Sep 27, 2007 | blog
I’ve been a longtime Firefox user, using many of the excellent plug-ins to extend the experience as I find more services that I use online. Like many people, I’ve let myself get a bit overloaded with added features, and yes there were several that I no longer use.
So tonight I went through my entire browser, bookmarks, organization, toolbars, plug-ins – the whole works. I’ve stripped down to the bare essentials and gotten rid of ALL the toolbars I had loaded. I never used them. Only the bookmark toolbar is left, and that went from about 50 buttons down to 14 buttons – it may loose even more, we’ll see.
The idea being that I put only the sites, services, and tools that I use every darn day on the bookmark toolbar. The rest of my bookmarks have been reorganized into one of (up to) ten categories – and yes I numbered them. When I click on Bookmarks now, I only see 10 categories. My apologies to Chris Brogan, I borrowed the term "rockstars" for the blogs I actually visit instead of reading their feeds.
I’ll be doing more work on the organization, but I had over 70 folders under my Bookmarks to begin with. Yeah, I’ll still have a hard time finding everything, but I believe that I can weed out feeds over time. This was to get the initial Bookmark menu so I didn’t have to scroll through it to find a folder.
So, I’ve got a ways to go before it’s fully organized to weed out the dead links and make it easier to find things but it’s a start. Wondering what add-ons I left in place? here’s a rundown that I use almost every day.
Well, that about does it for my browsing environment. Firefox is my main browser, but I do keep Internet Explorer, Opera, and Flock loaded for testing purposes. I’m thinking of adding Safari, but it’ll have to wait for a little while.
Now, what is your browsing environment like? What tools, add-ins, and programs do you use? Let me know. 🙂
Technorati tags: Firefox, Browser Add Ons, coComment, FireFTP, Google Notebook, GUtil, MeasureIt, Twitbin, Twitter, del.icio.us, ColorZilla, Windows Live Writer, Download Statusbar, Foxmarks
Sep 17, 2007 | blog
Here is an example of when the automatic update feature that is increasingly being enabled on software and drivers is a headache. Driver stability.
My "new" laptop (I bought it in May), has a built-in 1.3MP WebCam that utilizes the Logitech QuickCam firmware. That’s great because it’s recognized by the Logitech drivers and all the advanced functionality that their software brings. Now the bad thing about it is that the latest Logitech software seems to be less then perfect.
The camera picture will lock up and the camera will "turn off". This sometimes will be accompanied some time later (minutes to hours) with a complete, spectacular system crash, complete with blue screen (yes, it still exists) with dual outputs for both cores since it’s a Core Duo.
Pretty neat – hadn’t seen the dual-core dump, but I’d rather have the camera function like it should. This event simply underscores the necessity of stable drivers for any operating system, and that there are enough possible combinations of hardware that it will become nearly impossible for a hardware company to be able to completely test them all.
I’ll be checking into rolling back to older software to see if that solves the problem. It just shouldn’t happen in the first place though. One more reason I’ll be checking out a MacBook next.
Technorati tags: System Crash, Vista Blue Screen, Logitech WebCam Drivers, Logitech Driver Crash
Sep 9, 2007 | blog
Ok, I’ve been using WLW for over a year now and really enjoy the tool. However, there are a few nit-picking things that I have to be fixed in the darn thing along with some ideas that would benefit the product.
In the last two beta releases, they have improved the product substantially (download beta 3 here) with many visual and feature enhancements. My current favorite update was the ability to (finally!) schedule posting to my hosted WordPress blogs.
- Complete Blog Integration – I happen to be a WordPress (hosted on my domain – not wordpress.com) user and expect that all the features will work with it. Others use TypePad, Blogger, and others. Integrate the product work the same with all these blogging platforms as well as it does with Live Spaces.
- CSS Classes – I wish that the editor would parse the CSS from a selected blog and allow the user to use the CSS Classes to be applied to text/items in the post creation area. For example, I have a uniquely formatted class called “tags” for each of my blogs, and it formats my “Technorati Tags” with a right-justified arrangement with a border and background combo for each blog. Same type of class formatting for my abbreviations.
- Tag Info – Wish that the tags for the post itself (again the Technorati tags) could be fed to the blog as entries to the “tags” field in the database. This way, the tagging information can be appended to the post by the blogging software with my formatting, and without putting too much space and visual clutter into each post.
- Custom Tagging Tool – The ability to insert tags and have them pre-formatted with the proper URL each time is great. Here’s what would make it better. Allow me to completely write the HTML code for the tool – you’re close now, just get rid of any WLW specific HTML.
- True XHTML – This is one of the big ones. GET RID OF ANY CUSTOM “WINDOWS LIVE WRITER” HTML OR “WINDOWS LIVE” SPECIFIC HTML. The output of this editor MUST be pure XHTML to be truly cross platform usable. Luckily I’ve figured out how to work around this every time there is a new update to the editor, but others may not be able to do these workarounds. Simply, if a blog that the bloggers is publishing to is not Windows Live Spaces, then the custom HTML used by WLW should be disabled and the blog theme and CSS should be followed by WLW.
Well, that’s a handful of suggestions that need to be worked into the final release of Windows Live Writer. Didn’t plan on it being exactly five, but that’s how it works sometimes. Come on WLW team, let’s get this stuff right, you’re so close to matching my expectations, it’s not too hard to finish it properly.
Anyone else have some suggestions to the Windows Live Writer team?
UPDATE: Thanks to Kent Newsome’s Evening Reading post, I noticed another blogger mentioning WLW. Claus over at Grand Slam Dreams has written a quick review of WLW beta3. Also, for those of you looking for more information on the XHTML support in WLW beta3, check out Joe Cheng at whateverblog where he elaborates on WLW’s XHTML support
Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, WordPress, Rick Mahn
Aug 17, 2007 | blog
So I’m kickin’ back relaxing with a beverage this evening and see a tweet from Twitter friend Chris Pirillo pointing to an interesting app that I hadn’t seen before. Click.
Kinda cool, called Real Desktop from a Schillergames in Germany. Interesting deal, puts a 3D desktop on the Windows desktop. Very cool if you’re really interested in a great looking “glassy” 3D environment that can resemble your messy desk!
Be sure to check out the demo video on the main page.
Technorati tags: Real Desktop, 3D Desktop, Application Launcher
Update: Removed link due to the site having possible malware.
Jul 6, 2007 | blog
I’ve reading a bit about Flock lately, so I’m going to give it a try. I’ll let you know how that goes. I’m looking for any way to tie together the social networks better than they are today.
Technorati tags: Flock, Social Web Browser
