It’s News to Me

This will be my last post at this location.

After many years of relying on free hosted blogging services like Blogger and most recently this site on WordPress.com, I have now taken the plunge and registered a domain name for myself, http://perry-nelson.com, and over the weekend I began posting to my blog located there. Here is the link written out so you can see it, but it's active too so you can click it to go to the new location, http://perry-nelson.com/blog/ If you'd like to continue reading It's News to Me, please update your bookmarks so that you can still visit when you want to.

The primary reason for making this move is to give me greater control over my blog and an opportunity to experiment with other features on the web site that will eventually appear there. Right now the primary link, perry-nelson.com, only has a page containing a single link to my blog. In the future, there will be other content there, but that will take me some time to achieve.

My time on WordPress.com has given me a chance to experience the WordPress blogging software, and I've been quite pleased with it. But I wanted access to more of its features which the new site will provide. You'll notice a new look on the new site, one that I think is cleaner and easier to read. That different look was made possible by choosing a different template for my blog and being able to make such choices was one of the reasons for me to make the move to my own web site.

I am very grateful to the folks at WordPress.com for giving me the chance to blog here. I think it is a terrific place for someone to get their feet wet in blogging. If you are considering doing so, I recommend it highly. It is free, after all, and that price is hard to beat, but more than that, it offers an excellent blogging platform. And if you are thinking of starting a blog, Paul Stamatiou posted an excellent piece yesterday called HOW TO: Start Blogging.

So now that I've made this announcement, let me suggest that you come on over to the new location and let's continue our conversation there. I want to take this occasion to say thanks for your loyalty in reading my blog and for your patience in making the transition with me.

technorati tags: WordPress

Today is an especially appropriate day for me to pay tribute to mothers, mine and those in my life, and to my father because today, May 14th, is also my dad's birthday. Had he lived he would have been 96 years old today. The title of a song by Fred Fisher from around the beginning of the 20th century, "Daddy, you've been a mother to me," enables me to tie today's holiday celebrating mothers with the fact that it is his birthday, and I can reflect on them both and their contributions to my life.

Honoring your father and mother just isn't what it used to be. As I was searching for the author of the song I mentioned above, I discovered an interesting piece titled, "I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles," by Charles Marowitz, written ironically on my birthday last year, in which he traces the de-evolution of American attitudes towards motherhood. He says …

Mom's most ebullient champion was Al Jolson who, folded on one knee with a catch in his throat and a tear in his eye, declared that he would "walk a million miles, for one of her smiles" for she was his irreplaceable "mammy."

In today's popular music, one is more likely to encounter "Mother" with a six letter extension added, an inescapable expletive in rap music. In the minds of most kids between 13 and 21, "mother" is simply an abbreviation for that 12-letter obscenity.

Swans Commentary: I'd Walk A Million Miles For One Of Your Smiles, by Charles Marowitz - cmarow31

I am old enough, and perhaps sentimental enough, to be more in tune with the early 20th Century attitude toward motherhood than I am with the current attitudes, so Mother's Day is a day to enjoy the memory of my own mother, whom I called by her first name, Grace. I don't know how to explain that aberration, except perhaps to note that I followed the lead of my father, Willie, who called her that, and she tolerated it. I never discovered whether she wanted it that way or not. Ironically, I called my dad Daddy, so my parents were known to me as Grace and Daddy. I can only observe that families and their customs are strange.

There are a lot of different ways of mothering, each mother having her own style. There are good ones and bad ones and a few who don't have a clue. But all of them, like all the rest of us I suppose, do the best they can. For that I salute them and honor their efforts to guide their children into adulthood. And I hope they (you) all enjoy being recognized and celebrated today.

And as I was taught to close my nightly prayer on bended knee, I'll close this tribute with the last line of that prayer now. "God bless Grace and Daddy wherever they are."

I have finally regained my connection to the Internet this afternoon. Yesterday morning when I awoke, I found that my Comcast connection to the Internet was intermittently connecting but wouldn't sustain the connection. At the end of the day, I called tech support and they had me perform a couple of tests and then concluded they would have to send out a technician to try to resolve the issue.

He arrived today at about 10:30 AM and replaced the splitter that subdivides the incoming line into the four separate lines that lead to three televisions and to my cable modem. After he did that, the connection was restored. As they say, "you never miss the water until the well runs dry." Being without my connection only served to underscore for me how much I rely on the Internet throughout each day.

Today I downloaded the latest version of Flock 0.7.0.8.0 build_id: 1147436002.4225 and installed it. It's getting better with each build, but I am getting an error message that a script has stopped responding. I suspect it is related to syncing my favorites on del.icio.us, but that is only a guess.

technorati tags: Flock

Apparent glitch, originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

Flock is still in the pre-release developers preview stage, so it isn't surprising that everything isn't yet working as it should.

One of those things that isn't working on my system as I would expect it to is the newly-renamed "My News" function. With it you can subscribe to a site's RSS feed and receive notification, via a change in color of the My News icon on the icon bar (from white to orange), when the feed is updated. Once you've read the feed, you can (in theory) mark it as read and thereby change the bold font displaying the feed's name in the sidebar to a normal font. That's the way it is supposed to work at least.

For the last several builds, up to and including this morning's build — Flock 0.7.0.6.1.0 build_id: 1147073320.4097, marking the feed as read has no effect on the characteristics of the feed in the sidebar as is illustrated by the screenshot.

I've begun downloading a new build of Flock each morning just to see whether the previous potholes I had encountered have been patched. So far the My News feed problem hasn't. However, I was pleased to see that another problem (bug #1577) that has existed in both Firefox and Flock for some time appears to have been fixed. So potholes do get patched, and I'm sure that the one for this minor annoyance for My News will be fixed too eventually.

I knew when I embarked on this journey of testing Flock "there'd be days like this" so I'm not too concerned about this bug. But posting my comments about it here gives me a chance to elaborate on it a bit more than I can when posting a bug report and it gives me something to talk about on my blog. Hence my comments this morning.

My son, Jeff, and his wife, Deanna, and my grandson, Dustin, are visiting this weekend from Georgia. Blogging will be light, because they are here to help me do some maintenance and rearranging of my house. I'm looking forward to how things will look after all is said and done. I'll return to my life on the Internet at the beginning of next week. 

I have previously blogged about the virtue (as I see it) of being able to customize your applications to your own preferences. This afternoon I see that Daryl has made a plea for such customization of a feature in Flock, the alerts he receives from the Flickr Photo browser. He said:

In its current form, with some of the contacts I happen to have on my list, the photo topbar provides more of a distraction than a benefit. It provokes me far too often to stop what I'm doing so that I can look at photos of little consequence.

Daryl’s Flock Blog

I know what he's talking about, and in general I agree with his proposed solution or at least with some variation of it. I'd like the ability to turn off notifications when some of my Flickr contacts post pictures and to specify how frequently I am notified about updates to their photostream. If I could specify that for some contacts I want to be notified as soon as they've posted their photo and for others that I want to be notified only once an hour of their updates, that would be an improvement over the current way it operates, I think.

But the point of this post is to raise the question for Flock's developers of whether they are really willing to give us to the ability to fine tune Flock's functions. There is, of course, an Options section in the Tools menu where I can specify a variety of preferences, such as which web services I use, which search engines I want as the default, which blogging service I use, etc., but in my conversations with them, I've met with some resistance (it seems) to building in a lot of configurability into Flock.

I've seen this resistance with regard to at least two of the functions that make Flock unique, the blog editor and the web snippets area location.

In its initial incarnation, the blog editor was a free-floating separate window that tended to get lost, particularly if you ran your browser maximized. Next the blog editor opened in a tab, not in a separate window. Since the editor has recently been improved and updated (completely re-written, if I understand correctly), it opens in a separate pop-up window that by default is opened on top of other windows. Right now there is no way to set it to open instead in a tab, and I have yet to see any discussion of the fact that the option to change that default behavior is going to be available. I have, however, seen a number of user comments indicating they would prefer to have it open in a tab. I don't think it should be only one way. Let the user choose which he or she prefers.

The web snippets feature (previously called The Shelf) was originally a topbar just like the photo browser or the Mapper function. In its most recent rendition, it is located in an area at the bottom of the browser window that auto-opens when you drag a web snippet to it. (Web snippets are nothing more than a bit of text, a graphic or a link that you find on the web that you want to retain, perhaps for later use in a blog post.) Back when it was a topbar, there was some discussion of making it a sidebar or a bottom bar instead. At that time, I said my preference was for us users to have the option of making it either, simply another thing that we could specify as we saw fit.

The resistance I sense among the developers to that idea goes something like this. "We don't want the browser to become bloated, and besides most users would end up just using the defaults anyway. And what's more, many users might find it hard to discover the configuration options." They are the developers, of course, and I am only a user, so I can't argue with the point that providing user preference options might contribute to bloat. However, I don't think the argument that most users might use the defaults or that many of them might not discover the configuration options holds much water. Though both suppositions may be true, that isn't any reason to deny users, who are willing to explore the features of the product and want choices, the option to "have it our way."

So as I write in support of Daryl's idea, I also would like to prod the Flock developers to become more open to giving the user greater choice about how Flock behaves. Stop short of making the code bloated, but go as far as possible in providing users choice. It's easier to create fans if give them the ability to control the application through configuring it to their desires.

technorati tags: Flock, configuration, choice

At least the "Blog this" function at Flickr enables me to post a picture as the previous entry illustrates, however neither changing the theme nor trying to post a small version of a picture instead of a large one works yet when dragging pictures to the blog editor in Flock. Despite this, it still doesn't seem as if it is the blog editor in Flock that is at fault. Here's why I think that. When I create the post, the blog editor saves a copy of the post on my hard disk. I can look at that .html file and in the version on my hard disk, everything looks normal. So it seems that something in the process of publishing the post to WordPress.com strips out a part of the code and therefore causes the picture not to appear. That is true with the two themes I have tried this morning, so I'm not convinced that it is due to the theme I am using. Fortunately, Erwan and Daryl are looking into this problem to see if they can diagnose what is causing it and perhaps fix that.

I'll just have to await further development of the blog editor and the development team's investigation to get a resolution. In the mean time I can work around the problem if I need to post a picture by using Flickr's "Blog this" option.

In the most recent build of the blog editor I am pleased to see that a spell checking option has been added. Heaven knows I need help spelling and while a typo or two isn't something I'm going to stress out about, I do like to spell check my posts before I publish them.

Flock's news reader, originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

This screenshot illustrates Flock's new implementation of its RSS news reader, called "My Newspaper." The icon to call up the sidebar is designated by the red arrow pointing to the iconbar. In the list of RSS feeds, the bold font indicates unread items on that particular feed.

The photo is being posted, this time, using Flickr's Blog This option, so I am doing further testing to see whether it will post successfully with the Flickr tool.

I have changed the theme so that I can test whether doing so will permit me to post pictures here. So again, I’ll see if I can get the photo of “My Newspaper” from my Flickr site to post.

technorati tags: Flock, test

As you can tell from the previous post, the test failed.  The source code in the blog editor shows the src accurately, but for some reason something in the process of publishing to WordPress.com strips away the information on the source.  I’ve tried going into the editor in WordPress and manually adding it back and changing the information from img alt to img title, but that doesn’t help either.  Still WordPress seems to be removing that information for some reason. 

I have notified the appropriate people at Flock to see if it is something related to the blog editor.

technorati tags: Flock, test