Category: blogging

  • Tags aren’t categories and vice versa

    Begin rant: One thing that annoys me about the otherwise fabulous WordPress software that runs this blog relates to categories and tags. Categories, which run along the side of most blogs (look to the right), tell you about general topics a blogger has written about that might be of interest. Sort of somewhere between an…

  • Speedy blogs, speedily updated on VoIP

    Once upon a time, I kept stacks of computer magazines on hand just in case I was suddenly in the market for some gadget reviewed months earlier. Now a days, of course, the Internet has completely subsumed that role and it’s usually not the web sites of big magazines that even run the best reviews.…

  • New gadget blog sounds promising

    I’ve grown quite tired of the current crop of gadget blogs which seem all to focused on the People-magazination or something of new tech gear. Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, a site following Web 2.0 news, has expanded his stable with a new gadget blog, dubbed logically enough Crunchgear. It sounds promising as Mike seems to…

  • New stuff floating my boat

    Catching up on a bunch of feeds at Bloglines this morning, I found my inbox filed with news of cool stuff. The 1.5.0.2 upgrade of Firefox on my Powerbook g4 renders page with super speed that puts Safari to shame. Next, and I can’t quite decide whether this is great or insane, a service called…

  • Can overhyped Flock deliver?

    Once upon a time, oh say, 6 months ago, the hypemiesters descended on a new browser called Flock that wasn’t quite ready for primetime leading to the inevitable backlash. Flock, based on open-source Firefox code, was supposed to have nifty integration with blogs and photo sites and other such socially-oriented web 2.0 stuff but it…

  • Hooking up with Spam Karma 2

    All of a sudden, the bad guys have discovered my blog, the spam bad guys that is. Everything had been hunky-dory with this blog’s administration since I switched over to WordPress just about two months ago now. I set WordPress to email me every time I received a comment so I could moderate posts. Posts…

  • What we have here is a failure of redundancy

    I think it was scheduled maintenance or announced-in-advance downtime (or maybe it was just deja vu when I saw it), but Bloglines was offline for a while over the New Year’s weekend. I might never have known as I wasn’t online much but Monday night I fired up my trusty new feed reader,Netnewswire, and got…

  • Shrook, shrook not quite Shrook

    Well, the Shrook feed reading experiment is over and the NetNewsWire experiment begins. Shrook is an offline reader that synchronizes with its own online web-based reader. Re-inventing the wheel (in this case, re-inventing Bloglines) is not a winning strategy. Ah, but NetNewsWire, another offline reader, actually synchronizes with Bloglines. It also uses my .Mac account…

  • Good bye iBlog, hello WordPress

    Well, after making some changes in hosting plans, domain name pointers etc etc, it’s time to abandon the easy but less functional blogging program iBlog and switch to full-featured heaven aka WordPress running a site hosted by Bluehost. Couldn’t find a way to easily import the old entries (another weakness of iBlog?) so I’m reloading…

  • Is Shrook the great, hoped-for answer to reading RSS feeds?

    (Updated 9/23) I’ve been pretty happy keeping up with Blog RSS feeds using the online Bloglines service. It works from within any browser, updates feeds pretty frequently, lets me publish my subscription list on the web and allows easy export of my list for backup or to pull into another reader. The interface is excellent,…