General Disarray

osx.iusethis.com - cool apps for the mac population:

You can store the apps you use on iusethis, so it’s easy to download them again if you get a new computer. You will also be able to help others pick the best apps, and we can suggest new apps to you based on your profile..

There have been other attempts at sites like these, but iusethis.com seems to have taken off. Lots of apps and users already. I’m chalking it up to the nice graphic design and quick ajax interface. Check the site out. I already discovered some programs that I didn’t know about. Everything is tagged, every entry has a link to an app or a demo, and it’s really easy to build your application profile. There is a mixture of free and commercial applications, too, which I like, since most of us use a combination of the free stuff and the pricey stuff.

You can now listen to podcasts from within Bloglines! They’ve had YouTube working for a while now, so this is a welcome feature. As much as I love Odeo, it’s annoying to see in Bloglines that there’s a new podcast in my inbox, then have to go to a different page to hear it.

Kottke.org talks about “Wikipedia contrails” (the Wikipedia sites still in your browser’s history) this morning. Sounds like an interesting way to sum up your recent web browsing. Here’s mine:

• Ann Coulter — I was looking for the name of her new book so I could defame her in a post
• Achewood — An online comic that a friend recommended. Apparently the back story is pretty complicated, so I read the Wikipedia entry to catch up
• Archibald Putt — Putt’s law: “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.” I read this somewhere
• Father’s day — I was looking into the history of the holiday
• Footnotes — I was looking for hard and fast rules about whether a footnote has to go at the end of a sentence (I think it should)
• Geometric Series — Some idiot on Reddit.com was arguing that .999(repeating) doesn’t equal 1. It’s easy to prove that it does by summing the geometric series {a_n}_0^infinity=(9/10)*(1/10)^n
• GTK — It’s what powers the graphical display on the Gimp and Inkscape. A native version for OS X is in the works, and I wish it would hurry up and come out
• Infinite Monkey Theorem — A million monkeys typing infinitely would produce the works of Shakespeare
• Kola Superdeep Borehole — Deepest hole ever drilled, via Reddit.com
• List of problems solved by MacGyver — This was on Reddit or Digg or something. I don’t even know anymore
• Pareto Efficient — What WordPress.com’s theming solution is, since it makes those without web design knowledge better off without hurting those with it
• Scientology versus the internet — I’m fascinated by Scientology. It was a really big deal when the stuff about Xenu was posted to the net
• Snakes on a plane — Not coming out until August. I was looking for the trailer
• Stephen Wolfram — I was curious where Wolfram Research was located. It’s in IL
• Universal binary — Somewhere I saw a comprehensive list of Universal Binaries. I was hoping to post it to my Nifty OS X apps page since people claimed that it was “useless” unless it listed whether an app was a UB or not (seems a little strong since 99% of PPC apps run under Rosetta, and every website will say whether the thing is universal)

So there you have it. What I’ve been wp’ing lately.

Biz Stone has instructions on how to display RSS feeds on your blog using FeedBurner. I was not aware that they offered this service. Previously I had tried all sorts of RSS to Javascript services, which can be unreliable. You can count on FeedBurner.

The gist:

1. Get a FeedBurner account if you don’t have one
2. Get the RSS feed that you want to display and “burn it” (have FeedBurner process your feed for you)
3. Click on the feed, then click on Publicize. Then click on BuzzBoost and select the options that you want for your blog
4. Finally, copy and paste the generated Javascript into your template

Of course, if you have a WordPress.com blog, all you have to do is paste the feed URL into an RSS widget under Presentation: Sidebar widgets.

I have mixed feelings about this. Before I got a WordPress.com account I had many Blogger blogs, and I created a ton of custom templates. Some of them I managed not to lose, and I think they look pretty good (they are all very simple, clean themes — kind of rare, even with WordPress themes).

So I made a blog of Blogger templates: JTemplates. I guess it seems kind of hypocritical, given my ranting in favor of WordPress.com and content over style. But then again, lots of people still use Blogger (including me, if you count the template blog) for at least one blog, and the templates are just gathering dust.

I’d port them to WordPress, but I don’t have an install to play with. But if you’re a WordPress theme ninja, please do.

Website designers want searches to work for free - Yahoo! News

Simply creating a website for your company isn't enough anymore. The blogging revolution - some 75,000 new blogs are created every day, according to blog directory Technorati - and the popularity of Internet search - Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April - gives firms many more avenues for exposure. Savvy Web marketers realize that consumers turn to the Web to shop and to learn about companies, which is forcing them to market beyond just the company website.

Kind of. It depends on the business. Obviously if you have a web-based business (or an online component), being found through search engines is important. But if you have a store, all people really need is some pretty pictures, your address, your phone number, your email and your operating hours. And for the majority of their shopping for goods/services, people don't go to Google. They go to Yellow Pages or local search for their area. So that's where most businesses want to be: in the online YP directories. 

Now it’s using less real memory than Firefox, and barely any of the CPU. So, a real improvement. And the blog editor looks like it has improved a ton over previous versions, which I found almost unusable.

It still feels a little slow, but it’s not terrible. Here’s what I like:

• The blog editor creates high-quality HTML, and it doesn’t get garbled when you import old posts. It also has built-in spell checking
• The new user interface looks shiny and cool
• There’s an integrated RSS reader, which is of course integrated with your blog editor and bookmarks manager (so, like NeoOffice, this is several apps in one)
• I can’t put my finger on it, but the bookmark manager seems to be more intuitive now

Here are my criticisms:

• You can’t access any of the admin functions of the blog editor (e.g., which blog to post to, is this a new post or an edit, etc.) until after you hit publish, which is counterintuitive. A little settings button would do fine
• There’s not button for centering text/images in the blog editor. Not a big deal — I can do it in the source. But it wouldn’t be that hard to implement
• The user interface elements are totally inconsistent. If you edit a blog post, you get a pop-up window. If you tag something, view news or bookmarks, you get a new tab. What? Why? The RSS reader is situated in a sidebar. The Flock editor is situated in a topbar. You can’t change the two around. I think any viewer (photo, rss, bookmark, etc.) should be able to be viewed in a tab, sidebar or topbar.

Update: But I still have trouble managing blog posts. First, you can’t delete them at all. Second, you can only edit posts that were created from within Flock, which won’t always be the case. Third, if you edit a post, both the original and the edit disappear from the blog for no obvious reason. It’s still a great idea, but these things should be fixed by now.

WordPress.com Forums:

I’m noticing an increased tendency among forum regulars to be… well, rude, when people ask for stuff they can’t currently have. Yes, they probably have read the FAQ. It doesn’t make them feel less frustrated. And it has never been stated outright by the PTB that we will never be able to have plugins/customise templates/print out from blogs/use adsense etc. etc., so what is wrong with politely asking them to wait and see what happens?

This forum gets more like wp.org every day. Inevitable, perhaps, but also disappointing. If you do want to drive people to blogger, you’re going the right way about it.

Yeah. It’s why I’m not messing with the forum anymore. It’s ironic — a forum is supposed to encourage openness within an online community, but this one is making it feel gated. The WordPress.com forums are filled with bad advice (and the good advice is always ignored or misunderstood), people jumping down the throats of new users and frightening them off, and — most incomprehensibly — people trying to stroke their egos (on a free blog service forum? really?). I don’t have time for that.

For the rest of the forum regulars: keep helping people and try to stay civil. Realize that no amount of anger towards any given person will stop the influx of stupid or repetitive questions, but it will upset and possibly drive away current and future users.

[rant]

Now there are officially two themes on WordPress.com that allow you to use custom headers (Connections and Regulus, if you’re counting). The more customizability, the better.

I, for one, like using canned themes, because it means that I can focus on writing. On my old blog I did a total site redesign about once a month. It was a complete waste of time and I ended up posting more about my new templates than anything else. That’s part of what attracted me to WordPress.com. And keep in mind that I know HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Illustrator, Gimp, etc. I can make good looking sites, and I’ve been paid to do so.

But I’m obviously an exception. A ton of people get on the forums and complain about their inability to pack their blog full of custom images, Javascripts, badges, etc. Now, I’ve seen Blog*Spot blogs. They’re hideous. So I’m glad that, when I hit next blog on WordPress.com, I don’t see some painfully hacked template with pop-up buttons and an annoying mp3 in the background. But again, I’m obviously an exception. So if people can add custom headers, maybe enough of the desire to differentiate one’s self graphically will be satisfied, and blogging can resume.

I wish I could convince people that the WordPress.com way is better. You can customize things — different headers, different sidebar elements, etc. — without hacking the HTML. So if you’re a novice, you get far more customizability than you would on Blogger, and the customizations look better. If you know how to code, you have a choice: use a canned package with a considerable deal of customizability and ease, do a custom wp install, or use another service. This arrangement, therefore, is Pareto-efficient: one group (those with limited webdev skills) is much better off; the other (those that know how to code XHTML and CSS) is at least as well off as it was before.

[/rant]

P.S. Also, I tested out the built-in cropping tool. Very convenient. I’d need to reinstall Gimp or Seashore before I could do an accurate crop. The web-based cropper constrains the selection that you crop your uploaded image to so that it retains the same relative dimensions as the original header. People are going to have problems with this. I guarantee it. They won’t understand. They’ll say “the cropper keeps cutting off part of my picture.” And believe me, I know. When I worked at a print shop, I sometimes made banners. People would come in with artwork that was 3″x3″ and ask me to make a 10′x2′ banner. I would explain: it can be 10×10 or it can be 2×2 or it can be distorted. They’d storm out in anger, after telling me “Kinko’s does this all the time.” Yeah, because linear algebra works differently at Kinko’s.

P.P.S. Lots of action on the WordPress.com blog today. It’s a lot of fun to use a service that’s being actively improved.