See how easy it is??!!???

I’m officially addicted to RSS.  Let’s start at the beginning here.  Most modern day web pages publish articles to their website but simultaneously to a sort of simple version of the site as well which is just the collection of articles.  This is their RSS feed.  Now knowing that such a page exists, the technology also exists with which you can see when the feed is updated and pull the new article into a reader.

Anyone who peruses their favorite web sites for the newest news can know how silly it might seem to hit refresh every 60 seconds or just randomly browse and hope there might be a new update to the page.  However, if you begin to use an RSS reader you realize how great the automation becomes when the reader tells you fairly quickly after a page is updated.

So I started my RSS journey with the Sage plugin for Firefox.  Instead of opening up every single page I read and hoping to read the new news, I simply told Sage which feeds to check and I’d hit one button and it would give me the list of news.   The downside to this method is that I have to set it up for every computer I use which is very cumbersome.  Overall, this is a much faster way to read and digest new articles of news.

But then one day I find out Google has an RSS reader as well.  After setting up my feeds in Sage for the 983792857th time, I was hesitant to start again.   However, I decided if I set it up on Google I’d never have to set it up again because it’s based on the web, which is one of the HUGE plusses.   So I went and made the dive.

There are levels of effeciency that come into play when dealing with this sort of stuff that are probably beyond my set of knowledge.  But the switch to Google Reader has been, what I feel like, an incredible boost in keeping up with current events.  I’ve moved from 20 feeds to 49 feeds because I feel like Google does a much better job at keeping me up to date, yet I’m maintaining relatively the same amount of time to read them.  I think even though there’s more to read, I filter out quite a bit and read maybe 1 out of 20 articles.  You’ll find that some feeds have higher quality reads but low volume or vice versa.  There’s this obsession now to want more and more, but I’ll probably reach a limit of feeds that I can’t keep up with.

One of the cooler parts of Google Reader is now evidenced on my sidebar.  I can actually share stories I find interesting with the click of a button so you can sort of keep up with what I keep up with.  Additionally there’s a specific link for my stuff located at: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15227217337039956264

So at this point, I try to advocate the sort of switch from aimless browser refreshing to a more reliable way of keeping up via RSS.  It definately clicks with some people, but with others I think it might be too foreign.  For those in the too foreign camp I imagine they don’t utilize the web as a sort of informational overload, but more as a passing recreation which is why the obsession to be kept up to date isn’t keyed in for them.  Either way, it’s worth checking out.

My tip for you, I use Chrome set with reader as my homepage.  This goes along with the multibrowser thing I detailed below in the Chrome post.  I find quirky things to use individual browsers for.

Thanks HAMMERON!

I was talking to a friend about Chrome concerning the way they unified the search and address bar.  I have a variety of search engines in Firefox/IE that I use so I frequently go to the search bar, type in what I want, choose the relavent engine, then hit bombs away.  However, it turns out there’s a far faster and far better way of doing this in Firefox coupled with a handy shortcut key.

In the first place, control+L will take you directly to the address bar in every browser EXCEPT IE.  Couple this with smart keywords and you have a killer way to basically move to an all keyboard solution to searching quickly and effeciently.

Visit the page that has the search field that you search with. Right click on the search field. Choose Add a Keyword for this Search… The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Give the bookmark a name, e.g. “IMDB Search” and create a keyword e.g. “imdb” and file the Bookmark somewhere. Firefox comes with a Quick Searches folder so you could use that. Click OK

Now enter imdb Matchstick Men into the Location bar and press Enter. You’re done! You can repeat these steps for any searches you use – e.g. Amazon, your corporate phonebook, your favorite bittorrent site, anything!

So now, what you can do is have google set as something like “g” and then hit control+L then type “g cats” and it would run a google search on cats.  Run a similar setup for wikipedia, youtube, etc and you have this really cool shorthand search method!

Thanks to Hammeron for the tip!

Chrome Documentation

Chrome Download

Read the documentation, it’s very interesting how they’ve gone through the architectural process.  I was thinking just the other day how I use IE/Firefox/Safari all fairly interchangeably.  Yes, I said Safari, I actually think it is the fastest web page renderer but I’m not sure.

I feel old recalling a time where if you used IE you were doomed to spyware and other bad things, but most things have been resolved in IE7, not all, but most things.  I’m not a big plug-in user for Firefox so the transition is pretty seamless between all the browsers for me.  The big plug-in I use is Sage for my RSS feeds but I keep getting pressured into using Google Reader.

Anyway, it’ll be very interesting to see Google entering the browser war.  I wonder how quickly it will be adopted.  If they can deliver on the speed and reliability, I think a lot of Firefox users would probably switch.  IE has such deep penetration on the market because of its bundling with Windows.  There are A LOT of people who can’t abstract the idea that the Internet and IE are seperate entities.  I had someone at work who had no idea that you could get to web pages with something that wasn’t IE.  So we’ll see.  There’s a level of marketing that would have to be pushed out to go to the average user.  Alternately, if they have some great packaging options like they seem to be doing with things like Adobe Reader then it might take off pretty quickly as well.

UPDATE: Anyone using Symantec Endpoint Protection (which includes anyone at TTU using the antivirus software)

If upon boot you see this message: “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click ok to terminate the application.”

You need to remove the Application & Device Control from the installation of this product – i.e Add/Remove programs – click on Modify and unselect it

My inital impressions of Digsby are documented in a post below.  However as one gets more familiar with an application one’s opinions can change drastically.  Have mine?  No way!  Digsby RULES!

One week after I installed it I thought to myself, I wonder what I can possibly find to not like about Digsby.  I hunted high and low and finally found my one big gripe.  Memory hog.  It was up to about 85MB of RAM.  85MB OF RAM FOR IM!!!  It seems pretty insane.  But was I gonna dump Digsby because of it?  No, because of they actually have a beta release (which actually the stable release I think is also coined beta as well making this a beta beta release)  which addresses optimizations, notably in memory. Check it out here.

So after reading about how they’ve dumped the memory resources, I hopped on the beta beta release bandwagon to scope it out and sure enough.  I dropped to 30MB max and I’ve seen it go down to 12MB at a minimum which rocks.  The features I use are AIM/ICQ/Yahoo/MSN/Twitter so it might go up for you crazy people with Myspace/Facebook.  Overall, 3 weeks later, Digsby still rocks and only gets better.  It was fun GAIM/Pidgin/Trillian, but I think we finally have a juggernaut.

My only remaining gripe is that you have to have/make a Digsby account.  The pros of this are that whenever you log into Digsby it will load up all your modules you need, but I often swap between different IM accounts.  My laptop may be on one AIM screen name but then I switch to my desktop AIM name occasionally which becomes sort of a pain with an account based setup.  I suppose I could make my account global and include every screen name I’ve ever used but I’m not sure if it’s smart enough to know to enable some and disable others.  With MSN/Yahoo you can’t have multiple logins so you get disconnected and can’t auto reconnect.  This gripe is so minor and specific to me I’m not sure many other people would have such a unique gripe.

And speaking of 3 week later type of evaluations, I’ll be going back over Flickr/Picasa as well.

As is evidenced by the new Twitter sidebar, I’ve decided to give in and setup a Twitter account.  To coincide with it, I’m also switching from Pidgin to Digsby.

It seems like there’s so many social networking sites that it’s frustrating to keep up with any and all the new stuff.  It’s often been asked why I don’t have a MySpace or Facebook page and I respond that I have a website of my own and that’s enough.  Secretly, I feel like they’re the modern day Geocities and most of the pages I look at are HORRIBLY designed.  Certainly I’m able to do much more with my web site than the constraints put on what can be done on MySpace/Facebook, but people kinda just look at me funny and shrug it off.  This is the first sign that I’m becoming a crotchety old man though.

Yes, I realize as I’m listening to TWiT that they frequently talk about Twitter and it’s many uses.  But to me, when I heard the idea of Twitter, I was thinking it was a little absurd and stalker-ish to let everyone know what I’m doing.  That or it could become quite juvenile as evidenced by this PA Comic.  So I sort of left it by the wayside for now.

Then it dawns on me.  Paul Thurrot says that there are people like his mom or grandmother (I forget offhand) who simply won’t use an ATM machine and he gets it.  I get that I’m turning into that and I’m afraid I’m gonna lose my nerd street credibility!  Crotchety old man syndrome is kicking in.  On the one hand, I’m a lot more cautious about software now than I ever was before having lived through the Morpheus/Kazaa days of super spyware destroying your computer.  But now we’ve sort of evolved a bit past that with things like Ad-Aware and Spybot.  I’ve become a technological hermit even though technology is something I’m passionate about!

So I’m breaking down my misconceptions and going back to trying out software even despite the fact that I may already have something that serves that purpose and might be better.  This isn’t to say I’m going to get a MySpace/Facebook account though, I’m still not too keen on that.  But I’ll open up to Twitter for now.  It’s got a great set of tools for integration into the site and it’s opened it’s API up to things like Digsby.

Which brings me to Digsby!  I love it so far.  I had been a GAIM user then something bad happened on one build so I switched to Trillian, then I hated Trillian because I felt like it was slightly bloated but maybe more accurately it felt slower loading up, then I went back to GAIM when it became Pidgin and now I’ve been convinced that Digsby is totally the future of the IM super client so far.  It integrates all the popular IM clients as well as MySpace/Facebook/Twitter and email clients (Gmail/MSN/Yahoo/Pop).

The best thing about it so far is that compared to Pidgin, I was able to exclude people from sending me an IM if they weren’t on my buddy list.  Which Pidgin didn’t have, I had to install the regular IM client to enable that.  I’ve recently had a problem with spam IMs.  However, no longer!  I know I’m gushing now so just go to the site and try it out yourself.

Currently I use Gallery, though it could use an update in version, but I’m looking at moving to Picasa or Flickr to host images.  Though I currently don’t have a lot of images, that may change in the future.  I do need to know how easy it is to upload images, how many you can batch upload at a time (Gallery version I have limits to like 10 images at a time or something, it’s been a while), and how much storage space each one allows.  Gallery is limited to what my webhost allows while the others may have significantly larger amounts of space.

From initial glances, it looks like Flickr has far better support for things like WordPress integration.  Picasa, I’ve heard, is an overall better experience though.  So I’ll have to check into all of them and we’ll see.  My image gallery may see some hiccups though (hopefully not since I don’t have any of those images backed up anymore) while I fiddle with the upgrade.

If anyone has any insight on the various photo hosting solutions let me know.  Thanks!

Flickr Page | Picasa Album

UPDATE

Here’s what I found out so far.

Flickr allows 100MB of storage with an option of purchasing a premium account for more space.  It seems to indicate 100MB per month so I dunno if it’s increased each month.  I’ll find out next month.  Flickr’s uploading utility is quite nice for batch uploads as well as new album creation.  Overall the experience is nice but very basic and straightforward.  I didn’t find any of the nice plugins for WordPress yet much to other user’s claims.

Picasa: This is a combination solution for on and offline photo management.  The software you get from Google is really sophisticated and offers by far a greater set of tools to tweak your images.  Crop, straighten, redeye reduction, auto contrast/color, effects such as sepia and glow are all included.  You get 1GB of storage online which seems like it’s more than enough for me.  It generates albums based on the folder structure you’ve created then you can push images up to the web for online viewing.

Gallery 2 moves from flat file management to a database management and restricts me to the size of the database (which I only have one covering both WordPress and phpbb now) I use.  Gallery 1 limits me to the size of webspace storage I have using a flat file management system. I won’t be making the upgrade to Gallery 2 since looking at Flickr/Picasa I can have potentially vastly larger storage space.

Another image hosting place I haven’t looked at is photobucket so I’ll have to do some research there later.  The nice thing about Picasa and Flickr are that they use accounts I’ve already established with google and yahoo respectively.  Account management is an issue for me and while it’s not favorable to have all your eggs in one basket, it’s also just easier to know that there are all these great services that are linked by your semi-universal accounts.

Engadget Link

Uggggggggggggggggg, the pricing plans aren’t looking so great compared to the $35 I pay now. The cheapest plan is $69.99 and doesn’t have unlimited nights/weekends. Honestly thought, I don’t talk on the phone that much so I can live with 5000 minutes.

I think the most annoying thing is that you can have unlimited data plans but text messaging is extra. I don’t know specifically how phone data lines are setup but to me that’s total garbage since text messaging should come down a data line. I feel this is a minor technological inconvenience for the public that the carriers are milking it as much as possible before allowing the hardware makers the option of making it free.