TheGeoffRe(y)port

Seems like the times are a changin’, and I’ve recently replaced a few of my ol’ favourite techie tools for some newer, shinier ones. And given that someone out there voted for more tech posts, I thought I’d give this a go.

From Bloglines to Google Reader

Bloglines has been good to me. It introduced me to the idea of a web-based feed reader, which lets me keep track of over 100 different blogs at a time. Bloglines improved my blog-reading capabilities enormously. But it started to get annoying. Click on a blog with lots of unread posts and you feel like you need to read them all then and there, because they’ll disappear otherwise. Google Reader, however, gives a huge amount of freedom. I can read the posts now, leave them for later, read the one that captures me now and mark it as unread if I didn’t quite finish. It’s too easy. Plus the fact that the ability to export my subscriptions from Bloglines as OPML and into Google Reader without losing anything, made it a no-brainer.

Plus I’m really enjoying having this “Starred Posts” thing happening. It took a little bit of fiddling around, because Google outputs the feeds as Atom 1.0 or something (which my little feed widget can’t handle), but a little bit of feed conversion magic from FeedBurner and the whole world can see the posts I found interesting. Which brings me onto my second transition…..

From Locally Managed Feed to FeedBurner

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, my “feed” is a little text document that pretty much allows people to keep updated with what I’ve posted recently. You “subscribe” to the feed with a tool like Google Reader, or Bloglines (if you’re a little bit backward) and hey-presto, you can find out as soon as there’s something new posted. ANYWAY, because plenty of you people know this already lots of people subscribe to this feed, and it’s entirely possible that lots don’t even visit the actual blog any more, they just follow along in their feed reader. (If you are one of those, I’d love to hear from you, but you might actually need to get out a bit and visit the site)

So there’s a chunk of these type of people, and I don’t have anyway of working out who they are, short of manually checking through thousands of lines of log files, which isn’t quite my idea of fun. At least I couldn’t until now. FeedBurner lets you host your feed with them, and they take record all sorts of fun statistics on how many people are subscribed, what kind of reader they’re using, basically everything I could want to know about my feed. It’s great fun, and just adds that extra little something to the whole blogging stat-watching experience. There’s even a Wordpress plugin to automatically re-route all my old feed traffic to the new feedburner feed!

From Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 2

Firefox is dead, long live Firefox. Well, not quite. But the shiny new, recently announced Firefox 2 is a gentle step up from the previous version. It’s a pretty little thing, seems to run a whole lot gentler, less crashy, and when it does terminate unexpectedly (including when your laptop battery runs out), it just magically returns you back to where you were - including data entered into forms. It’s a pretty special little doo-dad, certainly beats the pants of the equally new Internet Explorer 7, and it’s making my life much better all round. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you’d best get onto it.

iPod to…… silence

Not all is happy in GeoffTechLand. For the past 15 days, my iPod has been out of action. Fortunately it was still (just) under warranty. Unfortunately, since it got sent in, it’s taking forever for them to ship me a replacement. Once they do though…. it’ll be back on the music train for me!

Just because I was sick of seeing the same layout every day, and mostly because I came across this brilliant new Wordpress template (see the link in the footer for the creator), I thought I’d have a bit of a try out of something completely different. No guarantees that it’ll stay - although my feeling is that we’ll go with it for a while. And have a bit of patience if things shift around a bit - still sorting out the little fiddly details. So leave your nasty, “I’m never coming back here again while you keep this design” comments after the tone.

Beep.

….is free wireless. And this is as good a list of all the free wireless spots around Melbourne as I’ve seen.

Well, there comes a time in every nerds life when he (or she) must make a decision. Whether they will stick with the evil Micro$oft empire, become a pretty little (cashed up) Mac person or join the hard-core nerd community and go with a Linux distro. And I’ve been wanting to leave the dark days of Windows for quite a while, but until now I’ve had too many reasons to stick with my Blue Screen of Death generator.

But things are changing. My work laptop, which is the machine I (ironically) use mostly when I’m not at work, now runs Ubuntu Linux. I only ran the install yesterday (freakishly easy install) but already I’m liking this thing. I had been playing around with an Ubuntu install on a VMWare virtual machine, but now I’m fully immersed. There are some cool things already, like having such a wealth of applications available for immediate install, and getting updated automatically. All very cool.

So stay tuned, I’m pretty sure the adventures of Geoff on Ubuntu will become a semi-regular feature here. If you’re wanting to follow along at home - you can download the CD image from the Ubuntu main site. It’s free. And in the wonderful world of Linux, free is a word you start to hear a lot of.

Months and months ago I posted about the new IE 7 Beta - well it’s now available as a release candidate (meaning it should crash a whole lot less). It looks pretty, has tabs, has a slightly cumbersome UI but I’m willing to get over lots of it. Basically, it’s a good browser without being great. They’ve weeded out lots of the really frustrating rendering things, so that web developers are happier people generally, and they’ve got it coming close to where Firefox is at. Personally, I think that Firefox still kicks its behind, but given that we’ve got a few apps that only work in IE at work - there are worse problems than having to end up using this puppy for them. Naturally, I’d recommend that rather than use this, you click on the “Firefox with Google Toolbar” icon on the lower left hand side. But this is better than using IE 6, so if you’re still using that - get onto IE 7 quick smart!

News has just come out that anyone can now get access to a Google Analytics account. I’ve been using Google Analytics for a few months now, and am still just as enthusiastic about it as I was when I started. If you’ve got a website and you want a pretty little stats collection tool - this is the way forward!

This post is being written in the latest new fandangled thing from the Microsoft “Windows Live” people - who look like they’re doing some pretty cool stuff. “Windows Live Writer” - which can be found here, is a WYSIWYG blog editor.

At this stage I must admit it does look pretty darn clever. It’ll suck down the styles from your blog and make it look exactly like it will end up in your post. Pretty smart. I’d say I’ll keep playing around with it - at this stage it’s only a beta and there will no doubt be some issues. I’ll have to give it a whirl on the train this evening too - see how it performs in an “offline” environment. If we even manage to make it work with “Ultimate Tag Warrior” (which I just plugged into the wordpress install), we might even use this regularly.

Pretty funky tool at any rate.

I’m aware that lots of the people who have started reading TheGeoffRe(y)port are pretty new to this blogging thing. So I’ve got some helpful hints that should make life much easier for you, and get you all clued into the easiest ways to become a blogspert before you know it.

1. Look at other blogs

Believe it or not, the best stuff on blogs usually isn’t on this site. Hard to believe I know. But there are lots of other people writing really interesting things. Check out the blogs that get linked from here. Click on the links that they link to. Type in something that you’d like to find out about on Technorati. Read stuff from people all around the world. If you’re only reading blogs of people you know - you’re missing most of the fun.

2. Subscribe to blogs.

Do you find that you are constantly going to the homepage of blogs to work out if they’ve posted something new? Wish there was an easier way to find out if someone has updated? There is. The little “Subscribe” box on the bottom right is links to what’s called an “RSS Feed”. It keeps track of what I’ve got on the site. That can be used to tell you when I’ve updated the site, using an “Feed Reader”. You can get little programs that work as feed readers, but I find that it’s much easier to just do it with “Bloglines“. Every time I find a blog that I want to track, I subscribe to it in Bloglines. Then when I want to check which blogs have updated recently, I just go to the Bloglines page, and it puts them all together. You can even get a little “notifier” program that tells me when a blog I’m subscribed to has updated.

If you want to get a Bloglines account, you can click on the little Bloglines image on the bottom left sidebar and it’ll let you sign up for an account and subscribe to TheGeoffRe(y)port. Or you can just go to http://www.bloglines.com. If you don’t like Bloglines, then Google have got the same idea at http://www.google.com/reader/ . It looks prettier, but I don’t like it as much. And make sure that when you do subscribe to a feed - you still rock up to the site every now and then. If you don’t, you’ll miss all the exciting comments (and prettification of layouts!)

3. Leave comments.

As long as you’re not getting abusive or nasty, almost everyone loves getting comments. So leave them. Leave me comments - you’ll make my day. Vote on polls. Blogs that don’t have anyone leaving comments are never as interesting. Get involved. Become a part of the “global conversation”. Or just say hi to your son. Either way, you’ll make the blogosphere a happier place.

4. Get a blog yourself.

It won’t take long after you’ve started traipsing around other blogs that you’ll start feeling like you’ve got stuff to say too! So go do it already. It’s always very fun when someone comments on your blog and you can go see what they are on about. It’s freakishly easy to do - all the cool kids are doing it. Wordpress.com is the place that I’d recommend, but Blogger is also pretty good. Blogger might even be a bit easier to use - but I reckon most Blogger blogs don’t tend to look as good as Wordpress. They’re free to sign up for, and very, very simple to get started. If you can move a mouse and compose words into sentences, you’re already over-qualified. Who cares if no-one reads it, you’re now an internationally published writer! (OK, that might be a stretch). Link to all the blogs you like, they might link you back! Anyone who writes good stuff tends to get noticed (that’s why nobody notices me:D)

5. Have fun and don’t let it take over your life.

It’s all supposed to be fun. Share ideas, converse, use big words that make you sound smart. Just don’t get to the stage where you have people complaining if you don’t post for a day or two.

Edit: Notice the new poll on the right hand side!

“….why not do it with some style.” If I was ridiculously rich and could get this to Australia, this little gem on eBay would have to be one of the coolest things ever about the 1980s.

Cos I want to know. Having decided that no-one likes my Richmond Report (see if I care), I want you to let me know if you really are reading this for my nerdiness value.  And take note: the “Add an Answer” link is there, you’re expected to use it! Be creative, make me laugh! You know you want to.