Jun 19, 2006 | blog
Ugh… There has been a bit of discussion on blog design lately, and I’ll admit that its not easy. I’ve been working on getting two new blogs ready for launch and the layout, design scheme, etc… is the hardest part.
Yes I will eventually hire a professional to give them an overhaul sometime in the future, but the sites will have to pay for that themselves, right now I need to create a compelling design on my own. Now keep in mind that I’m at heart a computer geek – a Windows computer geek – and you get the idea of how easy a time I’m having. 🙂
So in addition to learning a little about Linux, some about MySQL, a bit more on PHP, and quite a bit on WordPress. I now need to really get to understand color combinations, graphic elements and the like. Of course the technical aspects of all this makes complete sense, but the technical part is only one of many aspects of blog (and web) design.
For this site, I’ve stuck with a freeware template that I found out on the ‘net, and I’m fairly happy with it. I’ll update the design on this site sometime in the near future, and it’ll probably be my main experimental site for design experimentation and learning.
I must say thank-you to Chris Pearson for a recent post on the topic of web design pricing – it was a real eye opener. I understand completely because every job has its complexities, and that is why we hire professionals – so things come out looking right!
Jun 16, 2006 | blog
And that’s all this news raging about Bill Gates is – the next chapter. Obviously it’s the next chapter in his life, and in Microsoft’s.It’s also the next chapter for the technology industry, and computing as a whole. I’ve purposely avoided reading too many articles on the topic of his “moving” to part time.
The little bit I read was Scoble’s Heading to the BBC post, and Jeff Jarvis’ post The meaning of Bill. Both are insightful and told me more about the meaning of this change than any 5 second sound bite.
Regardless of your opinion of Bill Gates, at least read these two pieces.
UPDATE: Mathew Ingram also has makes some interesting points on Microsoft and questions what would be best for the company.
Jun 16, 2006 | blog
I’m a little disappointed in both Microsoft and Adobe on this topic. On the one hand, Microsoft has answered the requests of many of its customers in adding the feature to the current Word 2007 beta 2 release. On the other, you have them also adding their new XPS document format – a competitor the PDF format that we all use.
Adobe, is threatening Microsoft in statements about how Microsoft’s history of “embrace and extend” has destroyed other products and markets, in essence absorbing the market to the point that there is no point in competing. Of course Adobe does keep pointing out that their PDF format is an open standard and is the “de facto standard” for portable documents.
The disappointing part is that Adobe simply doesn’t trust Microsoft on this, and Microsoft has done nothing to make anyone believe that it isn’t after conquering the portable document market. The same behavior has been seen before on numerous occasions and Adobe has every right to be worried – Acrobat & PDF are one of its most visible brands that define the company.
So how do these partners move forward? How will they resolve this in the best interests of the customer? Microsoft’s Word development team had the right idea in making it easy for their customers to create PDF documents from Word documents. The XPS document format is interesting, but why create another portable format when PDF is already entrenched? What “enhancements” could Microsoft bring to the table in a service pack and render the Adobe Acrobat unable to read the new file format? Who’s to say that’s what would happen? Why wouldn’t it?
The simple thing for both companies to do is for Microsoft to abandon its XPS format in this case, actually enter into a licensing agreement with Adobe with verbiage to explicitly accept that Adobe is the sole developer of the PDF format. Adobe would generate royalties from licensing and both companies customers would gain from the agreement.
Of course the reality is that PDF may be an open standard, but Adobe’s Acrobat Pro is a $125 shipping product, and simply having PDF creation capabilities in Word virtually eliminates the need for this product, regardless of who develops the file format going forward. Add to that – if Word usurps Acrobat’s creation abilities, what incentive is there for Adobe to expend resources to develop and distribute a free reader for it?
Also, don’t forget that competition is the lubrication of innovation. Interesting stuff will develop because of this little riff.
Jun 14, 2006 | blog
Ok, thought I’d give a quick update on where I’m at using OneNote as a blogging tool, and I’ll try to keep it short.
ITS GREAT!
So I was able to follow Chris Pratley’s workaround (look at the bottom of the post) to get blogging through Word to work. And it does! Here are the steps I do have to go thru:
Simply highlight what you want to post, right-click and select “Blog This”. OneNote then shoots the selection over to Word and uses the blog template that ships with Beta2.
Edit the post if needed, and then I publish the post as a draft to my blog.
Once the draft post is on my blog, I can log in and make sure the formatting is correct, select the categories I want for the post, and add the
Technorati tags.
Finally I correct the date for the post since Word currently generates an incorrect date.
Publish post
So that’s it! Yes there are a few steps to the process, but being able to use OneNote as the creation tool is simply incredible.
Jun 14, 2006 | blog
I’ve got to apologize to anyone who has seen some odd behavior on my blog in the last 24 hours. I’ve installed the no-www plug-in that Matt talked about a few days ago. For more info go to www. Is deprecated.
It seems to work good at what it was designed to do, redirect any www request to the root domain. For example, if you entered https://www.rickmahn.com into your browser, the site would redirect you to https://rickmahn.com automagically.
This is cool for me as I want to just direct people to RickMahn.com rather typing out a full URL all the time, or describing www… as we have for years.
The problem of course is that all my stats are funky for the last 24 hours because they are trying to track hits on www.rickmahn.com instead of rickmahn.com. And, the RSS feed was tripped up as well, trying to pull updates from the wrong sub domain.
The good news is that it was a quick fix for all of these self-induced problems, and I hope it did not interfere too much!
If anyone runs across any issues – please don’t hesitate to comment on this post, and I’ll jump on it right away.
