Category Archives: Internet

General tibbets about the Internet go here.

–FeedDemon

Posted on by

I actually really don’t like FeedDemon. They’ve clearly tried to act like Google Reader in a lot of ways (or maybe Reader decided to be like them when they started) but Google does everything much better. Which annoys me.

I was really look forwards to venturing out beyond Google’s services and trying others but Google’s monopoly on awesome is held really tightly for some reason.

I didn’t like FeedDemon because:

  • It doesn’t mark items as read after I’ve been looked at the item. After the item has been selected it should immediately become read, keeping an item as unread isn’t the default action that I’d want.
  • Control + D to go to the next unread item. I’m sure you can change that, but by default that’s a dumb idea. What’s wrong with J (which works in some cases, but not others)? I typical action such as going to the next item shouldn’t require a combination key press. I know this sounds lazy, but I have to move my hand to press control, and that annoys me.
  • It seems to be using Internet Explorer in the reading pane. Not so much of a big deal, but wha’?

I really do like the syncing with Google though. I know I wanted to get away from Google to start with, but it’s more about working in the cloud than fanboyism. I like all my stuff being synced. My laptop should really just be  a throw away device.

I also liked the monospaced, large reading area though. But for now I’ll just give Reader a quick CSS hack to do that.

Start and home pages

Posted on by

For the past few years I’ve been using Google Reader as my homepage, since I go there every few hours really frequently. Today though, I’ve decided that I want to change the way I use RSS feeds. Instead of just lumping together all the things I want to read in Google Reader, and then being overwhelmed when there’s a few hundred things  a day, I just want to keep Reader for infrequently updated feeds. More a feed reader (web comics, forum threads I want to keep track of, WordPress trac posts I want to keep track of) than a content reader (TechCrunch, Valleywag, Mashable). For content, I can go to their websites.

I’ve also decided to try out FeedDemon.

That leaves my homepage empty now, and I’ve been thinking of sites to replace Reader. I figured start.io might be a good idea before realising that my bookmarks do that job in a much more organised and quicker way. I actually really don’t like iGoogle, and I’m not sure why. I have a perfectly good search bar with more functionality right up top of my browser.

BBC News is pretty depressing most of the time. I like to be caught up on the news, but death, war, and economic failure isn’t really the pick me up I want to see first thing in the morning. Maybe I’ll go with /r/funny. That’d be new content each time I go there, and it’d make me happy. I’ll go with that for a while.

Firefox 3.5b4: Storing data for offline use fuxxored.

Posted on by
Good idea, that doesn't work.

Good idea, that doesn't work.

For me at least anyway, and I’ve only tried it on two WordPress installations running bleeding edge 2.8. I get this message, click allow, and then all pages work once. Caching on the first load.

Then, if I refresh the page, or go back to it later, everything loads without the style sheet and JavaScript – the cached stuff. To fix it, I had to go into Options > Advance > Network and then remove my websites from the list.

I guess they’re for some reason competing with Google Gears, which makes little sense. Why compete? Why not just advertise Gears? They do exactly the same thing from what I can see.

Update: A lot of people are getting here to find out how to use Gears in the Firefox beta. You can use all your extensions (even if Firefox says they’re not compatible) by editing a single option. Of course, if you do that you could end up crashing Firefox or something, but you can just start in safe mode and disable it again.

  • Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
  • Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
  • Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
  • Restart Firefox.

I’ll just check reddit one more time

Posted on by

Realising I’ve been at my laptop pretty much 13 hours a day for the past month, I decided to take a break from it. Granted, the break was only two hours forty minutes, but it seemed much longer and I felt that I’d reached the high point of how relaxed I’d become, and actually felt myself becoming more stressed.

I guess I just don’t have anything else to do… When I’ve not been infrequently out with high school friends from back here I’ve just been bouncing between xbox and my laptop. In fact, whilst at the xbox I usually have my laptop open next to me… Offline hobby seeking required.

Oddly, I only got a 40 on this survey about having an Internet addiction, and I was totally truthful.

A step in the wrong direction for paid content…

Posted on by

I think it’s important that new generations look into alternate ways of doing everything – specifically in this post though I’m talking about ways copywriters can make money from their content. Businesses need to seek out people with ideas that don’t stick to the status quo because when people get into a habit or a life style, it’s hard for them to get out of it.

There’s this new company that’s in the talking stages with various websites, Journalism Online, who has noticed that advertising revenues just aren’t cutting it any more, and paper sales of publishers’ content isn’t selling as much thanks to the Internet. That’s a valid and real problem for the media world. Their solution? Charge people to read the content. That’s an outdated monetisation method that just won’t work.

The reason it’s been chosen is that Journalism Online is headed by three people all of which are from the biz. Former producers, former executives. They’ve been around for years and charging people for the content is what’s comfortable for them, it’s what they know. But it’s an antiquated system which doesn’t follow along with the ethos of the Internet; “I’ll get it from some place else for free.”

Ars seems to think this is viable because some other publishers are already doing this and quite successfully. The Economist charges more than $100 a year for subscriptions and that’s where they make the bulk of their money (which is odd in an industry where advertising revenue is the biggest earner typically).

The Economist‘s demographic is high salaried, business minded, career orientated, older people. Eventually, those people will die. Younger people – the people who business always want to target – aren’t getting their news from paper-based publications; they’re getting it from the Internet. For free. And they become to expect that. Users get really annoyed when things change (Facebook homepage update, LiveJournal’s shift to Basic and Plus accounts a while ago, Twitter stopping sending SMSs to UK phones, take your pick for an example), and going from getting our news for free to having to start paying for a subscription for the same thing we’ve been getting for years makes us angry.

Journalism Online‘s approach to changing websites that we use everyday will work for a short while – whilst the people that are used to paying are still buying. But when they stop, you’ll have no customers left.

Geeking it up together

Posted on by

After working on Summer09 all day (that’s its working title), I’ve decided to take a break now that the hours can now be called “small”.

I was Vimeo stumbling, happy that I have high speed internet access to watching videos in HD, when I found this.

If you’re too lazy to watch the video, basically what it is is a person once in a while opening their home/office/space to random workers, typically freelancers from the looks of things, in a really casual working session. I guess it’s a lot like a hackspace, but solely for laptop work. I love that there are places like this, and I really wish there were more of them.

I’ve looked through the workatjelly wiki for places in the UK that do these, but it doens’t look like there are any set up at the moment. For the moment I’ll stick with the hackspace stuff.

There’s a meeting on Saturday which I’ve nabbed a ticket for, and am definitely going. I’m just planning on taking my laptop so far, but if I can find the money to, I think I’ll hunt down a Maplins and get a arduino board (which I’m not even sure what it is) and generally geek out. I’m hugely excited if not slightly nervous about meeting a group of strangers.

The state of my market

Posted on by

After doing a few hours of market research (not exactly in depth, but a quick glance over my market) it turns out there is a definite gap. I’ve found a few websites (two) that offer exactly what I’m offering, and a few more that offer close to my service.

After playing with the former two (they give out two week free trails) it looks like they both designed fairly badly. They’re definitely not easy to navigate and both use confusing terminology. I’m not sure if they’re trying to avoid Microsoft’s names that have been used in their offline solution, but if they are they’re doing so needlessly. They’re not trademarked terms – they’re everyday words in the field – and changing them causes confusion for everyone. Especially when they use one term that’s already used within the field, but they’re using it for a completely different thing!

They’re missing out blatantly obvious features that seem simple to program in my head. I’m not going to mention them here, but I’ve done so in a OneNotebook. (Which is an awesome and under rated piece of software, by the way.) The feature I’m most excited about, and the one that I think business most need, is completely missed out.

One of the competitors I looked into even completely misses out on a vital feature for their service. And they’re the business that’s charging $250 a month for their lowest package, which could explain why my possible customer projections was so low for them.

They’re also imposing limits on their service which are totally wrong. I like to think that a forte of mine is knowing how to monetise services (in fact, it’s a consultancy job I’d love to do, and I plan to do more blog posts on my views for large, net properties), and I definitely disagree with how both these businesses are charging.

I couldn’t really find any other companies that do exactly what I want to offer.  Other companies I did find though are hoping to completely remove the need for my service for their customers. I can see why that’s a massively attractive prospect for the customer. This is a service where a business would just outsource this aspect of their activities. However, there’s absolutely no reason why (so long as I make my product awesome enough) these companies that I see as competition at the moment shouldn’t become my customers.

Sorry about this all being vague. I just don’t want my idea to be stolen so early in the game.

I mentioned Microsoft having a software based application that does what my service does, and I should probably talk about why they aren’t currently competing with me. Microsoft’s version is software based, where as mine would be cloud based. In the future I truly believe software will be completely removed from out computers, in place of a browser (not even a browser, probably) where we do everyone of our activities online. We can already do almost everything (*winkwink*) from Office in Google Docs, and that trend is only going to intensify.

Businesses like the portability of being able to do their processes without being locked into their offices at their desktops, or having to buy separate software licenses for their laptops, desktops, home desktops, etc, etc. The fact that they can access all their data wherever in the world is awesome too, in fact why not even have employees that live on the opposite side of the world? Presentation and meeting applications have been revolutionised by the Internet and web apps and can happen any where. They also don’t have to worry about the hardware, that’d be my job. They don’t have to worry about scalability either! My servers should be able to handle ten times more data than they want me to store and still run perfectly. Tonnes of reasons why web apps trump applications, and I’ve barely started talking about it.

It’s true that Microsoft are moving into that area though. So area Google. So are other companies. That doesn’t worry me. They’re not working on what I’m doing at the moment. Which is integral; why would they start working on their own products if they can just buy business? I’m not saying I want to run this business for a year and then drop it for a quick sum of cash – I’d request to stay on in the company in some influential point (not just “founder”) – I’m just saying that’s an opportunity that I’m not ignoring.

More and more software giants are starting to give a shit about web apps because they can’t be pirated. You can’t crack serial codes for an online account to something like you can for Spore. That means a sustainable score of revenue for them, rather than a short jolt of revenue on release, and then that stopping as you watch the seeder count increase on The Pirate Bay.

This update has little point: A secret project I’m working on

Posted on by

I was looking through a Mashable post on some start-up companies which always gets me motivated. I want to be motivated because I wanna start working on that web app I want to release by the time I get back to uni in October. Seven months should be more than enough to program almost anything, but typically my heart isn’t in it. Hopefully it will be this time though.

I was reading that post and suddenly realised what I could make. I’m not going to release it here (because that’s how cool it is), but I am going to say that it’s focused on business, rather than social which I just assumed it would. Might not even happen, I’m gonna do some research and some screen designs and stuff.

Does it being business orientated mean that it needs to be less sans-serif and more serif? Less curved edges? WordPress looks professional, but more matured because of that. I dunno, I’m not a designer. I suppose that I’ll just make it bland until it looks like a finished product and then get a designer to come fix it up. (I’m more likely to make money from a finished project than an unfinished one, so why started shelling out money when it’s unfinished?)

Kevin Rose apparently draws out screens or something? Hopefully they’ll follow up the video he and Tim did. They’re basically talking about how investing works these days. Hugely interesting and enlightening.

Making an impact

Posted on by

Today marks a time in my life where I can do even less work that I’ve been doing so far; the Easter holidays. In fact, it’s more like breaking up for the year. The only reasons I have to return to university are two exams in May, after that I’m free to be where I like until October.

I’m not going to set out aims because I never reach them, and I look like someone that sucks at keeping to lists. Instead, I’m just gonna say somethings that it’d be cool to get done.

First thing is making an actual web app that actually does something and release it. My problem here is I always have ideas and then typically seconds later I read on Techcrunch that a start up has had an amazingly innovative idea that’s shockingly like mine. So, I’ll at least try and make a cool bookmarklet over the holidays. It’ll do something cool, honest.

I totally want to make my Tumblr the top search for shamess. It pretty much has everything to do with me; my tweets, my shared RSS stories, even this blog. It’s pretty damn nifty. I don’t know many people that use it though. Tumblr was actually an idea of mine too, which I guess I had an age too late. I was thinking of making an extension for Firefox that’d let me grab a piece of text/image/video and stick it on another site for later viewing. Then I found that’s exactly what Tumblr did, so I started out there.

Another idea I had a while ago was what start.io is doing. In fact, I already have that system on my localhost page, but I think I’ll likely switch to start.io now. Anything I don’t like about it I can just change using a Greasemonkey script (like showing the links in a different order depending on what time it is).

I picked up WoW again today, in all it’s lowest graphical settings, OpenGL glory. I played a hefty amount of hours before I wasn’t having fun. Maybe I should just limit myself to an hour or two playing? That’s the height of fun before I get bored and leave the game thinking “I can’t believe I just spent so long playing this dumb game.” That’s just a downer. It’s just so damn easy to forget that you’re supposed to be having fun.

Same as Tribal Wars, really. My tribe is proper hardcore playing, and up annoyed at me for lagging behind. To be honest, I have been trying, I’ve no idea what has caused me to fall behind so much. But either way they’re acting like I’m a bad person because I’m not up in the tens of thousands of points and have three villages. Really? I play the game till it stops being fun each day, if that’s before I reach optimum pointage, then that’s the way it is.

Being a geek makes me happy :D

Posted on by

I came to this page and was immediately hit with a massive bout of exhaustion. That makes no sense, since I slept all night, if anything I’m over sleeping as of late. Despite that, I’m determined to explain why I’ve been so happy for the past few days.

First, my passion for working in industry, with a team of people, has totally been reignited. For some reason I found myself on Tumblr again, which I’m loving. Somehow I ended up at the official Tumblr staff account, and dawdled around people like Jacob Bijani’s tumblelog. I honestly spent an entire night, probably the best part of six hours, reading the latest ten pages. Wikipedia style, I kept ending up at random web pages he links to (and then pages those pages link to) and found masses of amazing stuff.

Ultimately that night I ended up at taking a look around tumblr offices. Gosh, how much I’d love to have a desk like that, have actual projects to work on, and people around me to do that stuff with. I mean, I’m all for being a lone programmer when I need to be, but sometimes it’s just cool to geek out of programming. I don’t really have anyone like that at the moment.

Second, I found an article on Wired (via reddit) on “hack spaces“. Pretty much a workshop for awesome people to meet up and work on stuff. Hardware tinkering, programming, tonnes of different stuff. They usually have a persistent space, like a rented room or something, where they can keep their stuff and just waste an entire day away. I hear that some are open 24/7.

Turns out it’s not just an American thing (it didn’t even start in America), but there’s a whole group of people all over the world. I found that there’s a hack space being created in Birmingham that I really want to be apart of. I’m not sure how I’m going to afford it; these things are funded by their community, with members paying a subscription. There was talk of it being about £50 a month, which I don’t think I’ll be able to make. Since I’ll be in Leicester most of the time, it might work out cheaper to just pay for meets I attend.

I’m massively excited about this.

The third thing is MCR  released a song for Watchmen. You’ve no idea how happy it makes me to hear their music again. Gerard’s voice just makes me grin like a lunatic. Honestly, standing in the middle of the street with a huge grin, lunatic. Considering it’s the thing that makes me happiest, I’ve no got much to say about it…