22 Jan 2007
Over the past few weeks I’ve undertaken a bit of an experiment.
The goal was simple enough, stop going to any notable news site (abcnews, cnn, cbc, espn, google news, etc.) and instead only receive their content via respective RSS feeds (click-throughs to stories would still obviously take me to an external site).
It really wasn’t that difficult but I’ve been more or less successful. Honestly I can’t remember the last time I went to a specific news site. I believe RSS is a more natural format to receive news in plus it inherently self moderates, most current at the top. If I spend 20 minutes reading the various feeds throughout the day, I’m pretty much guaranteed to get a decent snapshot of whats going on in the world without having to wade through a front page littered with the latest backlash against Paris or Britney.
Mind you if I had to pick a single source of news, it’d be Google News (Canada). It’s aggregated, personalizable and free of ads. In fact, I’m browsing the RSS feed right now.
16 Jan 2007
I was just about to go to bed when I got an email from the folks at Scrybe inviting me into their beta (I suspect I applied awhile back and they’re just clearing through a backlog now).
The launch details are here. Their blog is also here.
I just logged in and played around with it for a few minutes. I don’t know very much about the product but it appears to be (another) online calendar and task tool (at least that’s what the initial phase looks like). The UI is flash-based and surprising easy to navigate. A double click here and a single click here and all of a sudden your jumping from the year perspective to the hourly perspective 😉
I’m evaluating it right now on a Windows XP box with Firefox 2.0 and it’s running fine. It also sports an offline mode which although I haven’t tried yet could potentially set it apart from some of the competition. It also has a nifty ability to print calendars/tasks in such a way that you can fold them up neatly and take them with you (hopefully this isn’t their idea of an offline mode 😉
I’m going to go to bed now so I’ll close with a general concern about these types of offerings. For all intents and purposes I’ve effectively sold my soul to Google. They own my email and desktop search. If I do track tasks and dates online I currently use Google’s tools. Moving forward, I’d seriously consider using Writely/Google’s word processor once they get some semblance of an offline version.
This isn’t to discount what Scrybe is doing and I haven’t read into them enough to say whether or not they’re competing directly with Google. I think there’s plenty of room for improvement (on the part of Google) with respect to user interface (amongst other things) but ultimately it comes down to data management. Google’s #1 far and beyond.
That being said, I’ll give Scrybe a shot over the next while to see how it performs. From the talk on their forums it looks like multi-person synchronization is in the cards which would be kind of interesting. If they could get it to sync (even just a push) with Google I’d be happy.
Time for bed. Snow storm in the morning.
15 Jan 2007
I’ve been using the latest del.icio.us plugin for awhile with Firefox 2.x and have been quite impressed.
Although my experiences have been largely positive I did have to start with a new account b/c my previous one suffered from poor tag choices (and del.icio.us didn’t provide much in the way of batch modifications at the time).
If you ask me, the most useful piece of the puzzle is the Del.icio.us button bar in Firefox. At first it seemed like a fairly radical shift from traditional bookmark folders but now it’s second nature.
Basically you map ‘favourite tags‘ (from del.icio.us) that are then selectable from a drop-down. Selecting a tag populates the rest of the button bar with the tagged items. Simple as that. Truth be told, the entire mechanism for bookmarking also changed but I won’t be getting into that here.
For me, I’ve got 3 favourites: *firefox:main, firefox:work, firefox:fun. firefox:main *consists of your typical GMail, Google Reader, Facebook, etc. *firefox:work *contains internal links to JIRA, FishEye, Confluence, etc. and *firefox:fun *is not much more than a direct link to my hockey pool. It’s a simple drag & drop to add a new item to the button bar.
I agree that it’s more or less always been possible to do something like this. If you’re not sold yet perhaps an even bigger benefit to all this is that my links are centrally stored (you don’t store passwords and you have the option to effectively hide a link by making it not shared). The obvious draw for me is being able to change PC’s (or even dual-booting) and having one less thing to worry about synchronizing. Previous to this I was using another Firefox plugin that allowed me to synchronize via SFTP. It worked but wasn’t very seamless and collisions weren’t handled properly.
I’ve been a del.icio.us user for awhile now and have grown to appreciate the power and flexibility it offers. Sure there are alternatives now but it’s simple and offers most everything that I need _right_ now.
As an aside, If I ever manage to get away from using Firefox’s saved session support as a mechanism to take work home with me I’d consider tagging whatever I was in the middle of thus allowing me to start with a clean slate each day.
Anyways. Check it out. I should note that there are some rather negative comments on the Firefox page about the plug-in. Your mileage may vary but I’ve been happy with it.