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Organizing My Online Habits (Part 1)

Nov 26th, 2008
by plightbo.
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The Challenge

Three or four years ago it was easy to track friends, news, topics, blogs, etc. You used an RSS reader. It was simple – you organized your feeds in to folders and you were done.

Then Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook came along and changed the entire concept of how you behave online. No longer did you just get a feed of content to follow, but now there were tweets and comments and photos and “likes” to follow.

In fact, many people I used to follow via RSS stopped blogging (me included, but that’s changing). Over the last few years the structure I once had around tracking online activity and content fell completely apart: I stopped using an RSS reader entirely. I’ve relied on a mix of Twitter and FriendFeed and iGoogle to get by for a while, but never really invested in organizing any of them.

Today I began to take the advice put forward in the Balsamiq Blog (great read for small software startups). I streamlined Google Reader, shuffled iGoogle around, and cleaned up my FriendFeed account.

The Solution

The first thing I did was delete all RSS feeds that were for personal blogs from Google Reader.

I decided that from this day on, personal blogs will be handled entirely in FriendFeed. My reader would be used for market research, following online “magazines” (TechCrunch, political blogs, etc), and data-focussed RSS feeds (search feeds, Woot.com sales, etc).

But even then I felt (and still feel) a bit conflicted: what about iGoogle? Should I follow some blogs and newspapers there? What about the NY Times and the DrudgeReport? I can get RSS feeds, but those didn’t feel right in an RSS reader.

I’ve decided that the RSS reader should be for things I don’t want to miss and want to use real read-tracking for. For all other stuff (NYT, Drudge, some blogs) I can have a panel in iGoogle, along with my weather, stocks, and a FriendFeed widget.

Making the Most out of FriendFeed

I took all the personal blogs I was following and found that of them, only nine were not already FriendFeed members. For those nine I created “Imaginary Friends” in FriendFeed. While only I can see imaginary friends, it’s still a great way to track those people until they sign up for FriendFeed.

Then I created some new “lists”. I decided that everyone will stay in the Home feed until I get annoyed with them, after wish I will hide the annoying parts (ie: Tweets or some blog), take them off of Home and only in Other, or unsubscribe entirely.

To get started, I created several lists that mapped to my interests. These interests were a mix of groups, companies, and places. I expect this list to evolve, but the main thing I decided is that it’s “OK” for it to be semi-unstructured.

200811261415.jpg

BrowserMob is for people who I think relate or otherwise overlap with what I’m doing. This includes all my Selenium friends, as well as other folks who are in the QA and cloud computing space. This allows me to get simple market research done and see what individuals are up to.

Developers is for all my open source friends, as well as fellow Java developers and QA gurus. I know I can click here and get a full stream of techno-babble, or musings from tech-heads.

Friends is for people I consider personal friends. This list is likely to only contain people that I know I can respond to with very personal comments.

Interesting People is basically where I put folks like Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, the FriendFeed founders, etc. These are folks I don’t know that well or at all, but I like reading what they are up to and what they recommend.

Jive is where I can track all things Jive-related. Since I used to work at Jive, I know a lot of folks who work there or have worked there. This list is also where I put Jive-related folks (customers, clients, contractors, etc). I like to track Jive separately because I’m very interested in the space (collaboration software) and because some very good friends work there.

Other is my bucket for when I can’t classify someone. I rarely expect to click this, but people in here are ones I find are interesting but don’t fit in to a specific interest in my life. They might eventually get unsubscribed entirely, or they might be moved in to a different bucket as I learn more about them.

Portland is for friends, acquaintances, and bloggers who physically live in the Portland, OR area. I try to stay plugged in to the tech scene here, so this is where I’d go to follow it.

Silicon Valley is the same as the Portland list, but for my other home: the San Francisco bay area. This list includes more VC types and entrepreneurs than the Portland list.

Coming Soon: Part 2

For my part 2 I’ll discuss how I organized Google Reader and iGoogle. They are much less complicated, though I’m experimenting with Yahoo Pipes, so there might be some tips to share. Perhaps a few weeks after that I’ll also post a part 3 that reports how successful it’s been.

For additional tips on how to maximize your use of FriendFeed, check out a recent post on Louis Gray’s blog.

Testing out Ecto

Nov 19th, 2008
by plightbo.
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I’ve been looking for a decent blog publishing tool, but every time I think about it I realize that nothing is likely to be as easy to use as the FriendFeed bookmarklet. I’m completely in love with the FriendFeed bookmarklet and it’s super simple way to add media to your comments. I wish posting to my blog were as simple!

I used to use MarsEdit (back when it was owned by the NetNewsWire guy), but now that it has been acquired and upped to version 2.0 without adding an real new features, I feel a bit raw about it all. Especially considering the 1.0 version is nowhere to be found to download, meaning my purchase is effectively wasted.

So now I’m trying out Ecto. So far it seems pretty good, but the big question will be how easy is it to insert links and pictures in to my posts. We’re about to find out:

Check out Ecto! It apparently has good support for linking to Amazon products too:


“Planet Earth – The Complete BBC Series [HD DVD]” (BBC Warner)

(Btw – I am totally waiting for the HD-DVD version of this to drop in price. I figure it has to soon, considering HD-DVD is dead)

But Ecto also claims to be able to support good media, including resizing. Let’s see how that goes. Here’s my dog:


200811190914.jpg

Well that didn’t go so well. Lame. Two problems:

  • Ecto didn’t resize/downsize the image, which was from my iPhoto library and fairly large.
  • It did automate uploading to the blog, but if it doesn’t actually insert the photo in my post that’s kind of pointless! Instead I just got a stupid link. Bummer.

Let’s try dragging an image in to the editor:

ecto-shot-tm.jpg

Wow, dragging worked way better. It gave me options to create a thumbnail, resize, downsize the quality, etc. I wonder why I wasn’t given these options when I pressed the import media button. Don’t know which button I’m talking about? Here, I’ll paste in a screen cap of that button to see if screen grabs are easy to do:

200811190900.jpg

Wow, that seems to work well too. So far Ecto is impressing me, though I wish the import media worked a bit better, but the drag and drop and pasting of images has worked really well, so I can’t complain too much.

Now for the final test: let’s upload it and see how it ultimately looks in my blog.

UPDATE: I’m modifying this post to correctly link to my dog, Chewy, mostly to figure out how to display my iPhoto pictures, but also because Chewy is rad. Here’s another cute dog, but not mine (found him via the Ecto Flickr integration, which is also rad):

Happy Dog

Doh – Ecto Lets Me Down

Nov 19th, 2008
by plightbo.
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I thought Ecto might be perfect for me, but then I just got let down :( In my last post, the following quote, when pasted in from the original NYT article, ended up with garbled text after the apostrophe in “Toyota’s”.

It’s likely due to the fact that it’s a special character vs. a basic character and either WordPress and/or Ecto can’t handle it. So now I’m trying out Flock. It doesn’t look nearly as rich, but let’s see how this goes…
That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.
Op-Ed Contributor – Let Detroit Go Bankrupt – NYTimes.com

UPDATE: Looks like Flock can only support photos that are uploaded through Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, or Piczo, but not a self-hosted WordPress site. Bummer.

UPDATE 2: Looks like Flock does no better. Very annoying that these characters cause so many problems. Anyone know of a solution (short of having to publish the post, then view it, then manually fix any problems)?

Switched to WordPress

May 23rd, 2008
by plightbo.
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I’m fully switched over from MovableType to WordPress. First, for those curious: I am not switching because I have a problem with MovableType. I merely switched because I’d heard good things about WordPress and wanted to try it out. So if you’re looking for validation of one being better than the other, you won’t find it here!

Also, there were a couple tricks to migrating everything over. They were:

  • FeedBurner migration issues using the FeedSmith plugin
  • FeedBurner wouldn’t accept my new RSS feed
  • Preserving links from the old MovableType system

FeedSmith Woes

The first problem was switching my FeedBurner account over. WordPress has a plugin called FeedSmith that is supposed to make it trivial, but it wasn’t actually redirecting my RSS feed like I expected. It turns out I had to change my permalink settings and then the change took place. So that tripped me up a bit.

It was also not clear from the FeedSmith/WordPress integration documentation how the plugin works. I finally figured out, through some trial and error, that it basically redirects the RSS URLs in WordPress (ie: /feed/) to the specified FeedBurner URL for all requests EXCEPT for those from FeedBurner, which of course is required to avoid circular logic.

FeedBurner choking on my RSS feed

Once I figured out what the plugin was supposed to do, I then tried to configure FeedBurner to point to my new WordPress installation. I had already imported my MovableType content, which worked perfectly. However, FeedBurner would not accept the new URL and instead was complaining that there was an invalid UTF-8 character.

It turns out that one of my posts from MovableType had a special character that was giving FeedBurner some grief once it had been moved to WordPress. I figured out which one it was with trial and error: I simply changed my WordPress settings to have 1, 2, 3, etc posts in the RSS feed until FeedBurner started complaining about the feed. Then I just deleted that feed as a quick fix.

Preserving MovableType links

Once I had everything else done, i wanted to preserve my old MovableType links so that search results and blog entries wouldn’t be broken. Fortunately there were two articles I found that greatly assisted with this process. The second link was especially useful, though I had to do a few things differently.

The first step was to get get the original MovableType directories to have a wildcard redirect (I believe using mod_rewrite, but my ISP did this part) such that /my_mt_blog/* redirected to /my_wp_blog/* where the wildcard pattern was preserved. For example, this URL:

http://blogs.opensymphony.com/plightbo/2008/02/selenium_users_meetup_next_wee.html

Redirects to this:

http://lightbody.net/blog/2008/02/selenium_users_meetup_next_wee.html

Once that was done, then I needed to configure WordPress to use the “Month + Name” permalink settings, with a small modification: I needed to use “.html” as the postfix instead of “/” like WordPress defaults to.

At this point, just about everything was working except for two final problems:

  • MovableType links used underscores (“_”) in the URL whereas WordPress uses dashes (“-”)
  • MovableType links are truncated to 30 characters whereas WordPress do not appear to have such a restriction

In the blog post I referenced, there was a tip to use the Underscore Plugin for WordPress along with a special mySQL statement to truncate the post names. I found I could skip the plugin and just run the following:


UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = SUBSTRING(post_name,1,30);
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = SUBSTRING(post_name,1,29) WHERE post_name LIKE '%-';
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = REPLACE(post_name, '-', '_');

This truncates the imported posts to 30 characters and, for those that ended in a space or special character, to 29. It also replaces dashes with underscores. The end result is that my imported posts have the same URL as they had in MovableType. That’s it!