The Gmail blog had a terrific post on Friday that I am now blogging about primarily for my wife. She is very tech savvy and is an avid Gmail user, but it always surprises me that she deletes most of her e-mail in Gmail. I think this behavior carries over from when people used to have a limit on the size of the e-mail accounts, and therefore had to delete anything that wasn’t critical or important. It was also a much easier way to organize your e-mail inbox rather than creating folders and dragging the e-mail to them (which is what I do at work because we have limited space on our e-mail accounts). At any rate, I think archiving is essential to getting the most out of Gmail and can be a really big help in certain situations, as described in their post. I kinda wish Google would get rid of the delete key on the Inbox page, or at least make it a little harder to get to. 
April 21st, 2008
I was about to write my first new post in OVER A YEAR and noticed that I still had a draft waiting to be published. This was a post that had a lot of promise to it, but I got too busy with other things and it never happened. Now that Web 2.0 and wikis are a part of mainstream consciousness, this type of article has probably been written a million times by now. Also, some of the features/complaints listed for these wikis have undoubtedly changed, so I’d have to rewrite it to publish it legitimately. Therefore, DO NOT take this article at face value - it was written on August 13, 2006. Without further ado…
So, I wanted to have a hosted wiki so I wouldn’t have to bother installing MediaWiki or something like that on my home server, and I was curious what was out there. My first stop in my research was Wikipedia after a Google search, which took me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_farms. I glanced at that page and found a link in the External Links section to WikiMatrix. WikiMatrix has a nice wizard that you can follow to get a list of wikis or wiki software that fits your needs based on the questions you answer. It gave me a list of 12 wikis. After looking at the HUGE feature list and checking out the front page of each site (I based my initial choice on looks and site design), I narrowed it down to 5 wikis:
PBwiki was my first stop. I really liked the minimalistic design and it reminded me of the old WordPress, which I took as a good sign. I checked out the settings and features first, and the things that stood out were:
- View page as PDF
- ZIP backup of wiki
- Add Digg, del.icio.us, etc buttons to the bottom of each page
- Promotion section that dynamically creates a nifty image with your username in it to promote your wiki.
- Themes
- Page templates
- but…No traffic or page stats.
Wikispaces was next and it had the least attractive design. Here a rundown of features/complaints:
- Very minimalistic design.
- Can’t password protect your wiki unless you pay $5/month. I think this service is more like Wikipedia in that if you are a member, you can edit any other member’s wiki.
- Visual editor was minimal, but packed a punch. There was a nice image browser, media embed tool (think youtube, google calendar, flash), and even a special character picker.
- Not much in terms of special account or profile features.
Since I need to protect my wiki to only invited people, I had to dismiss Wikispaces. Next on the list is JotSpot. This wiki is very nice looking, but I have one major issue with it after trying to log in again. You log in as username “admin”. Unless I use this wiki frequently, I will always be clicking the “forgot password” link. Here are some of its many features:
- I like the way a link to an new wiki page looks. It puts a dashed red line underneath it, with a question mark at the end. This makes it very obvious that someone wants a page here, but hasn’t created it yet.
- Very nice visual editor. The link tool is handy and pretty user friendly. It lets you browse all the pages you have created and also lets you create a new page, link to an outside page, or link to a file you uploaded in your wiki.
- Page templates (on steriods). Once you create a new page and click on the link, you can choose from web page, spreadsheet (a lot like Google’s), Calendar, File Cabinet, and Photo Page. There are also shortcuts to all pages in each category in the left nav, except for web pages. If you click “install more applications” on the bottom of the left nav, there are even more to install: Project Manager, Bug Reporter, Knowledge Base, Recruiting, Call Log Manager, Group Directory, Blog, Forum, Simple Poll, Todo List. Very nice.
- One big drawback is that you are limited to 10 pages and 5 users. You can increase it to 100 pages and 10 users for $9.95 a month or choose another pricing option to get even more.
- Preferences and settings are pretty slim.
My immediate reaction is that I’d love to stick with JotSpot, but the free version is too restricted. Next on the list is StikiPad.
Sorry to leave you hanging, but that’s it! I think at the time, I eventually decided to use JotSpot. But today, if I need to collaborate on something, I use Google Docs. Which is funny, because JotSpot was acquired by Google! Thanks for listening. I didn’t want to let all that hard work go to waste.
April 21st, 2008
I can’t believe I never posted about this site before, but EvokeTV used to be my browser start page on my laptop at home. It was an AJAX-powered TV listing service that had awesome iCal and RSS support. So, I could look at my Google calendar and see when my favorite shows were airing new episodes for the next week. Or, I could check my favorite RSS reader and get new episode alerts for my favorite shows. Unfortunately, they had to shut down due to insufficient funds that were required to maintain the site. But from this post title, you can see the good news, and read more about it at the EvokeTV Blog.
February 16th, 2007
The seventh annual weblog awards, also known as the Bloggies, are now accepting your votes to determine this year’s winners. If you read a lot of blogs, and especially if you blog, you should participate in this process so the cream will rise to the top of the immensly large bucket of blogs that populate the Internet. I started writing out all of the categories of the awards, but there are just so many of them and I don’t have that much time. Just like real elections, I don’t plan on voting for things that I don’t know much about, like best craft weblog. So, go make your way over to http://2007.bloggies.com and cast your vote!
Hurry! Voting will close at 10:00 PM EST on Friday, February 2. The winners will be posted on Monday, March 12.
January 29th, 2007
I love, Love, LOVE statistical data - especially when it comes to things that interest me such as the Internet. Since 2001, Google has released a year-end summary of what searches were popular, and they slice and dice the information in very interesting ways. The zeitgeist for 2006 is no exception and you can also get an explanation of how they come up with the data at this Google blog post.
January 3rd, 2007
I’ve been catching up on my Bloglines feeds lately, and came across this O’Reilly Radar post about threadless.com. Tim describes it as “…digg for t-shirt designs”, which I think is fairly accurate after browsing the site for few minutes. Basically, users register on the site in order to submit their own designs and slogans, rate existing submissions, and (of course) buy t-shirts. The site design is pretty slick, and there are some really excellent t-shirts designs. The reason Tim is making such a big deal about it, is because it’s a true marriage of Web 2.0 and business - or as he puts it - “this is a ‘crowd-sourced’ manufacturing business”.
December 22nd, 2006
Just wanted to get this out there before the show is off the air, but I’m really digging the new Sci-Fi miniseries called “The Lost Room”. Since the story and premise is far too complicated, I’ll let this TV Squad post do the talking. There’s also a great Wikipedia entry for more information and a list of objects and their properties. After watching the first part, I highly recommend it. The first hour starts off a little slow to set things up and explain what the objects mean, but the second hour has the payoff. I hope the ending of the series doesn’t disappoint, but right now I recommend watching it. Sci-Fi is rerunning the episodes until Sunday where they have all 3 back to back.
December 12th, 2006
Well, I finally got my face on television. Now, it’s only for a few seconds, but still, it’s there. Here’s the story of how it happened:
My good friend, Noel, has been running this blog called TexasBurgerGuy.com for over 2 years now. He takes it seriously and has a passion for good hamburgers, so his reviews are very well done. Apparently, a lot of people at the Food Network read his blog, so they contacted him about doing a segment of a new show with him in it. The new show is called The Hungry Detective, which features a Los Angeles police detective that goes from city to city to find good restaurants that people may not know about.
When Noel got the news that they were going to film him, he let me know. But when I found out that it was going to be during the week and at Bubba’s Texas Burger Shack, which is right down the street from where I work, I just had to ask if I could pop my head in during the shoot. I took my good friend, Trey, along for the ride as well. Noel described the experience on this blog post, so I won’t get too descriptive.
In short, it was very interesting and fun to watch a television show get filmed. We actually showed up around 11AM, which is our normal lunch time, and there was no one there except Noel and a couple of crew members. We were hungry, so I finally ordered Trey and I a burger. After we got about half way done with our burger, the producer told us to save some room for another one so he could film us. So, after digesting our first burger, the producer set up a shot of Trey and I ordering our 2nd burger from the counter. We actually had to do 2 takes because they wanted to get audio of the shot (which they didn’t end up using). Later, they had the cameraman film us eating, which made me feel quite self-conscious! After that, we signed some release forms and we went back to work. Noel, on the other hand, had to stay the rest of the day for his part.
Here’s the clip that Noel posted on YouTube. You can see my back (behind the line) at the 3:39 mark, Trey and I eating at the 4:15 mark, and Trey and I ordering at the 4:28 mark.
Thanks to TexasBurgerGuy.com and the Food Network for a neat experience!
December 6th, 2006
Several months ago, I found a great little app via a Lifehacker post called OpenPandora. The 2 main reasons I like using are:
- Since OpenPandora is a Windows application, I don’t have to hold my web browser hostage to play music with Pandora.com.
- It sends my listened tracks to Last.fm, where I can get more recommendations and my friends can see what I’ve listened to.
The author of OpenPandora is constantly updating the program to provide more features and fix bugs. To get a list of all the other many features OpenPandora provides, go to the download page.
I was browsing the author’s blog archives to see when he added Last.fm support, and found another site called PandoraFM that integrated Pandora and Last.fm before OpenPandora did. It actually seems to have better integration and more features than OpenPandora, but the problem is that you still have to use your web browser to play the music. However, if you don’t have Windows or are restricted from installing programs, this is the next best thing to having OpenPandora.
December 1st, 2006
I’ve noticed after upgrading from Dapper to Edgy that my password for desktop sharing on my Ubuntu box wouldn’t work. I chalked it up to aftermath of an upgrade, but it kept happening at what seemed to be random times. I finally had my last straw today and decided to research it. A Google search first took me to this Ubuntu forum post, which then took me this bug report and also the workaround. After following the steps in the workaround, I rebooted and it was fixed! Thanks to KeesCook for posting the workaround.
November 30th, 2006
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