It’s News to Me

These are a few of the sites I’ve tagged recently to my del.icio.us account in no particular order.

• wikiHow — A Wiki devoted to a variety of how to articles. Extensive and well-done.
• Security checklist for home users of Windows — An excellent checklist for naive users of home computers to help them be a bit more secure.
• How to remove your materials from Google — O’Reilly’s guide to excluding and removing information from Google’s archives and blocking Google’s information-gathering bots.
• Practice in listening to German language broadcasts of the news — Deutsche Welle’s German language news stories with the text and the language spoken slowly.
• German language instruction — Link contains an audio link to learning German by Radio.
• Dual booting Windows and Linux — A how to article that explains how to set up a dual boot Win / Linux configuration.
• How to get around “Access Denied” and “Sharing Violation” roadblocks — Utilities that permit deleting of files that can’t be deleted otherwise.
• Shortcut keys in Windows and various Windows applications — A handy summary of shortcut keys.
• Google Reader — Google’s RSS reader application.

This morning I recorded a video to answer a question from my friend, Forrest Umberger, about how I intersperse comments into replies to his email messages.  I posted this video at YouTube after trying unsuccessfully to post it at Google Video.  I’m not sure what the problem was with Google Video unless perhaps it was longer than they permit.  I’ll have to go back and explore their rules to see if they limit the size.  This video was 12.2 MB in length and about 3 minutes long, so I would think that it should fit their requirements, but who knows?

technorati tags: video, YouTube, TheBat

This post is to test a bug I reported in Flock when publishing from the  blog editor.  It has no purpose other than to generate a post that I can use to generate the error.

technorati tags: Flock, testing, bug

When Mike and Daryl and I met yesterday, our conversation revealed that we each have very different styles of surfing and using the various tools that are available to us. And that, I think, is one of the great values of getting together with other knowledgeable users. You get ideas about different ways of doing things, particularly if you don’t get hung up with trying to convert others to your style but rather learn from them about their preferences.

For example, although I had read about the blogging tool, Performancing, I had never bothered to download it or even to explore it very much. Since Mike had it on his laptop, I got a chance to see it for the first time and I was impressed enough to investigate it when I got home and download a copy. This is my first blog entry using it.

Mike, who is still using Firefox as his primary browser, had also downloaded Opera and he, of course, also has a copy of Flock on his system, though at the time he did not have the most current one. And the fact that he has several browsers on his system is to my way of thinking a good idea.

I know that some of my friends seem to believe that if God wanted you to have more than one browser on your system She would have installed them at the factory. In other words, they can’t comprehend why anyone would have two browsers, let alone several. I think the answer is as simple as the answer to the question “what would you do if the only browser you had went wonky on you and wouldn’t load web pages?” Having more than one browser is at least insurance against that possibility. It also gives you multiple options to see whether a problem may exist with a web page just because of the browser you are using. However, there are other good reasons for having multiple browsers too. For instance, I use Opera because it has a nice Chat capability that I use for irc chat. Since no such feature exists currently in Flock, which I use as my default browser despite its pre-release status, Opera provides that additional capability to me.

The three of us also talked about how we use tagging and bookmarking and that demonstrated that all three of us have different styles. Mike, for instance, makes heavy use of Bloglines to “cover” the web sites he wants to check on regularly. He considers bookmarks as only temporary pointers to sites that he might want to blog about, so he merely sends himself the links he finds interesting at his gmail account, where he keeps them until he has completed his use of them and then deletes them. It works for him, so who’s to say that isn’t as good a practice as any other. As I’ve reported before, I use FeedDemon as my RSS reader and because I own that software, I also have access to NewsGator, which is an online RSS reader that is now associated with FeedDemon.

Of the three of us, I seem to be the one who is making most use of tagging. Mike doesn’t seem to use it much at all, and Daryl uses it some but is skeptical about its trendy nature and possible tendency to fall into disuse at some point in the future. I, on the other hand, have about 350 tagged sites on my del.icio.us page and find it quite handy when I am traveling and want to help a friend or relative with their systems. It gives me a way to locate sites that I find useful when I am not at my own computer.

Daryl made an entry on his blog recently called “How I’m using Flock” that I found particularly helpful because it gave me ideas about how I might use it too. I am convinced there is no one right way to use the tools we have available to us, and that there is great value in meeting with other users occasionally to discover what practices they have developed. While it is possible to pick up such tips and tricks from web sites and forums, there’s nothing like a personal conversation and demonstration to help you understand what works.

Mike Neel and Daryl Houston, originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

This afternoon Mike Neel, Daryl Houston and I met at Panera, here in Knoxville, for a first-ever meetup of Flock users in the area. Daryl has been employed with Flock since some time last year and was able to provide some information about what’s going on with the evolution of this program. Despite the relatively slow (but free) WiFi at Panera, we looked at some of Flock’s features and talked about new things that are in the works. It was a pleasant and cordial meeting and perhaps it marks the first of many such gatherings for Flock users both here and throughout the rest of the country.

I suppose all of us have heard it said many times that “the more you put into something, the more you’ll get out of it.” And my recent experiences in being involved in the Flock community only bears out the wisdom of that statement.

For instance, last night I spent a bit of time proofreading Eli’s newly developed Wiki explanation of how to verify a bug in Flock. In doing so, I rediscovered how to identify which build of Flock you are using, which is needed information if you are going to report a bug. I’ve also learned a bit about participating on IRC by hanging out on the irc-flock channel and observing the dialog that takes place there. Not only do you get a sense of the personalities of the Flock developers, but you also see how hard they work to make a product such as Flock work. So whether it is becoming involved in a church, a political party, or a hobby, jumping in and contributing whatever you have to offer, putting something in leads to a significant return on your investment of time.

And now here’s the point of these observations.

I believe the same principle applies to the Internet itself. You can simply be an observer of it by reading web pages, and from that you’ll derive a certain amount of pleasure and enlightenment, or you can become a participant in it by creating content online, whether through something like Flickr or writing a blog or participating in forums or becoming involved with an open source project. In my experience it is much more educational and clearly more fun to participate in the Internet than just to observe it by reading the content that others contribute. At the risk of committing the crime of using trendy terminology, Web 2.0 is to me far more fun than Web 1.0 was.

technorati tags: Flock, community, involvement

Daryl has just blogged about a meeting tomorrow at Panera’s restaurant at 205 N. Peters Rd here in Knoxville at 1:00 PM. Anyone interested in learning a bit more about Flock is welcome to join us.

I have to take exception with one comment Daryl made however. He said …

Knoxville’s not exactly a bustling metropolis of the bleeding edge web.

Daryl’s Flock Blog

I think you have to qualify that statement by adding “with respect to Flock.” Maybe that is what he is implying when he refers to the “bleeding edge web.” Granted not many folks here in Knoxville have yet discovered Flock, but we need not disparage the home town and the expertise that resides here. I’ve met some pretty sharp cookies in and around Knoxville as pertains to the web. They’ll come around to discovering Flock eventually, I’m sure.

technorati tags: Flock, Meetup

Downtown Louisville, originally uploaded by Dr Reelgood.

Mike’s family visited Louisville, KY, over the weekend for Madison’s Lacrosse game, and while there, he shot this picture of their most famous product (except perhaps for Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali).

Daryl Houston has a nice post this morning titled Wil Wheaton and Tagging that gives some insightful thought to the value of tagging. If you aren’t familiar with what tagging is through such services as Flickr or del.icio.us, you might find this worthwhile reading.

technorati tags: tagging, Flock

This morning I spent a bit of time evaluating SnagIt, a capture tool for Windows.

I decided to record a short video (about 1 min and 30 secs) about how to search in Flock’s Favorites Manager. It turned out reasonably well, so I uploaded the video to YouTube.com. You can watch that video here. I recorded the audio in real time and don’t find any way to edit what was recorded, so there are a few incorrect references (for instance, referring to the Favorites menu when I meant to call it the Favorites manager), but on the whole I was satisfied with the video because it is short and to the point, and it does illustrate how the search feature can be used.

I would welcome your comments on this first effort. Thanks.

technorati tags: Flock, video, tutorial, training, features, Favorites Manager