Franci Penov : Blogging

Windows Live Writer Beta announced

Franci Penov — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 21:19:00 GMT

Grab the bits from here . For more details go to Writer Zone . Posted using Windows Live Writer (Beta)...(read more)

Mark is back

Franci Penov — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 19:21:00 GMT

I am glad to see that Mark Jen is back online. For a while I thought he might've actually got in trouble. It's good to see him blogging again.

Mark, good luck at Google. I am sure you'll do there just as good (or even better) as you did on the Indigo team.

William Gibson has a blog

Franci Penov — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 10:11:00 GMT

That might be old news for people out there, but it was a pleasant surprise for me to discover that William Gibson has a blog (rss here). Apparently, it's been up for the last two years or so. Oh well, I guess I can't keep an eye on everything. Although I wish I knew earlier about it.

Update: Apparently Bruce Sterling also has blog (rss here). (Thanks, Fred)

Was that really necessary?

Franci Penov — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 15:31:00 GMT

I just stumbled upon these two posts. Compare them to these two posts.

'Nuf said.

Update: To answer the question about my point - the first two posts above are verbatim copies of other peoples's posts, one of them being mine. I am ok with somebody republishing the information from my blog. Hey, that's the whole point of the blogs - to spread information, right? I do it as well - the information in my post was borrowed as well. But when somebody does it, I expect them to at least use their own words. Optionally, they could also point to the source of their information.

w.bloggar

Franci Penov — Wed, 26 May 2004 05:44:00 GMT

I was looking around for desktop blog authoring tool. Well, not exactly loooking around; more like I've been pondering the idea for several months. I use RSS Bandit and w.bloggar was the obvious choice (read: it was in the RSS Bandit context menu :-)). So I went and installed it.

Some first impressions, mostly positive:

The program is very clean and has almost self-explanatory UI. It is very responsive, starts immediately and reacts blazingly fast.
The initial configuration dialog was somewhat confusing, as it wasn't clear what user name/password should I enter. Besides, the initial configuration doesn't ask anything about the blog type/site. I guess if the program targets specifically Blogger users, that makes somewhat sense. Still, it might be good to have small button "Advanced blog settings..." or something like it that takes you to the blog settings.
Almost all commands have associated shortcut, most of them quite logical. However, several commands don't use the de-facto standard shortcuts. Examples - the Redo usually is associated with Ctrl-Y; the alignment commands normally use Ctrl-L, Ctrl-E and Ctrl-R; F10 in most programs acts the same as single Alt press (gets you to the menu). Using these would make w.bloggar more familiar editing environment. OTOH - there are probably current users which already have learned the curent shortcuts and would be upset by any changes (oh, the joy of having to support "legacy" versions).

The bugs I noticed so far (I guess I have some kind of job-inflicted mental deviation):

null reference exception on the About... dialog box - shows if you start w.bloggar minimized in the taskbar notification area and choose About... from the notification icon's context menu
the status bar uses non-localized font, but attempts to localize the date format and shows strange characters
the post drafts are saved by default in the w.bloggar installation folder. This has two implications - if you are running as non-admin thic will cause some problems and also is potential information disclosure on multiuser systems. The preview html is also saved there.
hitting Reload posts in the Accont properties dialog while editing new post will clear the new post category
selecting text and inserting a link doesn't use the text. thus, any text you enter in the link dialog box ends appended to the text you selected.
(not really w.bloggar issue) the RSS feed of http://www.bloggar.com doesn't contain the latest post

Anyway, the overall feeling I get is that this is very nice piece of software. I really liked it, but of course, I'll have to give it some more time to decide whether it will be useful to me. In the mean time, I probably should look around and see what else there is. So, which one is your favorite blog authoring tool?

Update: I just hit the first major thing I don't like - w.bloggar doesn't put automatically HTML paragraph tags. I have to manually put the appropriate HTML instead of focusig on my text. :-( That makes the actual editing a lot more of an effort. Let's hope v4 makes some progress in the direction.

Are blogs worth advertisements in them?

Franci Penov — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 06:06:00 GMT

I use RSS so that I can avoid all the clutter of the HTML overhead. Including the advertisements. So imagine my dissapointment when clicking on the last post from one of the blogs I used to read showed a full-page advertisement in my browser.

I realize that blogging is not free; at least not for most people. So if somebody has to pay their expenses - they can charge for it. It's their blog and they can decide whatever they want to do with it. And I would love to pay for it - provided the perceived cost of the goods (the content) corresponds to the charge, as deemed by me. After all, I should have a choice as well, should I?

My attention is not a “free” resource. Advertisement is a form of indirect charge; I am paying with my brain. But my brain is my most valuable resource. My brain is not getting younger. I can learn and remember so many things. I can't afford mind garbage anymore. I think this “cost” is too high and in no way what I am receiving is worth what is being “taken” from me.

End result: unsubscribed.

Bloggers influence?

Franci Penov — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 22:31:00 GMT

While reading this interesting (as in not-the-usual-rant-against-microsoft-world-dominance-or-how-this-or-that-system-is-inherently-more-secure-than-windows-just-because) story, I could help but notice the following:

You can sit naked at your desk and buy a product by, effectively, pushing buttons

And it remainded me of this post of Rory:

Buying an eBook (theoretical version)
1. Walk into living room naked.
2. Find book on Amazon.
3. Buy it.
4. Read it.
That sounds really awesome.
Unfortunately, we aren't really there yet.

Btw, Rory, there might be several certain ... umh, strange queries in your referrals log. Then again, after the naked petrified Natalie Portman I guess nothing can surprise you...

The Power of Scoble

Franci Penov — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:41:00 GMT

[Update: John's site was back up about half an hour after I posted this. I guess I have healing..., errr, fixing powers...]

[Update 2: Exactly 1 hour and 10 minutes after I posted this, Scoble himself showed up for comment. Apparently, there is true to the old wisdom that knowing the name of somebody gives you power over him!]

While taking my daily portion of Scobleizer, I noticed a link to John Dowell's blog. Heading over there, I was greeted by warm “Internal Server Error”.

Bloggers, be afraid of The Power of Scoble...

(I just hope he doesn't link to this post... :-))

Bite the bullet and give us full text

Franci Penov — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 19:50:00 GMT

Blogging was supposed to be that great medium that will help us transition from the web world where the design and the presentation so often dictate what we see and where individuals and companies are judged by how they look to a world where the ideas are the main thing and everybody is earning ranks based on their minds and souls.

Well, at least it was supposed to be about content, not about presentation. And it was supposed to speed up the processing of the information overflow and help us find the interesting stuff.

And it is - to a degree, though. There are still people that would put in their feed only 20 words. Which is great if these 20 words are the essence. But, every so often these words are just the first 20 words of the post. And as with any beginning, they often fail to catch my attention.

This feels wrong on so many levels. Here I'll list only few:

I often have to make a decision whether I want to read something based on the author's name only, not on the content.
I've lost any supposed productivity gains, as I have to resort back to the browser - granted, it's embeded in my reader, but it's still the browser and it has to fetch the page and render all the html, download all the graphics, run all the flash. And it's slow.
It presents to me lot of visual crap - my eyes have to process the navigation, the title of the blog, any page headers and whatever other "noise" there is, just to get to the content.

Anyhow, Chris Clark said it better than me.

Bite the bullet and give us full text.

Visualizing blogs

Franci Penov — Sun, 28 Dec 2003 23:03:00 GMT

Ever wondered what a blog looks like? Steve Makofsky has implemented small tool to visualize blogs. It would be interesting to add the feature to show a map of the links between the posts in the various blogs.

Let's see if I can find the time and play with this in the next week...

Florin Lazar in the house

Franci Penov — Wed, 24 Dec 2003 05:28:00 GMT

Hm, it looks like Florin Lazar - one of the guys responsible for the transactions testing at our team, is in the blogging house... I have to subscribe once I am back from LA.