How I Read Blogs

When I started reading blogs, I only read one blog, then two. I made a folder in my bookmarks menu, and whenever I wanted to read something, I would go to the blog and see if there was anything new. This works just fine when you only have two blogs to read. When you have 35 blogs, though, it doesn’t work at all. That’s why RSS is so important. (If you don’t know what RSS is, get a life. No, check that. If you don’t know what RSS is, read the Wikipedia definition. And then come back here and keep reading.)

Google just went down

… and then it came right back up.

But still, it was kind of scary. I mean, we’ve all seen this image before, but never in the context of google.com. The last time Google went down was in 2005.

Why Google owns the future of web mapping

Half a decade ago, the big name in web maps was MapQuest. You wanted directions, you went to MapQuest. You wanted maps, maybe with satellite imagery? MapQuest was the only place to go. These days, though, every other mapping website lives in the shadow of one runaway success: Google Maps. And for good reasons, too: Google maps has better coverage, better browser support, a better interface, and much better satellite imagery.

And really, the satellite imagery is what a lot of people come for. Everyone knows it’s fun to look up your house, or for that matter, somebody else’s, and see what it looks like from space. (Usually, it looks like a roof. Not much, really. But bear with me.) Google’s satellite imagery is not only on average a lot newer than the competition’s (1-3 years old, compared to 2-3 years old on Live Maps and 4-5 years old on Yahoo Maps), it’s a lot clearer. And see that picture above? That was taken with a new high-image-quality satellite that Google has exclusive rights to the images from.

Google also leads, though, in map and directory coverage. Google has full maps of Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the United States, while Live Maps only has the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and India. And Live Maps doesn’t even cover the northern Canadian territories. Not that anybody cares, but still.

Google’s browser support is better (6 supported browsers vs. 3 or 4), and their mobile device support is outstanding. Google Maps is built into every one of the twelve million iPhones out there. They’re faster, easier, and a whole lot better looking than the competition. Plus, they have Street View. (Imagine how cool it would be to have street view, and turn-by-turn directions, on the iPhone.)

Sure, Live Maps has 3D features that Google Maps doesn’t. But they require a special browser plugin that’s slow to install and slow to use. You might as well download the free Google Earth, which provides a far better 3D experience. While Google might not have been the first to come up with webmail, GMail now outshines the competition by far; I think Google Maps will be doing the same thing before long.

Election 2008: The Website Review

Maybe you couldn’t care less who becomes the next president of the USA. Maybe you have a hard time deciding who to vote for. Maybe you’re a shallow moron who bases his voting decision on how good the candidate’s web site looks.

If you are, you’ve arrived at the right place. I carefully (read: carelessly) analyzed both ticket’s web sites to help you decide who you should vote for.

Design

Obama – The Obama-Biden web site is well designed, although slow. It received a makeover from its already-good design at the end of last year, and it looks even better now. It has well-thought-out menu navigation, pleasing fonts, and a great color scheme. The site promotes campaign action on your part and makes you want to help Obama win.

McCain – The McCain-Palin site looks good, but not nearly as good as the Obama site. In fact, at first glance, it appears to be a poor imitation of the former. It does have some advantages, though: nice animations on the home page, a photo gallery, etc. Its navigation menus, however, look awful when juxtaposed against Obama’s Also, the site doesn’t have that same energetic, glowing feel to it.

In short, Obama’s site is a lot like Obama, and McCain’s site is a lot like McCain.

Speed

When it comes to page load speeds, however, McCain has a real advantage. Although both sites employ a tacky sign-up landing page that needs to be circumnavigated to get to the real thing, McCain’s site loads considerably faster on the landing and home pages, although it lags a bit in the content pages, probably because YouTube videos take a long time to load.

Anyway, here are the numbers (which I timed with my wristwatch): Obama’s site took 50 seconds to load the landing page and 49 seconds to load the home page. His “About” page took 9 seconds to load. McCain’s site took 27 seconds to load the landing page and 11 seconds to load the home page; it, however, took 21 seconds to load the “About” page, although the page was semi-usable before it was fully loaded.

Conclusion

The presidential candidates’ web sites epitomize their characters: Obama’s is good-looking, but a bit slow, whereas McCain’s is a bit wrinkly, but more usable.

Your Opinion?

The Recommended Reading feature is moving

…to ma.gnolia.com.

In the past, I provided here, Saturdays, a list of my favorite blog posts and other online content from the week. It worked, I guess, but it was a pain to compile. So I finally decided I needed something new.

Ma.gnolia is a “social bookmarking” site, a lot like Delicious.com, but better looking. It allows you to bookmark sites, with rating, tags, and descriptions, and other people can subscribe to it. Hopefully this combination will be the perfect blend between full blog articles and little John Gruber-esque snippets that I’m looking for.

If you’d like to subscribe to my ma.gnolia feed (and I recommend that you do), it’s right here.

I’m on Flickr

Been wanting to see my terrible photos? Now’s your chance: I’ve uploaded a bunch of my best (yes, that’s the best I can do) to flickr. Just head right on over to flickr.com/photos/iansinke to view my handiwork.

(You can also just click the link under the list of photos in the sidebar)

Back Online

Well, after more than a week’s absence, I am finally (as of Friday) back online. It all started the Thursday before last week Thursday, when there was a big thunderstorm near our house. Check that, at our house. Around nine PM, there was a humongous clap of thunder, and three things happened:

1. The smoke detector screamed.
2. My little brother’s “Animal Explorer” (don’t ask) said “Press an animal or an explorer button.”
3. Windows kindly notified me that Primus DSL had become disconnected.

So the next morning I got on the phone with the Primus Tech Support guys, who did a few troubleshooting things (resetting the modem) and came to the conclusion that it would take “twenty-four to forty-eight hours” (listen carefully there) to get the problem fixed. All this in a heavy indian accent, of course.

It took more than 24 hours. More than 48 hours. I called them again Monday morning and they told me the same thing. 48 more hours passed; I called them Wednesday morning and was told, “But, my good man, this kind of problem, usually take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to fix, sir.”

Finally, on Friday afternoon, the guy from Bell Canada called. He had been fishing around at the local office and found the problem. What was the problem? Well, a wire had become unplugged.

Spam Recipes in GMail

The GMail web app is supported by “featured content” – a sneaky way of saying text link ads – at the top of every page. Among the more interesting ads are those in the spam folder: they are all links to recipes that have spam (the food, not the emails) as an ingredient. There don’t seem to be very many spam recipes on the internet, however. The only four I am seeing:

• Spam Skillet Casserole – Broil until golden
• Savory Spam Crescents – Bake 12-15 minutes or until golden brown
• Vineyard Spam Salad – Combine grapes, spam, peapods and onions in large bowl
• Spicy Spam Kabobs – Serve with hot cooked rice

I’m Back & other news

After a furlough of around two months, I’m back at blogging. I was a bit lazy about it for a while there, but now that I’ve finished school for the year, I’ll have plenty of time to write. I’ll get some Recommended Reading up as soon as possible, as well as some Recommended Listening.

In unrelated news, Steve Jobs announced the 3G (second generation, but three G’s of wireless connectivity) iPhone today at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The other big news item was a new service, or rather a rebranding of .Mac: Mobile Me. Before the keynote, this name was rumored and hated by all; now that it’s over, somehow it seems just great. Steve Jobs has this way of making anything seem a lot better, I guess.

On The Blogroll

Jeff Atwood doesn’t like blogrolls:

Citing your references and influences is a great and necessary thing, but obsessively listing every single blog you read– the so-called “blogroll”– is just noise.

If you’re really reading this many blogs, you should be linking to them organically in your blog posts, in a sort of natural quid pro quo. Wearing a giant blogroll on your sleeve is an empty gesture. I’m reminded of the distasteful way that blogs in giant ad networks (such as Weblogs, Inc) spam every page with a huge list of internal links to their other blogs. It feels artificial and insincere.

All the same, although I’m not going to put my blogroll in the sidebar, I feel somewhat obliged to publish it here, in case you’re wondering what I read. To that end, here it is.

• Coding Horror
• HanselMinutes
• Pogue’s Posts
• Rick Brewster
• Scott Hanselman
• The Old New Thing
• Joel On Software
• Shawn Blanc
• Paul Stamatiou

Not much, huh? I also read a few mega-blogs periodically:

• Engadget
• TUAW

There. Done. You will never again wonder what I read.

How the Recommended Reading Feature Works

I recently introduced a new feature: Recommended Reading. My goal for this feature was to be able to take a list of my favorite blog posts from Google Reader and automatically post them to my blog with a python script. The way I eventually implemented this was by ripping the Atom feed from my Google Reader Shared Items Page, take each item in it and format it as a <ul>, and then post it to my blog using XMLRPC/metaWebLog. Here’s the script, commented for your reading pleasure.

# Import a bunch of things we'll need.
# feedparser is from http://www.feedparser.org/
import feedparser
import time
import xmlrpclib
from xml.dom import minidom
from pprint import pprint

# Defines how to post to the blog.
def blogPost( server, username, password, date, title, content ):
datastruct = {'pubDate': date, 'description':content, 'title':title}
returncode = server.metaWeblog.newPost('1',username,password,datastruct,1)
print returncode

# Initialize some details.
# You would need to put your real blog url, username, and password here, though.
servname = xmlrpclib.Server("http://iansinke.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php")
username = 'xxxxx'
password = 'xxxxx'

# Check to make sure it's working.
pprint(servname.system.listMethods())

# Set up the post data.
Title = "Recommended Reading"
Date = ""
Content = ""

# Parse the feed.
# You would need to replace the URL with your google reader account's \
# shared page URL, or some other RSS or Atom feed.
f = feedparser.parse("http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/15838963114361614548/state/com.google/broadcast")
ontent = Content + '<p>(Every Friday, I post my favorite blog posts of the week under the title "Recommended Reading".)</p>'
Content = Content + '<ul>'
for item in f.entries:
Content = Content + '<li><a href="' + item.link + '">' + item.title + '</a></li>'
Content = Content + '</ul>'
Content = Content + '<p> </p>'

# Post to the blog.
blogPost(servname, username, password, Date, Title, Content)

This took me about two hours to figure out and implement. Feel free to use it however you want.

I’m on Twitter

Twitter, the uber-popular mini-blogging site, welcomes Ian Sinke, persona extraordinaire.

You can check my updates at http://twitter.com/iansinke.

Right now I’m tweeting directly from my iGoogle home page with BeTwittered.

Oh, those spam ping-bots!

Not long ago, Raymond Chen blogged about those spam pingback-bots:

Last December, some people started to get annoyed by the pingback-bots, and others were confused by them. What’s the deal with those pingback-bots?

It’s all about fooling the search engines in order to make money, taking advantage of friendly policies at domain registrars to make it less costly an undertaking.

Step one: Register a bunch of domains with a domain registrar that includes a money-back guarantee.

Step two: Set up fake blogs on each of those sites, with different keywords.

Step three: Use a script to search the blogosphere for articles that contain keywords that match your site. (There appears to be a single script that 90% of the spam blogs use, since they all look exactly the same, and have the same bugs!)

Step four: Create a bogus blog entry for each one that say something like “Hey, here’s something interesting I found on the Internet” and then reprints the article in question. (You may notice that many of these sites mis-attribute the authorship; some of them even claim to have written the article themselves!)

Step five: Host ads on the site.

Step six: Just before the money-back guarantee period expires, look at each of your fake blogs to see which ones have made money from the ads and which ones haven’t. Cancel the domain registrations of the ones that didn’t make money.

Well, yesterday morning I logged into my wordpress admin dashboard and saw that I, too, had been attacked by a spam ping-bot. The website: a fake hair cair blog. Wait: a hair care blog!? Yes, they linked to my Recommended Listening post of last week. What does hair care have to do with classical music? Well, the title of the song I was reccommending in the post was The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. That might explain that bit.

This is where the story takes a turn for the worse. I should have blogged about it yesterday, but no, I put it off until today – and what do you know, the blog has gone out of style, as Raymond predicts:

Most of these sites are in existence for only a few days, so trying to stop each individual site is a waste of effort; the site is going away soon anyway.

The moral of the story: Don’t procrastinate.

A Comparison of URL Shortening Services

URL shortening services link a long URL you give them to a shorter one they provide. Apparently, the big name in URL shortening is TinyURL. I was wondering the other day which URL shortening service made the shortest URLs. So I compared a bunch of them, shortening a long Engadget URL. (I read Engadget daily.)

Original:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/15/live-from-macworld-2008-steve-jobs-keynote/

Metamark:
http://xrl.us/bd7gn
notlong:
http://enga.notlong.com
Qurl:
http://qurl.com/sj6ss
Shorl:
http://shorl.com/badrabrofropih
Snipurl:
http://snipurl.com/1x966
Tinylink:
http://tinylink.com/?kADrhuq1GD
TinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/38xtah
URLcut:
http://urlcut.com/1ozmt

Hmm. We have a tie for last place: Shorl and Tinylink both have 31 characters in their new links. I’ve got to admit, that’s an improvement over the original 78 characters, but it’s pitiful compared to Metamark’s 19 characters. Metamark is the clear winner, two whole characters longer than Qurl’s 21 characters. The moral: the most popular is not always the best.

Please take this quick survey

Click Here to take a quick (4 question) survey regarding what you know about music.

Weekly Tech Blog Roundup, 2nd edition

A collection of links to my favorite posts from the last week.

• Making Donations Easy (Coding Horror)
• Who Wrote This Crap? (Coding Horror)
• That Sinking Feeling and Repairing a Corrupt WAV file (Scott Hanselman)
• How to Demo Software (Joel Spolsky)
• Windows 7: Microsoft’s MinWin Kernel Not So New (Paul Thurrot)
• Gmail + IMAP = Love (Paul Thurrot)
• Is it time for 64-bit on the desktop? (Coding Horror)

Three Cool Contests

The Code Project Visual Studio 2008 Beta Competition

Criterion: Write a great Visual Studio 2008 Beta article. Post it on CodeProject.com. Wait.
Prize(s): $1,000 cash, a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, and more.
Find out more.

The Code Project Monthly Competitions

Criterion: Write a great .Net/ASP.Net/MFC article. Post it on CodeProject.com. Wait.
Prize(s): Everything from control libraries to software to books.
Find out more.

The DotNetSlackers Forum Posting Challenge

Criterion: Post lots, lots, lots of posts on the DotNetSlackers.com forums.
Prize(s): Telerik RADControls, Xbox 360 Elite, software, books
Find out more.

Weekly Tech Blog Roundup, 1st edition

A collection of links to my favorite posts from the last week.

• Don’t Click Here: The Art of Hyperlinking (Coding Horror)
• Paint.NET v3.20 *ALPHA* is now available (Paint.NET Blog)
• Wikipedia as another traffic source for a software web site (Planet Micro-ISV)
• How To: Use Google Earth and SketchUp to Visualize a New House Lot (Scott Hanselman)
• Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance (Scott Guthrie)
• Staying on top of things with timely updates in separator pages (The Old New Thing)

Gmail gets IMAP

I’ve been using Gmail as my primary email account for a while now, but I’ve never bothered syncing it with Outlook, partly because Gmail’s web interface is great and partly because Gmail didn’t support IMAP. However, as of yesterday, the Gmail team has added the IMAP support they promised to Gmail.

Microsoft Announces Office Live Workspaces, rips off Google Docs

Today I got a notification by email of the beta launch of Microsoft Office Live Workspaces. I, of course, clicked the link and read more about it, before signing up for the beta. (I’m on the waiting list right now, of course.) You know, it seems to be a blatant ripoff of Google Docs – to save me time, I just cut and pasted this from the beta website:

Anywhere Access

• Store 1000+ Microsoft Office documents in one place
• Access them from almost any computer with a Web browser
• No more flash drives or sending yourself documents via e-mail

Share With Others

• Invite people to your workspace
• You control who can view, comment, and edit your documents
• Stop manually merging versions from multiple people

Works With Microsoft Office

• Open and save files directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook
• No need to learn a new program

Hmm. “Anywhere Access.” “Share with others.” “Invite people to your workspace.” Where, oh where have I seen that before?

The suspense is unbearable

As mentioned in my previous post, Firewheel Design, the people behind IconBuffet and Blinksale, are working on something new. What it is, nobody knows, but today Josh revealed on the IconBuffet news blog that…

We’re working on a new game. I can’t tell you what the game is about, what it does, or how it’s played. But I can tell you that if you like IconBuffet, you’re probably going to love this. I hope… if you don’t then we’ve made a tragic mistake. Doh!

I can tell you more in a couple weeks.

Over the next week or two, I’m going to slowly reveal a few details about the game so we can you up to speed before we launch it. We’re going to really need our IconBuffet peeps to help us out — be early adopters as it would be — to aid us in getting the kinks worked out. So stay tuned here for the latest. I can’t wait to tell you more.

Hey Firewheel design…

Is the wait nearly over?

(Mystified? Click here.)

High speed!

As of today, we finally have high speed internet. The old connection was a whopping 128kbps, whereas the new one is 5mbps (or so). Here’s the full report from speedtest.net:

Large files that used to take a whole night to download now download in 10 minutes!

Thoughts: I love Akismet

So far, Akismet (WordPress’s spam filter) has caught 888 spam messages. Compare that to 8 legitimate comments so far on this blog (3 of which were pingbacks, and two of which I wrote.)

I’m kind of disappointed with 110mb.com

A week or two ago I expressed here on my blog my excitement over 110mb.com “free” web hosting. Yes, the basic hosting package was free. But MySQL only comes for a price. Oh well, I didn’t really need MySQL anyway.

I’ve decided to do the OSWD thing

Lately I’ve been really having fun creating web site designs, so I’ve decided to share them on OSWD.org. OSWD stands for Open Source Website Design; they have thousands of free designs available. You only need to link back to the designer’s web site.

Microsoft Popfly, Part 2: Mashups

(If you haven’t read Part 1 of my review yet, you might want to.)

The second, much more exciting half of Popfly is the Mashup creator. Mashups pull data from one or more web services and mash it together, using one web service to parse the data, or another to output the data, to create a unique web service.

Since I have very little experience with mashups, I simply followed the Popfly tutorial to create a Windows Live Local map with the last 10 twitter posts on it. I found the tutorial to be simple and easy to follow. I think I will be using Popfly to create mashups in the future, if I ever need to.

To create a mashup, you have to select “Create a mashup” on the Popfly home page, which brings you straight to the mashup designer.

To the left of the Mashup designer is the toolbox. You can drag and drop items from the toolbox onto the designer surface, and then connect them with lines using the pencil tool. After you drag and drop items onto the designer surface, you can change their settings or connect them to other blocks with lines. Here I have dropped a Twitter block onto the surface and am changing its settings.

Finally, when you’re finished, you can save your mashup to your account. Once again, whatever space your mashup takes up comes off your 25 MB of disk space.

Microsoft Popfly, Part 1: Web Pages

Microsoft Popfly is a new free online service (still in beta alpha) that lets you create mashups and web pages. It also includes the “Popfly Spaces” feature that allows you to store your mashups and web pages online, and access your mashups from within the Visual Studio Express Editions. People can download your mashups and use them in their Windows Vista sidebar or their Live.com personalized home page. In this the first part of my review, I will be covering the Microsoft Popfly web page designer.

Popfly is 100% powered by Microsoft Silverlight, which is also in beta right now, so I needed to download Silverlight first before I started using Popfly. On the Popfly home page, you are given options for creating a mashup or a web page.

After clicking on “Create web page”, you are brought (almost) immediately to the Popfly web page designer. The web page designer has a user interface a la Microsoft Office 2007. Excuse me, make that “the 2007 Microsoft Office System” (snicker). 

The web page designer is very easy to use, although I found it to be a tiny bit slow to add text formatting. Of course, I have a very slow internet connection.

The ribbon interface currently only has two tabs, Page Editor and Page Style. On the Page Style tab, you can choose a color scheme and a theme for your web site. There is a wide selection of themes, grouped into categories, and matching color schemes that make your web page look great. 

I selected a “Computers and Electronics” theme for my test web page, and chose the “Breeze” color scheme.

The editor makes it easy to add pictures, links, etc. to your web page. If you upload a picture, it is stored in your Popfly Space. Each user gets 25 megabytes of space to store pictures, mashups, and web pages.

I uploaded a sample picture (nothing spectacular, just an icon from IconBuffet) so I could see what the image uploading process was like. I found the upload/insert process to be  easy and straightforward.

Formatting is also easy.

When you’ve finished creating your web page, you can preview it in your browser. 

In conclusion, I think the Popfly web page editor shows potential to become a great web publishing tool. However, it needs a bit of work to become a professional-level editor. Of course, since it’s in alpha, that can be expected.

Check back here tomorrow for a review of the Popfly mashup creator.

Three Cheers for OpenDNS

As I mentioned in my previous post, my Mom was complaining about her internet connection being terribly slow. I had heard of OpenDNS, which claims to speed up your internet connection speed, but had never actually tried it. So I thought I would try it out and then blog about my experience.

First step: Finding out what my old speed was. Our internet connection is called “High Speed Lite”, but that’s an insult to high speed internet; its maximum speed is 128 kbps. I ran a simple test at Bandwidth Place, which told me my connection speed was 123 kpbs.

Then, I went to OpenDNS.com and looked for the downloads page. Except you don’t need to download anything. Their easy-to-follow instructions stated that all you need to do is open control panel and change two settings!

Well, I was dubious, but I changed the settings. The instructions said that I needed to reboot my computer, but their online test page said that everything was OK, so I avoided that minor frustration.

I went back to the Bandwidth Place for another connection speed test and – voila! – my new speed was 133 kbps – a 12% increase!

If your internet connection speed is lousy, I can reccomend OpenDNS.

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