all my personal mail now directs to my gmail account. Gmail seems to do a very good job of filtering out the spam emails as hardly any get through. When one does get through I like the way that there is a “report spam” button. This makes me feel empowered about binning those tempting offers of “life” enhancing pharmaceuticals, and takes some of the chore out of it.
I like to think – rightly or wrongly – that because I have proactively “reported” the spam back to google, their anti-spam machinery immediately takes note and stops any other gmail users from recieving the same piece of spam, either from the same source or containing the same content.
I get a similar feeling of usefulness when I report comment spam back to akismet (via my wordpress akismet plugin) – I like the fact that because someone tried to leave comment spam on my site they are immediately blacklisted by all the other blogs that use akismet, making my site more like a honeypot to trap spammers rather than an unguarded doorway for them to try and sneak into.
I always go on (and on…) about how I chose a 12″ powerbook because it was really portable and had decent battery life. Thinking about it, it isn’t that much more portable than a bigger powerbook or macbook, but it has better battery life than those with bigger screens. Now that I have a new battery in here I have to gush about how nice it is to have really useable battery life. Last night I watched a film (well a long TV episode) on battery power, listened to about an hour of radio paradise over wifi, and then here I am this morning, blogging, surfing and doing some web development and still have a third of my battery left. All this time i’ve had wifi on, screen at full brightness and about 10 applications open.
Today I find myself in Caffe Nero on the triangle. I’d always discounted it before because I didn’t realise it had an upstairs bit and I didn’t like the idea of using my laptop downstairs with people queing for coffee looking over my shoulder. I’m presented with three possible wifi connections – StreetNet, SurfandSip and Caffe Gusto next door. I couldn’t get connected to surfandsip (and I think it’s a paid service anyway?), Streetnet seems a reasonable signal, and Caffe Gusto is weak but useable (a bit cheeky too considering, but it’s nice not to have to fill out the survey that you do with StreetNet)
As I mentioned before a few of us from netsight are going to Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle. Besides actually attending the conference i’ve been reading up on other things to check out while i’m there. I plan to visit a few of these coffee shops with wifi and i’ve also just read that the blog business summit is also on at the same time – maybe there could be a bit of cross-fertilisation there as many of the plone bloggers will be at Plone conf?
I tried out a friends pocket pc (or is it windows mobile now?) smartphone recently – a cool little device with a slide out QWERTY keyboard (I think it was a variation of this htc device). It also had wifi support so I thought I would try to blog from it. However, he hadn’t got opera installed and the wordpress gui completely failed to work in pocket internet explorer. I’m sure there is a solution to this, but I was disappointed that the wordpress online admin didn’t gracefully degrade.
This is something to consider when designing web apps – whilst AJAX could potentially be used to provide huge usability enhancements to people using mobile web devices with small screens – the majority of people are going to be using windows mobile with pocket internet explorer – your app should work with no javascript support at all. and then be progressively enhanced with AJAX as a seperate consideration.
i’ve just set up an account with watchthatpage.com in attempt to find an easier way to keep track of sites that have not yet joined the RSS revolution. There are plenty of sites still out there that do not provide an RSS feed for their news pages and blogs. As Robert Scoble pointed out a while back – 98% of people don’t use RSS, but that means 2% of users do – which is a hell of a lot of traffic, reading the web via an RSS aggregator rather than actually visiting the site. It seems backwards not to have an RSS feed for frequently (or infrequently) updated news/blog content. I’ve used this analogy before, but i’ll use it again – expecting people to visit your web site just to see if anything has changed is a bit like standing on someones doorstep and not knocking or ringing the bell, but hoping that someone will come and open the door occasionally just to see if anyone is a standing there.
I don’t actually use my RSS aggregator (bloglines.com – an online service, so I can keep track of news and blogs from any web device, including my mobile phone) to read all the sites I visit – some sites (scobelizer, register etc) are updated so frequently that I know thay will have updated since I last looked, so I just have them bookmarked (via foxylicious firefox extension – my bookmarks are maintained from my del.icio.us tags), otherwise my aggregator gets full of unread content and this reduces the value of it, as I tend to skim read and dismiss stuff.
Thankyou very much for the unprecedented amount of comments I found in my moderation queue over the last few days. Very informative, but just so you know I don’t need any of the gambling facilities or drugs you all recommended. I’ve just activated Akismet to see how that goes – I was very impressed that it comes as standard with this version of wordpress (2.0.3). All I had to do was sign up at wordpress.com to get an api key.
this is the internet equivalent of trying to organise my CD collection – wait- that’s not too difficult, i’m giving most of my cd’s to a charity shop as I prefer digital only these days. I think my “readers” are getting a bit confused when I jump between posts about coffee and posts about geekery. no. those two go together perfectly. Anyway, i’m going to add some categories, and try to retro-categorise some of the old posts over time. RSS subscribers may see old posts reappaer for a few days/weeks/months/years
so far so good although can’t be bothered to write much with the on-screen keyboard!
I’ve cleared out a bit more of the remaining pages of the old site, just as a decluttering exercise. Nobody has complained so far of missing content (well in fact nobody has commented on anything at all so far, and there was me worried about having to deal with loads of comments.. hmm.. better check that they actually work!), but if you have found yourself on this site following a listing on google and you can’t find what you are looking for, even with the search, please let me know and i’ll try to retrieve it.
Jim Toe 2008-06-17 14:26:40
KathrynJuarez28 2011-08-07 23:57:35