unwiredben

With a new location, I get to start a new blog.  Tonight, I registered and set up Veg Out! Brooklyn, the followup to my successful Veg Out! Austin site.  That one has been taken over by lizardprincess who will start adding her own content soon.  The Brooklyn site is trying some different things, with the only categories being "News" and "Reviews", and everything else being done with tags.  I've got my first review up for a little cafe called the Perch Cafe. 

For the geeks out there, I formatted all the contact information using the hCard microformat so browsers and other tools can automatically recognize that there's an address on the page.  I installed the Operator plugin for Firefox, and it recognized the hCard right away, giving me the option of adding it to my address book or mapping it on Google.

I'm not going to publicize the new blog much until I can get some more content on it; I've been enough cool places in the last week to get started, but I won't really have time to write more until I get to California on Wednesday.

I just created asuseee, a community for users and developers of the ASUS Eee device that I've been talking about. Rather than bog down my own journal with more musings on this, I figured it would be worth having one place to put all of those posts. There actually was already a community on the device, puter, but it's all in Russian so I didn't find it too useful.

I think my next post will be able the preinstalled packaged on the device. I've been trying to make an image of the distribution included before I do something silly like "apt-get upgrade", but I had problems writing a big tarball to the SD card as I kept hitting I/O errors. I suspect a flaky card, but I also suspect not-quite-wonderful drivers or hardware for the media slot.

I've started yet another blog empire with a little entry :) Check out http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/05/pocket_tunes_an.html for my first contribution to the Palm corporate blog. I'm sure I'll have a bunch more to write about soon.

Here's a useful tip that I just worked out. To make NewsGator Online appear in the list of online news readers that Firefox 2.0 supports with its RSS/Atom discovery, open a new tab and go to "about:config". Then, add the following new entries using Right Click/New/String

browser.contentHandlers.types.6.title:
NewsGator Online

browser.contentHandlers.types.6.type:
application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed

browser.contentHandlers.types.6.uri:
http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=%s

You'll have to restart Firefox, but it will then appear in the Options panel under the Feeds tab, and in the preview feed tab if you use that setting. You might need to use a different number than 6 in the names if you have other feed extensions installed; just pick the next number that's available.

I've been doing some rework over at Veg Out! Austin this morning.  I've cleaned up some borders, adjusted some font sizes, and added more pictures to the site.  I want to do some more extensive rework, especially with the way that lists of reviews are shown in the archive pages, but I think the changes already help a lot.  Now, I just need to write more content for the site.  I've been wanting to do a comparison piece on how different local places do nachos for several months now, and despite lots of research (hehe), I've not sat down to write everything up just yet.

For the last few years, I've been using Bloglines as my main blog aggregator. It's worked fairly well, but earlier this week I found out about some security holes that have been unfixed on the site for months. That bugged me. Then, earlier today, I saw a reference to NewsGator Online, a competitor that has much better integration with offline newsreaders, allowing you to read feeds from different locations but keep your "read list" in sync.

I tried them out. After a little OPML editing to remove a layer of "outline" that wasn't needed, they imported my Bloglines data without any issues, and the UI of their service is pretty good. I like that it's not using frames, and the "collapse a site's entries" buttons work quite well. My only complain is that there wasn't a way I could mark the feeds I'd just imported as "completely read", but it looks like that's a common request, so I think it will be in the system sooner rather than later.

They have good mobile browsing support, something I've already tried from my Treo. The paid version is $20/year, and I'm happy to pay for this -- it's better to be a customer than a freeloader when you've got a critical application, in my opinion. They have a well staffed support forum (something Bloglines has been missing for a while), and there seems to be a lot of momentum to make their service better.

My only other complaint is that their site is a bit slow. Bloglines has had slow periods, but never this bad. However, it looks like they're in the middle of switching to new servers, so I'll cut them some slack.

This is the keynote, a conversation between two very popular bloggers. At first, I was interested, but I'm bored now and have been bored for the last 20 minutes. Sorry.

The first panel this morning was "Looking for XML in All the Wrong Places", a discussion about where XML works and where it doesn't. It was rather technical, and it took a while for the moderator to match the questions with the expectations of the audience. I got a few ideas for my own XML project about small things I could change to make our format more robust, but my main questions about localization and validation weren't really addressed.

After that, I met up with lizardprincess for "We Got Naked, Now What?", a BlogHer-sponsored panel about the issues with writing personal blogs while being employed. They had taken some surveys and found that about half of the personal bloggers didn't talk about their relationships and sex life online, while more than 3/4ths of them didn't discuss money issues. One panelist, a former adjunct professor at SMU, had a great story about how her anonymous blog about college life brought her a lot of praise, but ultimately resulted in her losing her teaching position. There were a few hostile responses, IMO, but there were still a lot of good voices both on stage and in the audience, and we're certainly moving into a world where employers will have to tolerate their employees merging of their personal and professional lives.