Since I’m always working on one website or another, trying out new ideas, this is something that interests me very much – coding the 17th website is just not that exciting. One of her recommendations was Squarespace.

I’m simply blown away. It’s a very easy point & click way to build web sites (including blogs, discussion areas, photo galleries, what-have-you) that really doesn’t require any code. It comes complete with pre-built traffic measuring tools, log viewing, etc – and pretty, too.

And in case you really need your own custom tweaks, you have full access to the CSS, and limited places where you can even inject additional HTML.

Since I’m currently tinkering around with re-building my wife’s jewelry web site, I gave it about two minutes, just playing around – here‘s what I got so far.

It’s impressive enough that I’ll spend some serious effort on this over the coming days. (Add to that the fact that they’re fairly affordable – $8 a month is certainly in line with other hosting solutions, and they do all the software patching for you )

Oh, and if you’re – like me – paranoid about your data, they have full XML export facilities. And blogs can be exported in Moveable Type format, which pretty much every other blog software can import.

Unless you really don’t want people to read your old entries….

Should you dare to specify inline CSS style in a <span> tag, be sure you separate the property name and the value with a colon, not an equal sign. Especially tricky if you copy width/height from an image tag.

While saner browsers opt to treat the attribute as not specified (since it’s not well formed), Firefox treats the whole <span> definition as erroneous. Result – my beautiful pictures didn’t show up in Firefox. (Both Safari and IE did the right thing and just formatted as if I hadn’t specified a width/height)

Every day I work with it, I love CSS more…

If you’re in a similar situation, you know how annoying this is – I really don’t want to do the same status update on 15 webpages. For a long time, I’ve been only updating my Twitter page. It’s the most convenient one, just one key press away, thanks to Twitterific. A few days ago, Tim Bray was also wondering about different places to update your status. And one of his readers was kind enough to point out MoodBlast. It’s a wonderful little application that lets you post your status to a large number of services simultaneously.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have decided it might be a good idea to make legal threats against anybody who’s not using their approved API – which doesn’t support status updates. (Interestingly enough, Facebook has no problem employing the same techniques to scrape data from other applications, like gmail.)

This points out a fundamental problem of many web applications – your data is under the control of somebody else. Both import and export only happen at the whim of somebody else. And in Facebook’s case, that’s a 23-year old who seems to have power delusions.

This probably means I’ll abandon Facebook sooner or later, and I’ll definitely be re-evaluating all the web services I use if they provide open access to my data. I suggest you do the same – otherwise, more important data than your “status” might be locked away.

Tags: Twitter, Facebook, open data

I have currently 178 feeds, and get about 300 articles a day. (Yes, I know, Robert Scoble handles 622 feeds – but I don’t get paid for blogging). After taking a good look, I found out that 10 of those 178 feeds (or about 6%) produce about 50% of the volume. So I’ve decided to say goodbye to them.

I’ll share them here, complete with the reason why they didn’t make the cut – maybe some of you want to pick up some of them. And maybe someday, I’ll come back to them. The Internet really is an outboard brain.

• Lifehacker – excellent tips on making your life easier, and the hardest choice in the entire list. But I just can’t read 20 posts a day on how to become more productive.
• BoingBoing – Random bits of curiosities. Gets old after a while, and you have to suffer through the writings of Cory “I’m really important” Doctorow. Easiest cut on the whole list
• CNet – yes, lots of tech news. But a bit too much for me.
• Slashdot – used to be News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. Now it’s just links to articles on other popular sites that have been posted weeks before. And the fact that they still claim to be a .org domain really sticks in my craw.
• Wired News – Same as CNet. Interesting, better writing than CNet, but just too much
• Code Project – I used to love getting their latest articles on Windows programming, just to jog my brain for new ideas. However, by now I’m generating way too many ideas. I’ve got project ideas that’ll last at least for several years. And, to top it off, I think the future of applications is on the web, not on Windows.
• J-Walk Blog – Like BoingBoing, mostly random curiosities. With really funny writing. But just too much distraction, and not enough info for me.
• Kottke.org – Probably the original “interesting snippets” site. I just don’t have the curiosity to follow it. Plus, Kottke and his wife just had a baby – I doubt there’s going to be much writing for some time.
• Alice in Wonderland – Excellent article with random tidbits from the gaming world. But, again, random tidbits are only interesting to me for so long.
• Mac Minute – Tons of Mac News, but unfortunately mostly press releases. And since the interesting ones will appear on Daring Fireball anyways, there’s no need to keep this feed.

What feeds can you cut without really losing anything? (No offense if it’s my feed, either – there are only so many things you can read in a day)

The situation: A guy is running iTunes Visualizer during a party, and the Apple Logo is one of the Visualizers, so it pops up from time to time. (It’s not really a surprise – if you ever ran Visualizer, you’d know…)

The solution Ellinore over at CNet has is writing a blog article to complain about the “troubling” act of Apple, “sneaking in” a billboard.

Let’s instead try to solve the problem. We want to run iTunes Visualizer without the Apple Logo – how can we invoke the power of the Internets for us?

Well, obviously Google is one answer. So how do we build a decent search query for Google? I’ve usually had luck by keeping the search terms to a minimum, only listing items that are crucial to the question at hand. So what goes into our query?

• iTunes – this is what it’s all about
• Visualizer – that’s the part of iTunes we want to fix
• Apple Logo – that’s what we want to operate on
• remove – that’s what we want to do

Now, let’s structure that so it resembles a Noun-Verb-Object structure – Google seems to like that. This gives us: “iTunes Visualizer remove Apple Logo“. And lo and behold (I love saying that!), the very first result gives us the answer.

It turns out the guy who wrote the original iTunes Visualizer also wrote something called G-Force – a visualizer plugin for pretty much most media players that have any relevance, including iTunes. Without any logos, for somewhere between free and $30, depending on what features you want.

To be fair, the original article mentions in passing that there are other options than the default – but without any links. I guess it’s easier to complain than to solve the problem…

That makes it even more important when companies get it right. One company that – in my opinion – got it totally right is SmugMug. I started a trial account with them about two weeks ago since I was exploring online photo services. I played around with it for a few days, and then got distracted.

They only give you a 14-day free period, but they’re smart enough to ask for feedback at the mid-term mark. And since I had some time, I actually wrote up my thoughts and concerns, including the reasons why I’d probably not switch over. To my surprise, I had an answer to this within 30 minutes – they addressed some of my concerns, showed me things I missed, and promised to take a few of my suggestions under consideration. That is quite impressive.

At that point, I was 50:50 on the switching thing. I really like SmugMug better than flickr. There are lots of features to tempt you – great galleries, awesome web interface, and the fact that the data is stored in several places simultaneously. (Hence you’ll lose pictures about never). Switching is always a hassle, so I thought I’d just let it lapse for now – especially since I just paid for a 2-year Pro account on flickr.

It got better, though. At the end of the 14 days, I got a second reminder – showing me where to sign up, or if I weren’t going to, asking if I’d share the reasons with them. I shared my reasoning with them, and I also mentioned I was working on an iPhoto plug-in for SmugMug. What can I say – I love playing with Web APIs, and I love plug-ins. Imagine my surprise when they immediately comp’ed me for a lifetime account. It’s their policy to give free accounts to all plug-in developers. Now that is really amazing. Not only the fact that they do it at all – the really mindblowing part is that it happens without any bureaucratic hassle.

A company that actively listens to you, answers your questions, and stands by its word – that would be enough for me to sign up with them even if I didn’t get the free account. So it’s time to move some pictures around…

Kathy Sierra has recently been subjected to some hate speech of the ugliest sort. Why do people feel the need to resort to sexual references and death threats? Why do they feel the need to attack people who are nothing but genuinely nice? (Granted, I don’t know Kathy in person, but her writings are nothing if not full of respect and love for other people.)

I’m even more at a loss to understand how this can happen on websites that are associated with some major names in blogging. How can those people not stand up and protest this abuse of their sites?

Maybe we are indeed better off in a world where people are forced to take responsibility for their actions. I keep hearing the “fear of repercussions argument” – but in the long run, everybody who ever effected major change spoke publicly. Gandhi spoke out. Martin Luther King spoke out. Abraham Lincoln spoke out. Jefferson wasn’t exactly quiet.

I’d love to hear counter examples so I can go back to my more idealistic world view – but right now, I think anonymity serves no purpose except to shield perpetrators of crimes.

Addendum: Seth Godin just said it much better than I could

And now, just to complete things, I’ve decided to go to Barcamp LA. It’s going to be next weekend, and it’s basically an ad-hoc conference where you learn about new things. Basically, learn about anything, but as far as I can tell, it’s a lot of web stuff. I’ll see and report back. Maybe I’ll meet a few of my readers there? Anybody going?

Tags: Barcamp, Los Angeles

The Twitter folk took it a step further. They allow you to subscribe to the status pages of a number of your friends, and you can choose when and where to get those messages. If you always need to know where your friends are, you can even get it as text messages on your cell phone. Basically, it’s instant messaging in a group, over instant messaging, the web, and your cell phone.

And it has started really taking off as of late. Or, as the Many2Many blog calls it, it “tipped the tuna”.

There are people who think it’s the best thing since sliced bread – Robert Scoble and Don MacAskill, for example. There are also quite a few people who think this is simply Web-2.0 junk and predict its imminent implosion. Finally, there are people like Dave Winer who are skeptical about Twitter, but are willing to give it a try. (Of course, he turns it into another River-Of-News channel – what else did you expect?). That’s the camp I find myself in.

I couldn’t immediately see it as tremendously useful, but given the amount of people who are simply in love with it, it is probably more than just a fad. There’s something they’re doing right. After all, Dodgeball is pretty much the same idea (plus location information) but it never took off quite the same way.

After trying it for a week (using the amazing Twitterific as the Mac side of the equation), I must say that it has grown on me. It’s inspiring to see what others are working on – it’s almost like being plugged into one giant consciousness. (How’s that for new-agey!?)

So, in case you were wondering what I’m up to (or if I’m adding your most urgent wish to iCalFix), you can follow me at http://twitter.com/groby. And if you have any twitter links that you think I should follow, I’d love to hear from you!

(Oh, and if you want some “out-there” applications for it – read about home automation with Twitter….)

Tags: web-2.0,twitter