Ho rotto il sito
I have broken the website
Literally: (I) have broken the site
Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, new posts do not appear in the RSS feed. True, there have been only three posts, of which two were automatic lists of bookmars, and one was just a dummy post to test the feed. But still.
If you know what I need to do, please shout. I don't think I have the will and the patience to find out.
…because a kind soul has alerted me that this here RSS feed thingy has given up its soul.
During the last six months I have developed an interest in social network aggregators (solutions to bring together all activity performed on several sites online, in one single location that people can subscribe to).
While performing my investigations I signed up for nearly every single available service, until I lost track of what I was feeding into what else, and created quite a fair amount of duplication along the way.
Then a few weeks ago I started using FriendFeed, thinking it was going to be yet another lifestream/aggregating service. I fed it all my other services' feeds and left it alone for a bit.
After a couple of weeks I noticed that there was something unique about it, namely the possibility to merge together your friends' feeds in a river of posts, then comment on their activities or simply give them a thumbs up (a 'like') on what they have written.
It would be fantastic if these comments were saved alongside the original posts (in Twitter, Google Reader shared items, or blog posts, for instance, instead of within FriendFeed as it happens now). Apparently, you can do so with Socialthing (I have not yet checked out Socialthing myself).
So now I feel that my research is going somewhere, I can forget about certain aggregators I have used but that I do not need to track any more – and I definitely do not need to include in FriendFeed, unless I want to create a self-referential infinite loop. The casualties are:
A week ago I installed Jiglu (automatic website tagging) and wrote about it.
It has been fantastic to see how thorough can a free auto-tagging plugin prove to be, and I am definitely interested in the functionality that highlights words on a page and overlays upon request a list of other instances of those words throughout the site, with excerpts and links to individual posts.
I have however decided to deactivate Jiglu, mainly for the following two reasons:
I was very impressed by the fact that Jiglu can go as far as grouping terms into categories – and mildly amused that it thought 'Mia Cintura Nera' was a person (it means 'My Black Belt' in Italian).
Making sense of the ocean of data that pervades our lives will require more and more sophisticated algorithms, but for the time being some degree of manual human moderation is still necessary.
I am not a designer, never been and never will be. Working on the web, however, I have often indulged in the pleasure of pushing pixels around a page.
However, with time the pleasure has turned into frustration, and the real satisfaction is now mainly derived from playing around with data to make it do what I want it to do. The presentation layer has become a burden and I try to avoid it as much as I can.
I have lately been working on a few ideas that need an appropriate design to be implemented. I started my usual trial-and-error method to check what looks nice and what doesn't, and what would complement the content best.
And then I stumbled on Colors of Rainbow a WordPress theme that more or less does it. With a push of the proverbial button – literally. It would only require a couple of tweaks that it would probably take me under an hour to apply.
This time I might fight my pride, let go of control and let those who know best do their thing.
Yahoo! has announced that it will support OpenID. What can this bring to the average web user?
In terms that I hope are not oversimplified, OpenID lets you log on several websites with one single set of details. You do not spread out that single set of details to all the websites (that would defy the point, it would be like using the same username and password for all your online logons).
Instead, OpenID gives you the option to log on to website A by briefly popping over to website B and logging on there. It means that A trusts B with verifying and keeping your identity safe.
You then might go to website C, click on log on, and because you are already logged on to website A (via B) you are offered to extend that logon to website C, either for the current session or for a longer period of time.
The full details of a decentralised single sign-on system are of course a bit more complex than that, but I hope this will give you an idea of where the benefit lies for you.
I have been using OpenID for several months now by pointing bitful.com towards an OpenID provider. From the end of January I (and another 250 millions users) can just use my Yahoo! login credentials because Yahoo! will act as website B in my example above.
Yahoo!, once again, really really rocks it for me.
I use Outlook extensively, and not only for sending and receiving messages. It is a repository for all commitments, reminders and notes. Surprisingly enough, I never bothered to look into shortcuts, until the other day, when I accidentally hit three random keys together and a 'Move Item to' window popped up.
A quick search returned this complete yet simple and very clear list of Outlook shortcuts by the RNIB. I have started using these few ones straight away:
I was already aware of the following shortcuts to create new items, have been using them regularly and recommend them strongly:
I hope you find these useful too.
I've been playing around for a bit with Jiglu tonight.
Jiglu's tagline is 'Tags that think', and that's exactly what it does: it automatically tags your content and displays tags as cross-referenced links.
All you have to do is register your URL, install some code (I used a ready-made WordPress plugin, but there are versions for Blogger, Typepad and other platforms), and Jiglu analyses your content, subtly underlines people and events with a faint dotted line and makes them clickable. You can choose to include links too, but I find the outcome a bit confusing for the end-user.
Say for example I mentioned Jamie Oliver in a post. Jaiku overlays a link on the text 'Jamie Oliver', and the link takes you to a list of articles in my website that mention Jamie Oliver.
I have installed it twenty minutes ago and the list of people is growing and growing. A great way to offer content aggregation with absolutely no effort whatsoever from neither the content producer (no manual tagging, no building of topic pages) nor the website user (no need to search, links are presented organically and maps overlay the content).
As with all automated tagging systems, I can already foresee some limitations (it is a text-based tool after all) and it would be great if it could be co-managed manually (perhaps as a paying feature?) but I already like very much the potential it has to enrich and integrate content.
Hello dear technically-inclined reader, I wonder if you could help.
I have been using email as my main means of capturing and storing information. Started with Outlook, switched to Gmail for a while (loved the tags and no-directory structure) but then went back to Outlook when I got an HTC Tytn II that syncs with it in real time.
I send myself dozens of emails every day, whenever something crosses my mind (easy for me, as I'm online on my mobile every single waking hour – from the moment my it wakes me up in the morning to the movies I watch on it or feeds I read in bed before falling asleep).
These emails look something like this:
Then every now and then I sit at my machine at home and transfer the data into Outlook, MS Money or my weight/calories spreadsheet. Yes, I could enter the info straight into my mobile (it syncs with Outlook and has Mobile Word and Excel and all you can dream of) but if I'm at work it's much easier to email myself. Large fingers love large keyboards.
My question is: does anyone know of any application or system that lets you email a specific worded syntax to yourself and it gets entered into Outlook as a task/appointment/note/contact? I have fooled around with Sandy for a bit and although she's definitely a very smart cookie, her Outlook integration does not stretch that far.
Thank you.
A few months ago I read a very intriguing article on typography and vertical alignment (Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid). I am not a designer and I have always found very hard to understand why certain elements and composition are pleasing, and other are not. The article in question explains that it has got a lot to do with mathematics and proportions.
I have recently had a chance to implement the tips from that article on Bitful. If you are curious and are reading this via an RSS reader, go and read this post at bitful.com.
Are you there? Good.
Now, assuming you are familiar with my un-design of the last few months, nothing much has changed. Except that everything aligns vertically in multiples of 18 pixels. Compare the following two links:
and you will probably be able to appreciate the difference. If you don't, I will have spent a fun day anyway.
As usual, please let me know if you notice anything going very wrong, or if there are any display glitches (I was lazy and only tested the design in Firefox 2, IE 7 and Opera 9).
WordPress is great. However, upgrading to the latest version can be a bit of a struggle. There are quite a few thinks to keep track of (especially if you are a heavy customiser) and do in the right sequence.
If you have more than one installation, you can spend the best part of an evening doing something that should not be so painful.
That is why a while ago I installed a very promising WordPress plugin called Instant Upgrade. One click to upgrade to the latest version, that's what it promises. At the same time, it states very clearly that you have to give up ownership of files, and set permissions to 777 (read-write-execute), which I am not too keen on.
One word of advice: if you try it, then decide to drop it, you must be very careful to follow a very important procedure instead of the usual 'disactivate-delete files' standard one. You absolutely must follow the instructions via manage > InstantUpgrade and click on Change file modes (so that you have full access to them). This is because once you successfully upgrade once using the plugin, your WordPress files belong to the webserver.
This plugin is a stunning piece of work. Not for control freaks like me though.
I am a perfecly happy Google Reader user and have very little to say about it that is negative. Feeds are my main source of information and I have tried many readers (Kinja, Netvibes, Attensa, Bloglines) before settling on Google's product.
For a brief period, I used the 'share' feature in Google Reader with some items that I deemed interesting. The advantage: one-click sharing from within Google Reader. The inconvenience: having to copy them into del.icio.us to keep all my bookmarks together, nicely tagged and in sync with Firefox.
I was perfectly aware that those were items I was willing to share; this made it a bit too limiting for me and I quickly decided to stop using that feature.
So I was not surprised in the least when on 14 December Google announced that it was going to make your shared items very visible to all your friends in Google Talk.
Many people complained, as there is no way to hide items from people (some of my del.icio.us bookmarks are set to 'private', for instance). Google's answer, for now, is (in my own words) 'remove people you don't want to share with from your contacts' (!), or 'delete all your shared items and start afresh with stuff you do want to share'.
I don't know where to stand on this one. It's a nice feature that may suit many people. I understand some can be annoyed, but I guess the word 'shared' sort of gave it away from the start really.
UPDATE (26 Dec 2007 at 5:58am): Steve Rubel has a workaround to mark shared items as private with tags, and so has Google.
I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out why I could not access WordPress from my mobile any longer. Well, it's the holidays and I can waste a day like that if I want to.
It turned out that Mobile Admin (the plugin that streamlines the WordPress admin interface for easy access from smartphones and PDAs) had stopped working when I installed SimpleLife (WordPress plugin to generate lifestreams).
[Update: Kieran has fixed this issue and Mobile Admin now works eeven when SimpleLife is activated. They were using the same function internally - more info in comments for this post]
Even if I don't blog much on the go (I don't blog much at all these days) I like to approve the occasional comment straight away, and clicking on the email link to do so kept sending me to a blank page until I disactivated SimpleLife.
SimpleLife sounds very promising but it is admittedly still in Alpha. I'll stick to my own existing data stream and wait for further developments.
Today's little project will be finding out why every time my phone connects to WordPress it downloads over 300k of stuff. Oh, and of course opening presents and having Christmas lunch and nodding off in an Advocaat-induced haze in front of Queenie or catch her on her new YouTube channel instead).
Merry Christmas to you all, whatever rocks your boat.
From Doris Lessing's Nobel prize acceptance speech:
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
And all of this because of 'the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities'.
Please note that Lessing was too old and ill to make the speech herself and instead had someone else read it out.
Ok, first of all, respect. The woman has a body of work and has achieved what can be considered the highest recognition in literature.
Secondly, that's where I come from too. Absolutely gaga about books since I was four, I was given the fantastic opportunity to choose to study literature.
But hey Doris darling, that's the way the world goes. I was not too happy myself when, in the early Nineties, I found out that my pride and joy, the degree I had moved to London for and worked my butt off to get a first and a distinction, was on the job market just as valuable as a weekend crash course in macrame.
I reinvented myself, never stopped learning new stuff, made a pact with the Evil Internet Overlord to feed my intrinsic curiosity and I now work very happily in software development. And as soon as I can afford it, I am going to enrol in a part-time BSc in computer science.
Never, ever look back, no matter how golden the past may seem to you. Chances are you are idealising it anyway.
Besides, OMG teh title of this post is just 2 funny LOL (by the way, credit goes to whoever captioned the image that illustrates this Techcrunch article on Lessing's lecture).
You might be aware of Beacon, Facebook's new advertising platform that allows Facebook's partners to place a cookie on your machine when you shop with them, and next time you log on to Facebook you are notified that the retailer is sending a story to your profile that says 'X bought (played, watched, etc.) Y at Z'.
I am not against the idea per se, in fact I'm quite excited about the possibilities. If I bought tickets to the Tangled Up Arena Tour I'd love it to be entered automatically into my events, for all my friends and colleagues to see. OK, bad example here perhaps ;-)
You will not hear my cry out at an invasion of privacy. It is your choice to share some personal details on Facebook. Your choice to add your colleagues as friends. You must be prepared to face the consequence of your actions. Don't come to me crying when your boss totally susses out your lame excuse to skip work.
The problem is that Facebook can't control the way partners use Beacon, and retailers don't always warn you when you shop with them that they are going to place the cookie and send the story to Facebook. You do have the option to refuse the story afterwards, when you log on to Facebook with the same browser, but what if someone else has used your computer, say to buy you a surprise present? Or, heavens forbid, a surprise present for someone else you are not even meant to know about?
If you use Firefox you can just use the BlockSite plugin and enter http://*facebook.com/beacon/* in the input box. Other browsers might not make it so straight-forward but you can still do it.
Of course, you can avoid being on Facebook. Or stop shopping online altogether. And then you'd be the modern equivalent of my dad who stubbornly refused to let anyone in the family watch the second TV channel that launched in the sixties because one channel is just enough, why would anyone want to be able to choose?
When I heard Barclays was releasing a three-in-one Credit, Oyster (London transport) and OneTouch (cashless purchases under ten pounds by waving the card on a reader) OnePulse Barclaycard, I was the first in line to get it.
The accompanying leaflet showed the logos of some of the retailers that will be accepting OneTouch payments soon: Books etc., Coffee Republic, Yo! Sushi, Krispy Kreme, Thresher and Eat.
I decided to give it a go on Friday morning, as I was in Paddington station going to Cardiff for work and was as usual too early.
I went to Krispy Kreme, asked if they were equipped for OneTouch payments, was met with a quizzical stare. I left. My blood sugar was safe.
I was glad to see Yo! Sushi was still closed (raw fish in the early A.M.? Gaaah).
I got a coffee and a bottle of water at Eat, went to pay, asked for OneTouch. Yes? No? I showed my card, enquired about the reader, explained how I wanted to pay.
The kind, serviceable, customer-focussed till operator tilted her head, arched her eyebrows and rebutted 'You wanna do wha'?'
The queue was building up behind me. I fished for some coins. I wondered when the future would catch up with me.
This time I was looking for a tutorial to find out how to allow in-cell editing in Outlook.
So I found out that the seventh most popular search starting with "how to" is about the lyrics to "How to Save a Life", and number nine is "how to save a life" which I guess is more about the song than actually finding out on Google what to do when someone is about to die (me? I'd probably call 999).
It could be that The Fray are very popular.
Or that Isaac Slade mumbles when he sings.
But I'm afraid it's because it was heavily used to promote the third series of Grey's Anatomy.
I've had Yahoo! Mail account for as long as I can remember, and I've always been very happy with it.
I've also had a Gmail account since the time they were still only in invitation-only beta. I forward all my other mail to it so it acts as a searchable permanent reference. I also set it up with filters and labels and use it to email stuff to myself (reminders, notes, todos…) so that everything is filed away automatically.
Until recently, I never used it to email anyone, but scarily over the past month I've been using the Gmail web interface so much that some days I don't even run Outlook. So, if I've forgotten your birthday or if you were expecting me for dinner last night, I'm sorry, but Google ate my Outlook.
Unfortunately, I am still incapable to take the plunge, give up on Outlook and trust the web with all my mail. Perhaps listing the pros and cons on 'paper' will help me make up my mind.
Reasons why I like Yahoo! Mail:
Reasons why I do not like Yahoo! Mail:
Reasons why I like Gmail:
Reasons why I do not like Gmail:
Perhaps Yahoo! Mail has exactly the same features as Gmail, but they are not as evident or talked about, and today it's all about how much people talk about you.
Yahoo! Mail vs Gmail: the jury is still out.
A post from Overyourhead into my Google Reader, about delays in a Spanish airport, with the word 'delay' in Spanish.
And, right below it, that day's Spanish 'word of the day', which was… 'Delay'.
Either a very odd coincidence, or Google is getting more and more powerful these days.
At some point this afternoon, searching for 'ditsy' on Answers.com made Google return Jessica Simpson merchandise as sponsored links.
It does not any more now, but I took a screenshot to prove it. Click on 'all sizes' for the original version where you can read all the text.
For the lucky ones among you who are unaware of Ms Simpson, she notoriously asked whether the 'Chicken of the Sea' tuna she was eating was in fact chicken or fish, and also said that she believed that Buffalo wings were made from actual buffalo. Bless her little Daisy Dukes.
Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 People Need to Shut The F**k Up about the Mobile Web,
in reply to
Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks.
I totally agree with the content (but perhaps not the tone) of the top article. I consume cartloads of mobile content every day (on T-Mobile "unlimited – as long as you do not go over 1GB of content per month in which case we might let you know you're pushing it a bit" tariff). So it does not have all the bells and whistles of the full desktop broadband experience. Get over it.
Did painfully slow 28k modems stop the Internet from developing into what it is today? Did the fact that if you stayed connected for hours nobody could call you (and your phone bill made your parents have a fit) prevent you from finding information and connecting with people. Thankfully not.
Of course, this is only my personal opinion and it is based on how I use the web. Some folks believe that in the halcyon years of yore people knew how to relate to each other in person and oh wasn't it brilliant to find a hand-written letter from a friend waiting for you on your doorstep. Well, I'll take my avalanche of emails and text messages and Facebook pokes and Twitter updates any day over one letter per month (if you were lucky). But again, that's just me and what makes me buzz.
Two days into my holiday my mobile phone reset itself and was wiped out.
I back up all my contacts daily with my desktop and online once a month, so information was not lost and easily retrievable away from home.
However, my notes on how much I had spent so far, on what, and how to split that with Dr B. was gone forever.
I had been thinking for a while that now that I am not a nineteen-year-old student any longer, I could perhaps become a little bit less obsessive about logging my expenses. And so I decided to enjoy the rest of the holiday and spend away.
Once I returned home I continued not to log any cash expenses, and I was particularly proud of this great achievement.
Until yesterday morning, when I overheard the woman behind me in the queue at Tescos muttering 'I don't fu**ing believe it!' under her breath when I paid for a banana and a tin of tuna with my debit card. And I realised that I was doing it because I knew that Nationwide sends automatically each transaction to Microsoft Money, and I have trained Money to tag each transaction coming from Tescos with 'Groceries'.
So, well, same disorder really, but now managed electronically online.
This graph shows all the music I have listened to in the past six months in a pretty visualisation.
Click on the picture to view it at Flickr, then click on 'All Sizes' and select the original picture for maximum detail.
From lastgraph via plasticbag.
Emoze is a free service that pushes email to your mobile phone.
I have used its first version for months. This version needs Outlook to be up and running on your machine at home.
A week ago I switched to the new version of emoze that pushes email directly from Gmail, with no need to leave your computer on, and it rocks.
Unfortunately, as it can also sync contacts and calendar, I noticed some problems straight away with mobile number fields being lost in Outlook. I thought I had not disactivated the contacts sync, so I did, and manually reinserted all mobile numbers in Outlook (way to spend a whole Wednesday night!), but it did it again yesterday.
I am still trying to figure out what is going wrong, but you know what? For the first time, instead of giving up and going back to a strict software-based solution (Outlook), I am this close to relying primarily on Gmail's flexible web access, with Outlook possibly as a local back-up solution but nothing more.
I'd never have thought I'd do that one day. Shall I take the plunge?
I was searching for info on how to dump entries into a database via a csv file (or something like that), and Google's autocomplete revealed that the world is a sad, sad place.
If you cannot see the image, here's what Mr Auto Complete told me:
I recently found out that Facebook should not be used as a platform for work-related interaction.
I was at the gym on my lunch break when a colleague's status update came through on my mobile:
(Name) is wondering why oh why drivers choose the last possible moment to take the J6…
I thought 'computer drivers' (we were at that time indeed fiddling with tech-related stuff at work), so when I got back to the office I asked what the matter was and was met with a blank stare.
Once at home in the evening, I checked my colleague's Facebook profile where I could read the rest of the update:
…turn at Spaghetti Junction – total madness!
My colleague works in Birmingham. I could have figured the rest of the message out myself.
I subscribe to 112 RSS feeds (blogs, news, friends' social network contributions), which I guess is about average. I usually manage to go through all of them at least once a day (usually at 6AM for about half an hour).
Of course I do not read them all. So how do I choose?
A lot depends on the post title, at first. However, after a short while familiarity with the writer's style quickly lets me decide whether I will find it worthwhile to read an article or not.
We all have a limited range of topics we are interested in, or have something to say about and need to share. So I might be interested in topics A, B and C. You write about topics B, C and D. She writes about topics C, D and E.
I don't know about you, but I will only read your posts about topics B and C, and only her posts about topics C. Every now and then I check my Google Reader Trends, identify the feeds I have most often let flow through the river of news without clicking through, and prune extensively, aiming at having a manageable number of feeds, which for me is around 100.
I expect my readers to do pretty much the same with this website, and will not take it personally if after the nth post about some ridiculously named new overhyped application you will bide farewell and never visit again.
Don't come to me ranting that this modern way to access information selectively is evil and I am missing out on a lot of things, because that's what people have been doing forever with newspapers. The only difference is the technology that helps us parse via keywords and spare us what we do not want to see.
And anyway, if she ever were to produce a fantastic post about topic E, I am pretty sure I would hear about it somehow.
Don't you just love social networking?
I was looking for Soho Pride's rescheduled date (it was going to be tomorrow but was moved to 19 August) and found the Soho Pride Upcoming event. I clicked on 'I'm attending' and joined the list.
So far, we are going to be four. I'll bring the quiche.
It's been one month since I was at Hack Day London. The memories are still vibrant, and here is a list of links about it, for me to remember and for you to discover.
If my iPod had GPS, it would adjust its volume and music genre according to where I am, the time of day and some manual settings.
It would detect one of my gym locations and switch to my sports playlists provided it was 7am or 1pm.
It would increase its volume if it lost reception, 9 times out of 10 it's in the tube and it's noisier.
It would switch to work-friendly music and low volume if I turned it on at my work location.
And once at home, RFID would detect if Dr B.'s iPod (both appliances would be tagged) was in the vicinity, in which case it would only play music both Dr B. and I like.
It would also create playlists on the fly mixing both my and Dr B.'s tracks and streaming them via Wi-Fi.
Then, if either desktop computer was on, it would detect it from the wireless network and stream music from them too.
And I could go on and on…
We have all the technology. We spend an unhealthy amount of time tagging and organising. It's about time it all came together.
