Web

Major changes have taken place! The site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and a new theme has been installed. I’m still in the process of tweaking the styles and the layout, and a few plugins still need to be replaced and/or upgraded, but for the most part everything should be functional. If you run into anything that’s not working as expected, please let me know.

Feedback is welcome!

This post by Mike Laverick is, as I believe they say, spot on (did I get my British English right?). Blog aggregation is one thing; many bloggers do it, including myself in my Virtualization Short Takes. VMware does it with Planet V12n. It’s not that uncommon. In my opinion, as long as the original blogger and the original blogger’s website are properly and clearly attributed, it’s not really a big deal.

The site that Mike pointed out, however, is—in my opinion—taking blog aggregation too far. There’s no clear attribution of the original author nor a clear link back to the author’s original site. I recognize content there from RTFM Education and Yellow Bricks for sure, and I suspect that some of the other sites in the Blogroll are also being rolled in. At no point anywhere in any of the aggregated articles do I see a link back the original author, the original author’s site, not even so much as mention of the original author’s name. There is only a small byline that says “By: Other Website”, but that’s it.

If you want to aggregate content, feel free. Just be sure to give credit where credit is due, and don’t rip off other people’s content.

For those that are interested, I’ve started bookmarking all my own published articles. They’re viewable on Delicious.com with the tag “Articles”, and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for that tag as well. I was having a hard time keeping track of all the URLs where my articles had been published, so I thought I’d just go ahead and bookmark them so I had them for future reference.

I hadn’t really considered that doing this would also help me judge the popularity and/or usefulness of the article, as measured by the number of other people who also have it bookmarked. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that this makes it easier for other people to find them as well. (Hey, you can’t blame me too much for wanting to promote my own work!)

For the past few months, I’ve been messing around with Evernote, an information tracking/note-taking service. Evernote is interesting for a couple of reasons:

• The service’s “claim to fame” is some proprietary image recognition technology that allows you to search for words found inside images. So you could store pictures in Evernote and then search for text found inside those pictures, for example. You have to synchronize your notes to their server (more below), where it is then processed for searching.
• Evernote uses a hybrid web-based/local client arrangement, and makes clients available for a reasonably wide variety of platforms. I’m using the Mac OS X version, but there are also versions for Windows, Windows Mobile, and (soon) an iPhone version.
• Evernote synchronizes your notes across all platforms, so you could create a note on your Mac laptop and then search it from your Windows Mobile smartphone. Each client synchronizes with the Evernote server(s) so that your notes are available from any client. You can also log in and view your notes from a Web browser as well.

Evernote just recently opened up their beta to the general public (it’s been a private beta until now). If this sounds like something that might be useful to you, go sign up and put it to work.

Personally, I’m still struggling with the best way to use Evernote. Thus far, my usage has been very light. I’ve particularly wrestled with getting information into Evernote. If any readers are also Evernote users, I’d love to hear how you’ve been using Evernote and which tool—the Evernote Clipper, the Web Clipper, printing as PDF into Evernote—seems to work best for you.

It appears that some of my articles from a couple of years ago are being republished on another site without any attribution or link back to the original. That’s one of the bad things about the Internet as it stands today…it’s far too easy to “copy and paste” another person’s material onto your own site.

If you’re interested in republishing my content, just drop me a line. I’m sure we can work something out. Just don’t shamelessly steal my writing.

I finally got around to installing a new theme here on the site.  I was both eager to install a new theme—after all, how many thousands of other sites looked just like this one—and yet also apprehensive, because I’d gotten the previous theme tweaked just the way I wanted it.

So, I’d be interested in hearing from the readers as to the new layout.  Do you like it?  What can be improved?  More importantly, what’s broken and needs to be fixed?  Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated, and I value your patience as I tweak and tune this new look.

Thanks for reading!

UPDATE:  The front page of the site is broken when using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows.  Not being an XHTML/CSS expert, I have no idea why it’s not rendering correctly.  It renders fine with Safari, Camino, and Firefox (on both Windows and Linux)—sorry, IE users!

UPDATE 2:  The archives index and tags index pages are now working again, tag information has been re-added to the bottom of each post, you can browse articles by tags, and the layout has been tweaked slightly.  Everything is rendering fine on all browsers except the home page on IE6 (I tested Camino on OS X, Safari on OS X, Firefox on Windows XP, Firefox on Ubuntu Linux, and IE on Windows.  I’m still not sure of the cause of the IE-specific layout issue on the home page.

UPDATE 3:  The strange formatting error with IE on the home page turns out to be a problem with some of the articles, where I’m using monospaced fonts to represent a command line or a piece of code.  I’ve updated a few of the articles causing that problem and it should be better now.

I don’t like advertisements in my RSS feeds.  I just don’t.  It’s not that I begrudge the authors the ability to monetize their content; that’s their choice, and I can certainly understand the need to pay for hosting and bandwidth costs.  The day might even come one day when I am faced with the same issues here on this site.  Even so, I don’t like ads in the feeds.  After all, if it’s a good site, I am very likely to visit the site anyway, even with full feeds, so that I can comment, view others’ comments, or see related posts.

So, when ads started showing up in my RSS feeds from a variety of sources, I looked for a way to kill them.  I came across this article (at least, I believe it was this one—I’m not entirely sure) that suggested the use of userContent.css to block ads in NetNewsWire.  It works like a champ!

Basically, you have to edit the NetNewsWire stylesheet to include a reference to your ad-blocking code, like this:

@import url(../userContent.css);

Then put the userContent.css file of your choice (apparently there are many; I think I pulled down one of the files linked to in that article) in the ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Stylesheets folder, restart NNW, and away you go!  No more pesky ads in the RSS feeds.

In addition to ads, the “FeedFlare” functionality offered by FeedBurner irks me as well.  If I want to digg it, bookmark it with del.icio.us, or whatever, I’ll do that—I don’t need links in the content of the feed to help me.  I suppose that functionality is useful to some readers, and probably helps increase readership and visibility of the site, but I still don’t like it.  Fortunately, that is easily blocked using this same technique.  You only need to tweak the userContent.css to include the additional URLs used by FeedBurner to add the FeedFlare content.  (By the way, this is not a knock against FeedBurner; I use FeedBurner too.  I just don’t like FeedFlare.)

Two of my favorite applications have been updated recently.  NetNewsWire has reached version 3.0 (and adds lots of new features), and Camino reaches version 1.5.

The NetNewsWire update brings, among other things, native Growl support (no need for NewsGrowl any longer), new display and layout options, a slightly more streamlined interface, and Spotlight support.  I just installed the new version this morning, and I’ve already found the Spotlight integration to be useful.

The Camino update brings an updated rendering engine (Camino 1.5 now shares the same version of Gecko as Firefox 2.0), enhanced ad/pop-up blocking, and RSS feed detection.  Nothing earth-shattering, but useful features nonetheless.

If you use either of these applications, I suggest you upgrade to the latest versions.  I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Cocoalicious, the native Mac OS X front-end to the del.icio.us bookmark system, has been updated and now sports (in my opinion) a cleaner user interface that bodes well for future development.

Gone is the brushed metal look; in is a unified toolbar.  A recent posting by the developer alludes to a more “modern” look that resembles Mail.app or NetNewsWire.  I, for one, welcome the changes and I am excited to see the changes with the application.  So excited, in fact, that I’ve done something I’d never done before with an open source project: I volunteered to help.  I’m not a programmer, but I figured there’s bound to be something I can do to help.

If you are a Mac user who also uses del.icio.us, you owe it to yourself to try out Cocoalicious.

This is really exciting news.  Development on Cocoalicious, the Mac OS X native application that front-ends del.icio.us, has started back up again.

I’ve blogged many times about Cocoalicious (starting as far back as June of 2005) and how much I enjoy using the application to manage my del.icio.us bookmarks.  I was really disappointed that development had stalled, and had even started searching for replacements to the application.  Fortunately, it looks like the new developer (who is working with the original author, not replacing him, from what I understand) is already seeking feedback and ideas for future versions.

Personally, I’m pretty thrilled with the application as it is, and have only one feature request:  please, please, PLEASE drop the brushed metal interface.  Or at least offer us an option to toggle back and forth.  I’d love to see a fresh new UI like that used by Mail.app or NetNewsWire, with the tags in a pane on the left and your bookmarks listed on the right, and a divider (like the one used now) to open, close, or resize the built-in browser.  Combine that with a new, modern unified toolbar (not Mail.app’s lozenges, please!) and perhaps incorporate some of the tag UIs that have been proposed (like this one), and you’ve got yourself one killer del.icio.us client.