is easy to navigate and the tags make finding similar content super easy.

Flock

I saved Flock for last because I’ve been disappointed in the browser, lately. They’ve dumped support for Shadows, which I had already setup all of my links in. They still support Delicious, but although Shadows has a tool to import Delicious bookmarks, Delicious doesn’t have a tool to do likewise with Shadows. Furthermore, everytime I update the browser to the latest release it takes longer to load and seems to cause more problems with my PC, especially if I leave it running.

This would have been really handy while I was getting my Bachelor’s degree. MyNoteIT looks like just the thing I was scouring the Web for on a semi-regular basis. It will store your notes, you can upload documents, list your assignments, and it looks like a lot more. I’m going to keep this site in mind when I return to school to get my Master’s, but for now, it’s just a “wish I would have stumbled onto this sooner.”

 

What can mynoteIT do for you?

Ask the community your dire question at the message boards.
Access your notes on your mobile phone via mynoteIT Mobile.
Upload Word and OpenOffice documents, images of scanned notes andaudio notes.
Keep track of all your upcoming assignments and get them done with your to-do list.
Use our sophisticated WYSIWYG editor to easily take, edit and store your notes online.
Instantly search your notes or the mynoteIT community notes, and learn something new.
Create a bookmark list of the most helpful and useful notes you find on mynoteIT.
Join or create class groups or school groups so you’re never out of the loop.
View all your upcoming assignments on your calendar.
Add friends to your friends list to easily keep in touch with each other.
Easily keep track of all your grades in all your classes.
Store your teachers contact information to easily contact them anytime.
Go through the revision process with your friends with our note tree.

If anyone has any experience with this site, please leave a comment. It is really hard to manage school work with a family and a full time job. If this helps, I, for one, would be very interested in using it in the future.