Blogged With Flock

I just discovered a fun way to discover interesting blogs.  Simply go to Google and search for "Blogged with the Flock Browser".  This is the signature that Flock adds (if you choose to let it) when you blog from Flock.  I've found myself blogging from Flock more and more because it's just so easy.  You know the blogs that Google discovers will be of interest because interesting people use Flock.  Here's 10 Flockers blogs that I enjoyed :

• space to imajin
• S-O-S
• Gospel Graffiti
• zeitspur
• cornology
• Danyo says...
• Addicted To Placebos
• Live from Krypton
• Studio : Dedale
• Jacques Snyman
  

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Fave Widget Update

I moved my bookmarks from del.icio.us to Faves back when they called themselves BlueDot (my Faves). Since then I've posted more than once (11 times if we count this post) about their excellent service and converted a few friends along the way. I've also been using their blog widget for most of that time; it was simple and yet very useful. Yesterday Faves announced a new blog widget. The new widget has a neat "interactive wizard" to allow easy customization of the content and appearance of the widget. For example, you can filter Faves based on one or more tags; select whether to show only your Faves and/or your Friends Faves and/or everyones Faves. The best feature is that you are no longer showing a list of links from your Faves you are actually showing your Fave. Which means you can include the Faves thumbnail image, the Favers profile image, the link and the Faves note. This last bit is my favourite part of the new widget. Often a links title is less than helpful. The note can be a quote from the page or something you've written as a memory aid or an opinion about the page. Whatever it is you control the note for your Faves note. Which greatly increases the Faves usefulness.

The wizard also offers many options for controlling the widgets appearance. There are 8 fully styled Themes, a no style options and a option to fully customise 14 elements of the widget. In the end I was a bit fussy and went with no style so I could fully control the widgets appearance in my blog template. You can see the results in my sidebar near the end of the page. You can find the wizard at : http://faves.com/widget, but you'll need to be logged in to view it. You can also find out more about the advanced styling from the Faves Wiki.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

TextPattern : Quality not hype

I haven't had much time to post for the last fortnight. But there has been lots I wanted to talk about. One reason I've been time poor is that we've been doing some research into Content Management Tools to cover the needs of some upcoming projects. In the end we installed and tested two systems; Drupal and TextPattern. This short list was partly derived by running available CMS based sites through the W3C validator. TextPattern was the only CMS that validated cleanly and Drupal was fairly close. But in the end some popular choices from our shortlist quickly disappeared as they had so many validation errors.

The inclusion of TextPattern was a big surprise. We currently have a casual working for us who is a real TextPattern fan. I kept saying ; but you wouldn't be able to do x in TextPattern and almost everytime the answer was yes. In fact almost anything you would want to do with Drupal could be done with TextPattern. Though in every example there was one major difference between the two : TextPattern was easier. Everything in Drupal requires three semi-obscure steps to set it up. While everything in TextPattern required one click and a save.

There were things we really needed that weren't available for TextPattern (ie. LDAP validation) so in the end we decided on Drupal. But if you are looking for a CMS and your needs aren't too complicated then I suspect you won't go to far wrong using TextPattern.

Blogging From Contribute CS3

I'm currently trialing Adobe CS3 prior to upgrading from Macromedia Studio 8. In particular I was keen to try out the blogging options in Contribute CS3. Which is exactly where I'm writing this post. This functionality was released a few months ago. But I prefer to manage upgrades as new suites are released. I'd also tried this from work but have never been able to create the connection. Now I know that the problem is probably proxy related as I had no problem making this connection from home. What's nice about posting from Contribute is that you are writing directly into your page with all the pages available styles. So you get a real feel for how the final post will appear. The Blogger editor is very sensitive to whitespace and so you can end up with some unexpectedly large spaces in your post.

One potential limitation is Bloggers use of labels instead of Tags. There is a drop down in Contribute listing all existing Labels and you select the ones you want to use. But there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for adding new Labels. Which means I'll probably need to edit this again in Blogger to add Contribute as a Label. But perhaps I'm just missing the option. It is very much a first try.

Sidebar Massage

After studying the Site Overlay results in Google Analytics I realised my blogs sidebar needed a minor makeover. The core of the makeover is changing my Labels to a cloud (instructions here). This meant the Label widget would take up much less room and consequently could sit much higher in the sidebar. I also removed the My Profile widget and moved the profile link into the Links widget. Finally I added a link to my account on BlueDot . Not sure why I hadn't done this earlier.

widgetboxing my Throbbing Thumb

Yesterday I was doing some tests with widgetbox. Specifically I was trialling the Flickr slideshow on my other blog (The Throbbing Thumb). The Flickr slideshow can be customised to show photos from a specific user ID and/or a specific tag. In my test I decided to display all the Flower photos from my account.

Widgetbox is a brilliant idea. Essentially developers create code snippets and define parameters and users select and customise the component. Widgetbox manages this process delivering custom javascript to the users blog. This system allows for a very wide range of widgets that are easily installed by the blogger.

I was really impressed by what widgetbox offers. Still after a day of testing I removed the Flickr slideshow. Mostly because it made the page load much slower. But also because for all it's customisation I couldn't tweak the widget to really fit my blog. The biggest problem was the Flickr ad (there was also a second option: a yahoo ad) which was too white and too close to my photos.

I hope to test some of the other widgets in the near future to determine if the slow load was specific to this widget or typical of widgetbox and to see if I can find widgets that better fit my design.

Is this post off topic?

I became a blogger by stealth. I'd been planning to blog for quite a while. But I'd never told myself. Consequently I'd never really thought about the act of blogging. But it's hard not to make a few posts without reflecting on the process.

What I quickly came to realise is that a blog isn't usually about the writer.A blog is about the writers relationship to a specific subject. The exception is when the writer is a topic of public interest. For example, Dilbert is a topic of interest to Dilbert fans hence we would be disappointed if Dilbert didn't blog about Dilbert.

By consistently writing about a subject the blog attracts readers interested in that topic. By unexpectantly writing about a different topic the writer is breaking a contract that has been established between the writer and their audience. I guess most readers are willing to tolerate the occassional digression. But I find my time too precious to squander it on itinerant bloggers.

Am I off topic right now by posting a post about blogging? I guess that depends on what Geek Glue's topic is. I suspect this blog is an exploration of current trends in web development and web applications (Rich Internet Applications doesn't cover things like del.icio.us which I have already written about). Therefore there may not be a lot of nuts and bolts stuff (i.e See My Flex App Run Fast). Instead it will be a broad overview through an examination of specific technologies (i.e Getting A Taste for del.icio.us). Does a discussion of blogging fit within that; I guess it does.

technorati tags: Blogging, Web 2.0

Notice of intent

For the longest time I avoided blogging. Why pollute the blogosphere any further, I thought. But then I found myself approaching it sideways. Pretending to myself that the purpose of my blogger account was to run some tests. But then I suddenly found myself in the midst of a post "testing" out the blogging feature of Flock with a post about Flock. What a disgrace! Who was I kidding? No doubt it had been my intention to blog from the start (even before the start if that is possible).

But what do I have to say? I work as a web developer and spend quite a bit of my time reading web development blogs. Many of these bloggers seem to have some inside knowledge (of whatever it is they blog about). But the 'inside knowledge' I have is hardly worth sharing. So what do I have to say. I guess it is my intention to use this blog to ask myself questions. A conversation with myself (and whoever else wants to join in). Publishing these conversations will force me to think carefully about my answers because the world seems quite capable of holding us bloggers accountable for our views. Hopefully I will have something to say that is worth challenging?

technorati tags:Blogging