Creative uses of RSS

Taking RSS Beyond Headlines is a list of things that the RSS format can be used to accomplish. My favorite is the package tracking.

It’s good to see not just thoughts outside of the box, but links to sites that are actually doing it. Looks like there is more to come on this site, so keep your eyes on what you could be getting over the web in the near future.

Don’t know what RSS is? Try this.

Technorati Tags: RSS, web, technology, creativity

Blogging Delivered?

Thanks, AT&T.

Found via Naked Conversations.

Technorati Tags: blogging, att, crap, technology, media

Getting Discovered

Robert Scoble has a great post about getting noticed in the blogosphere. The comments are worthwhile. I left a comment myself, copied below:

I wasn’t going to comment, but I must have before because the comment fields were all filled in. =)

I think getting discovered is hard, but have to ask why you want to be discovered? Usually, in my experience, the really interesting people are discovered when they aren’t trying to be discovered. There are interesting people who work at getting noticed, but if you spend your time blogging to be noticed, are you really blogging what you want to say to the world? If so, hats off to you.

If I write what’s in my heart and mind day in, day out, I’m guessing Robert Scoble would probably not read my blog very often, if at all. Why? I don’t know much about tech stuff and don’t write about it (though I sometimes link to stuff about it). While it may be otherwise, I’d be surprised if he was interested in what I blog. I read Scoble and some others of similar theme because I like tech and hearing about what’s out there.

Someone commented earlier that interesting is subjective and they’re right on the money there. Just because an A-list blog doesn’t find you interesting enough to link to doesn’t mean you aren’t interesting, you just aren’t interesting to them. You could have twice as many readers as an A-list blog who just don’t blog themselves and not know it.

But it also doesn’t mean you can’t participate in the conversation with the rest of the world. =)

Technorati Tags: blog, scoble, interesting, writing

Email Down

My email is currently down. If you have tried to email me and not received a response in any way, that’s why.

I’m working with various tech support folks to resolve the issue.

To Blog Wirelessly

You know what would be really cool to have? A palm device with a wireless Internet connect built-in. Not to be too materialistic, but if I had one of those, I could conceivably blog from anywhere I could get a connection.

Many of the thoughts I have are quick and short, but booting up my computer just to jot them down is pretty tedious. I tend to lose the meat of a thought by the time I get a browser started up. Unfortunately, I’m not rich enough right now to afford such a device unless I maybe come across a used one. Still, it’s nice to dream big, right? =)

My Predictions for 2006

A lot of people are making predictions for 2006, so I thought I’d join in the fun.

• One or both of my parents will start blogging
• At least three friends of mine who aren’t blogging now will be by the end of the year
• Google’s stock will drop, probably in response to data security issues
• Yahoo! will make an offer to buy Six Apart, but Six Apart will choose to remain a private firm
• As WordPress gains more popularity as a blogging tool, plugin developers will start creating tools for both WordPress and Movable Type side-by-side. Rumors will fly about the two blogging tools merging, but nothing will be confirmed or denied in 2006
• President George W. Bush will face the possibility of impeachment due to misinformation at the start of the Iraq war, but will be no more impeached than President Bill Clinton was before him
• The Blu-Ray format for next-gen DVDs will take off for a while when the PlayStation 3 is released, but ultimately fail when Microsoft announces HD-DVD support built-in on Windows Vista as well as a second generation Xbox 360 that supports the format for movie playback (games will not appear on HD-DVD discs)
• With the advent of yet another format to watch your movies on, smart companies will allow you to turn in VHS or DVD copies of a movie and give you and 50 to 75% discount on the same movie in the latest format. The old copies will then be recycled. This will take off quicly and companies that don’t do this will be left in the dust.
• Most of the movies in 2006 look to be sequels, so I’m going out on a limb to say that most of them will feel like sequels as well. The two Pirates of the Caribbean movies will be excellent, but being filmed back to back will leave the first movie feeling like a separate idea altogether.
• UPDATE: In an effort to make Wikipedia a bit more palatable as a starting point for reliable information, a group of professors, scientist, and experts in various other fields will come together to create a peer review for the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s back end will be updated to allow for this peer review. The process will eventually prove too slow for the medium and die a quiet death.

We’ll see if I’m at all right in a year. Actually, some of these were spawned by other prediction lists, but I tried to add my own twist if they were. Really, it was just the thing about President Bush.

Additions

With the new structure of the site, mostly on the back end, I’m able to add whole sections very quickly. Today, I restructured how the random quotes that pop up at several points (mostly on the blog pages) work. It’s now far easier to add quotes into the mix since they are actually individual entries in an independent blog. This move also allowed me to create pages to list them and allow folks to search for them if they see one they particular liked, but couldn’t quite remember.

I’m excited about what I have in store here, including continued posts and thoughts as I have done in the past, but with a little more breadth and some extra stuff for work I have planned for 2006. Part of that is already done as I’m 95% done in turning Movable Type into a fully-fledged content management system for this site and hope to use it as a basis for other web site work I may be doing in the future.

Technorati Tags: movabletype, blog, blogging

Holiday Break

I’m taking a break from blogging this weekend.  There’s enough going on that I only just now turned on my computer and can sit at it for more than ten minutes, let alone type any thoughts our or read up on my feeds.

One last thought, though.  I checked Google Analytics to see what search terms folks are using that drive them here.  There’s been a spike in people looking for “Christmas Alone” that I’ve found a bit disturbing, but not surprising.  It’s made me think about how very lucky I am to have friends and family to spend time with and enjoy that time to boot.  My thoughts and prayers are with those who are alone this season.  Even though I’m not in the same place now, I know what the dark and cold of lonliness can be like for a person.  But I can also say with integrity that there is hope for a warm light to drive it away and bring genuine and lasting joy and peace to our souls.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, Happy Holidays to those who prefer that, and enjoy the weekend to everyone else.  Drive safely, enjoy alcohol in appropriate measures, spend time being happy about something that makes you happy, and have a good time.  See you on the flip side.

Technorati Tags: christmas, holidays, christmasalone

A Problem with Hosted Services?

Link - Scobleizer » Salesforce hits problems

I’d use Flickr a lot more (at all, actually) if I could keep the photos on my site and tag them at theirs.

Performancing

A new extension/plugin for Firefox was released in beta today. Performancing allows you to blog from within the Firefox browser.

Why is this cool? If you see a link while you are browsing around, you can open the little window to blog and drag-and-drop the link into your post. Then follow the link and drop another link from that page into your post. No more cutting and pasting and switching back and forth between various windows.

The part I like best, it has full support (or the beginnings of full support) for Movable Type categories. I’ve seen other in-browser blogging tools, but none of them support the categories.

Wish list:

• Ability to edit Extended Entry, Entry Excerpt, and Keyword fields in MT
• Spell check
• Ability to schedule post or post as draft and change the time of the posting

This tool looks awesome. Good work on the part of this team!