deFlocked — for now

In what I suppose will come as a shock to some who think of me as a “SuperFan” of Flock, I’m announcing that during the last week I have decided to change my default browser to Firefox 2.0, just as Tish is getting on the Flock bandwagon.  The primary reason for the change, in my case, is speed or the relative lack of it in Flock.  It may be just my system or it may be that because Flock aspires to do so much, it will always be slower than FF, but whatever the reason, there is enough of a speed difference that the extra effort required to make this change seems justified.

Last week when I noticed the difference in the speed of the two browsers, I pulled up Process Explorer and checked the properties of both browsers side-by-side, and this is what I saw.  

 

For those really interested, clicking the image above will open a larger version of it that I hope you’ll be able to read clearly. (Update: After posting this I notice that the “expanded view” of the graphic above displays at the same size as what is within the post. Here is a larger display of it.) The memory usage in Flock seems to be almost twice as much as in Firefox.  In all fairness to Flock, it must be acknowledged that it is at version 0.7 or thereabouts whereas Firefox is at version 2.0.  I’m sure I’ll be testing each version of Flock as it comes out, so the change I’ve made is not necessarily permanent, but for now you can color me as primarily a Firefox user.

So what “extra effort” you may ask yourself is required to duplicate all the functions that Flock makes available in its default installation when one chooses to use Firefox instead?  Well, that’s an interesting story to me.  In many ways, I think it says some positive things about Flock that there is a lot of things that I must activate to recreate its built-in functions, and there are some things that I can’t duplicate in Firefox at all.

First, let me describe the things I am able to duplicate. 

Since I used Flock’s built-in “My News” to track the RSS feeds that I follow, I’ve opened a Bloglines account and am systematically adding the feeds to it that I previously followed in Flock.  This would be a lot easier to do if Flock had a capability that Mike Neel has been requesting for a while — the ability to export the feeds from Flock to an OPML file.  But it doesn’t yet have that ability (see Update #2 below for a correction), so I’m having to go through the feeds one at a time and subscribe to them in Bloglines.  Fortunately, Bloglines offers a widget that you can add to your Bookmark Toolbar so that you can subscribe to a feed easily.  I’ve also set my Bloglines account as one of the two Home pages that open when I open Firefox, so that provides the same function as Flock’s notification that a feed has been updated.

I’ve had to add a del.icio.us widget to my Bookmark Toolbar so that I can tag items for my del.icio.us account, whereas when I “starred” a favorite in Flock, that gave me the option to do both things at once.  That is a feature that I’ll welcome being able to get back when Flock improves its speed and I return to it as my default browser, because the way Flock stores favorites gives me a capability that I can’t recreate in Firefox.  But I’ll say more about that later when I discuss what I can’t duplicate in Firefox.

Flock has a built-in blog editor that Erwan Loisant is working to improve.  However, I have already begun experimenting with a number of the other blog editors that are available.  At the moment I am using Windows Live Writer for this post, and that is the editor I usually use when I want to add a graphic to the post anyway.  WLW gives some additional capabilities for formatting the graphic at the time it is added, so I prefer it for that function.  I’ve also installed Performancing into Firefox, and I use that for quick posts directly from the browser.  And on those rare occasions when I want to post a podcast, I use the Write panel in my WordPress installation so that I have access to the podPress add-in that I have installed there.  I don’t think it is likely that any one of these various blog editors will ever have all the features that are unique to the others, so I am content with having a number of tools to perform the specific task I want to accomplish.

Flock’s integration with Flickr is sweet, and I prefer its uploading capability to either the Flickr Uploadr or the web interface at Flickr.  However, I can subscribe in Bloglines to the RSS feeds for those of my Flickr contacts that I want to stay informed of when they update their photostream.  So in one sense I can duplicate Flock’s notification that one of my contacts has uploaded a new photo.  However, one feature isn’t available by doing that.  In Bloglines, I can only see the Public photos that my son uploads, not those that are designated as available to only Family and Friends.  However, I can live with that limitation because when I visit Flickr, I can see that other group of pictures. 

And finally to draw this epic post to a conclusion, let me say that the thing I can’t duplicate in Firefox that I miss most from Flock is the ability to easily change which collection displays in my browser in the place where the Bookmark Toolbar is displayed in Firefox.  I have used the “collections” feature in Flock extensively, and I really liked being able to display across the top of my browser the links in the different collections so that they are easily accessible while surfing. 

I look forward to Flock’s further development and the improvements I hope for in its performance.  You haven’t lost me as a SuperFan Flock.  I just need a little time away to play for a while in the fast lane.

Update #2: Daryl points out to me in a comment to this post that Flock does indeed have the ability to export news feeds to an OPML file. And upon looking more closely, I did discover that ability. Thanks, Daryl. Sorry to have inaccurately criticized Flock regarding a feature that was already there. I guess it lends support to your frequent comments about the importance of discoverability. 😉

Curling up with a good CRT

I know many people are fond of waxing nostalgic about the joys of curling up with a good book and how much better that is than trying to read something on a computer monitor.  And to a degree I can appreciate that perspective.  Because you can take the book to bed and read it there or on a train or plane while traveling and because there is a certain joy in the feel of just turning the pages, staring at a CRT or an LCD screen isn’t nearly as convenient and that represents something of a hurdle that one must overcome to see any benefits to reading something online.  But as I’ve done it more, I’ve now actually come to prefer curling up with a good CRT to read many things.  Why?  Well, that’s what I want to talk about in this post for a moment.

Technology can aid aging eyes

This is a screenshot of an article my friend Paul Moor pointed out to me recently, shown at the font size I normally use for surfing.  If you click on the image to open it in a larger view, you’ll notice that the text is rather small and therefore uncomfortably dense to be read online, or at least it is to my aging eyes.  However in Firefox, I can quickly press Ctrl + a couple of times to increase the font size temporarily when I am going to read something like this online so that it becomes easier for me to see. 

Here’s what it looks like when I do that.  Why don’t I just make that increased font size my normal surfing mode, you ask?  The answer is pretty simple.  Although the font size is better for reading an article like this, that large font size distorts the web page layout when I leave it that large for most web pages, so I prefer to only increase it temporarily when I’m reading something this lengthy.  If you visit the link to the article, you’ll see that it is quite long and reading it took me about an hour, so I wanted the comfort for that period but not permanently.  When I’ve completed reading something like this, I can simply close the tab in which I have it opened and I am back to my preferred font size for surfing. 

This one simple change, increasing the font size, does wonders for my enjoyment of reading things online. 

Being online enhances the experience of reading

In my experience it has always been a good idea to have a dictionary handy when you are reading something.  While I have a pretty good vocabulary, it is limited, of course.  So if I really wanted to get something out of an article, I’d need to look up the meaning of some of the words in the article.  As I curl up with my CRT, looking up words like “ululating” is a matter of copying the word I don’t know to the clipboard, opening a new tab to Dictionary.com and pasting that into the search box and bingo I’ve got the definition. 

However, Firefox has made the process of looking up a word at Dictionary.com even easier through the use of a neat little concept called a keyword for linking to a web site.  At the right is a screenshot of the “Quick Searches” folder of bookmarks that are stored in Firefox by default.  If you’ll notice the items highlighted in yellow in this screenshot, you’ll see that for a number of them keywords have already been defined that for that particular link.  I can press Ctrl T to open a new tab, and type “dict,” a space and then paste “ululating” and press Enter, and it will open Dictionary.com with the definition of that word displayed.  Because it is so much easier to look up words when I am reading something online, I find myself much more likely to actually look up those words that I’m unsure about than I would be if I had an Oxford English Dictionary at my side.  And I am back to reading the article in which I am interested much more quickly than I would be otherwise. 

But reading online is not just useful for solving my ignorance about the meaning of some words.  Sometimes references are made to someone like Norbert Weiner, with whom I am not familiar, so I can copy that name to the clipboard, open a new tab (Ctrl T) and type “wp,” a space and then paste “Norbert Weiner” and press Enter, and bingo I have an elaboration of who that person is.  “Wp” is the keyword assigned to Wikipedia in the default installation.  By becoming familiar with the various keywords already defined in the Quick Searches bookmarks in Firefox, it is possible to speed up the use of these resources for enhancing the experience of whatever you are reading.

And for me, the advent of tabbed browsing, which has finally come to Internet Explorer too with version 7, has made using the browser so much more efficient that I can’t imagine having to go back to surfing without it. 

Have it your way

What I have described up to this point is using the out-of-the-box configuration of Firefox.  However, I can change things to suit myself and my own habits better.  For instance, “wp” doesn’t seem as natural to me for Wikipedia as the keyword “wiki.”  I find that easier to remember.  So if I prefer “wiki” to “wp” as the keyword for Wikipedia, I can just change it. 

Here’s how. 

In Firefox, go to Bookmarks / Organize Bookmarks and open the Quick Searches folder.  Highlight the Wikipedia entry, right click on it and choose Properties, and change the keyword so that it is what you want rather than what it was.  This is what that dialog looks like.  Notice the Keyword field is highlighted in yellow in this screenshot. 

What’s best about this capability is that you can assign your own keywords to any link that you have bookmarked.  If you want to create a keyword for a link to your blog, for instance, you can bookmark the page, then go to this dialog in Organize Bookmarks and add the keyword, say “myblog” for instance, and then any time you want to visit that link, you just open a new tab (Ctrl T) and type “myblog” and press Enter.  By tailoring the browser like this, I think you’ll find, as I have, that the experience of curling up with a CRT is more pleasant than you might have previously imagined.

New browsers

Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 are out and available.  I’ve installed Firefox 2.0 on my own computer and yesterday, I helped my friend Paul install IE7 on his.  He described IE7 as the Rolls-Royce of browsers, but I countered that it is more like getting a new car of the same brand.  There are a number of new bells and whistles, but it is the same kind of car.  I like it much better than IE6, but it is a matter of preference as to whether it is that much better than FF 2.0.  I do like the way it does RSS feeds, however.

If you are still driving the old version of IE, I would think you would want to add IE7 as soon as it is convenient.  It is purportedly more secure than IE6, and it certainly has enough enhanced features that it is worth the trouble to install.  If you aren’t yet bold enough to add it now, it will be installed automatically through Windows Update sometime in November, I understand.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about these browsers in the days ahead, so stay tuned.

Update: Mike Neel has also posted his comments about these two browsers, in which he goes into more detail about the differences and similarities between them.  So rather than my reinventing that particular wheel, let me recommend that you check out his review.

powered by performancing firefox

Well, Duh!

I am almost embarrassed to admit that I have only today discovered this technique, but I must swallow my pride and state what to everyone else may be obvious.

For a long time, I and a number of my friends have lamented the fact that in Windows XP it is frequently difficult to find a program because the list of programs listed when you click on All Programs wasn’t in alphabetical order. This morning I began trying to find an answer and the answer, it turns out, is so simple that it’s embarrassing.

If you will click on All Programs and then RIGHT click on any one of the programs’ names, a context menu will appear in which one of the options will be “sort by name.” If you click that, the entire list will snap into alphabetical order! Who knew?

Okay, now you can begin your comments to ridicule my ignorance and tell me that you’ve known that forever and that I am a dunce for never having discovered it before, but just in case you didn’t know it, now you do. I suppose I can now die in peace because I have made the world just a little bit better. Enjoy.

Blogged with Flock

Theme modified

For some time now, I’ve been disturbed by the fact that the theme for this blog didn’t display the same way in Internet Explorer as it did in Firefox (or Flock).  This morning, I’ve used widgets to display the items in the sidebar and in the process, that has seemed to clear up the problem of how it displays in IE.  I may continue to tinker with other themes, because though I like the clean look of the Barthelme theme, there are many, many more options out there and I may be able to find one I like better. 

If any of you IE users experience problems with this theme, I would appreciate the feedback.

Blogged with Flock

Cheryl’s pictures from Dollywood

Apparently Cheryl and the children made a trip to Dollywood yesterday because she has posted some pictures of the children on her Flickr photostream.  However, for some legitimate reasons, those pictures are made visible only to Family and Friends who have Flickr accounts and are so designated.  So while I can point you to her photostream, you won’t see the children’s pictures there. 

She did a nice job, though, of shooting them and I marked several as favorites because she caught the children with nice smiles that didn’t appear too affected or strained.  The pictures were posed rather than candid shots, but despite that, the expressions she captured were very nice, and of course the advantage one has of staging a picture is that you can have some interesting settings and other elements in the picture that enhance it and make it suitable for framing or sending away to Grandma. 

This one of Connor, for instance, is a keeper and would make a nice cover for a Halloween card, if we sent cards out for that holiday like we do for Christmas.  I’m amazed that Cheryl was able to get him to sit still and to look into the camera with a smile on his face long enough to take the picture.  At almost 18 months old, he is energetic and therefore not inclined to pose, but he has been photographed a lot since his birth, so perhaps even at this young age he may have learned the art of holding still for the camera.  On the other hand, his mother may have threatened him with torture to within an inch of his life to get the picture, but if she did, I certainly don’t want to know that. 😉  Obviously I’m kidding, because I know she would never do that. 

This picture of Kaitlin, though posed, has a nice casual look to it.  Since Cheryl is a beautician, in addition to her primary job with Morgan Stanley, I was surprised that she would find it acceptable to take the picture with that loose strand of hair that you see, but to me that makes the picture better rather than worse.  And I like the fact that Kaitlin isn’t straining to smile.  Sometimes just looking pleasant is better that grinning, as my Grandfather used to say, “like a possum eatin’ briars.”

In this picture of Morgan, I think Cheryl got the hat trick — three great shots, all on the same day.  Again, it is a posed picture, as is obvious from the surroundings, but Morgan is showing a natural, beautiful smile, and I think that kind of thing makes all the difference in the world in a photograph.  Learning to allow yourself to be photographed naturally is a skill some people never acquire.  I suppose the advent of digital photography and because of that the resurgence of photography as a hobby may make this generation of children more accustomed to being photographed and may result in a much better photographic record of their youth that I’m sure they will treasure when they are older.  One other great thing about having photographs such as these in digital format is that they won’t fade through the years or if you print a copy to share with your family and it does fade, you can just print another. 

I’m very impressed with Cheryl’s skill at getting these pictures.  It shows that Mike isn’t the only photographer in the family.

Thanks, Barry

I notice that Barry has responded to Tish’s request to make the full text of his RSS feed available rather than just the first 255 characters.  Thank you, sir.  I think it makes the aggregated feed at KnoxBloggers.com more readable and symmetrical, given that the rest of us send the full text in our RSS feeds.

Blogged with Flock

The aftermath

Since Mike has reported on the content of what we covered at last night’s KnoxBloggers meeting and Tish has shared her impressions of it, all that remains for me is to upload the pictures.

While my photography may not be the greatest, at least these pictures document the event and those present (at least those present at the time the pictures were taken; Cicelie came in later).  From left to right in this photo, you’ll find Maja, Mike and Tish.  Sorry Tish that I got you with your eyes closed, and Maja I apologize for the fact that the flash didn’t seem to reach you, but such things happen when the photographer is an amateur.

Lidia had a chance to pose for her photograph, since I missed her in the other one.  Also she got the benefit of the full flash saturation, so congratulations Lidia on being so photogenic. 

I’ll also add a brief comment to what Mike posted about what we covered. 

One of the things we did while talking about blogging was to set up a blog at Blogger and one at WordPress.com, just to demonstrate how one would do that.  Since most of us already had some experience with using Blogger and fewer of the group knew much about WordPress.com, we issued invitations to those present to get an account (username and password) at WordPress.com so they could make some practice posts on the demonstration blog we set up there.  While WordPress.com says there is no limit to the number of blogs you can create, it made more sense to avoid littering the landscape with individual test blogs and to concentrate our efforts on one blog.  One advantage of this strategy, it seems to me, is that if several of us are blogging together we can provide each other feedback or help when problems are encountered. 

I want to encourage those of you who received invitations to the WordPress.com demo site to go ahead and get your account at WordPress.com so that you can begin to experiment.  And I’d like to invite you to ask Mike or me if you have any questions about what you are doing there.  We’ll be glad to try to answer or help you find an answer to your questions, if we don’t know. 

Tonight’s Knoxbloggers topic

The monthly meeting of the KnoxBloggers group takes place tonight at 7:00 PM at Mike Neel’s house. Because a number of Mike’s coworkers have told him that, though they aren’t yet bloggers, they thought they might like to give it a whirl, we decided to spend this meeting talking about how to get started blogging. So Mike will lead tonight’s discussion, and he has asked me to contribute anything I can to his presentation. I certainly don’t want to preemptively steal Mike’s thunder with this post, however I’d like to get a few ideas down here so that we can refer to them tonight.

In truth, the problem really isn’t how to start blogging, because getting started is easy. Many blogs are started every day, but far too many of them are abandoned fairly quickly once the new blogger discovers that blogging requires sustained effort. As I’ve said many times before, creating a blog is a lot like planting a garden. If you don’t tend your garden, your neighbors will soon see it fill up with weeds and it will show your lack of attention. The same can be said for a blog, except that the “neighbors” in the case of a blog are the entire world. So the first question a potential new blogger should ask himself is “are you sure you really want to do this?” But for the purposes of tonight’s discussion, we’ll assume the answer to that question is yes.

Ideally, I suppose, the next question a blogger would ask herself is what kind of blog she wants to write, but this is seldom the order in which things happen. Most of us begin blogging and then “discover our voice.” In other words, most new bloggers, and this was certainly true in my case, begin without any clear idea of what we are doing and sometime later we may become focused on one primary area or discover a theme. When I first began blogging on June 17, 2001, with this post, I just wanted to see if I were able to create a weblog, and at the same time I wanted to avoid committing any money to the endeavor. So I began using the free Trellix software that Dan Bricklin had written and used the free hosting site at Tripod.com. As you can see that initial effort still exists. So you should keep in mind that your past “sins” will remain out there for everyone to see, unless you actively choose to remove them.

In April of 2002, being still dedicated to using free services, I opened my blog at Blogger with this post. If you look closely you can see, I stayed at Blogger for quite a long time, until October 31, 2005. My three plus years of blogging on Blogger was done almost exclusively using their web interface’s blogging tools. Eventually, I used Flickr’s blogging capability so that I could add some posts that included pictures that I had uploaded to that service.

It was because of Flock that I moved to WordPress.com and became familiar with the WordPress blogging platform and a fan of that system. Flock gave me an alternative blog editor to use in addition to the web interface that WordPress.com offered. One of the really nice features of WordPress.com is the Akismet tool that it makes available for fighting blog spam, comments by spammers to your posts (the weeds in the garden of your blog).

In May of 2006, I finally decided that I was committed enough to blogging to move my blog to a hosting company, where I registered a domain name and began paying a monthly fee for their hosting my blog. The reason I chose to pay for hosting was so that I would be able to control more of the design and features of my site. On this site, I can use the web interface for writing posts, or Flock’s blog editor, and more recently, I have begun to experiment with using Windows Live Writer, which I like a lot.

So that gives a bit of historical perspective on the experiences that will inform my comments tonight. I look forward to meeting those of you who will be attending our gathering for the first time, and I hope you’ll come armed with questions and an open mind.

On the road again

On Monday, October 2, I left town to visit my family in Georgia for a couple of days, but the two-day visit I had planned originally turned into a four-day visit, and I didn’t get back to Knoxville until Friday around noon.  That’s why there were no blog posts last week.  I thought about announcing this visit in advance but I generally don’t want to make it known that I am out of town for home security reasons.

The primary purpose of my visit, aside from seeing the family, was to deliver the Yamaha NS-10M near field monitor speakers (pictured at the left, showing them as installed at his house) to Jeff for use in his basement recording studio.  Several years ago, I had purchased these speakers to use with the midi studio I was setting up.  But as with too many things, my willingness to buy exceeded my capacity to understand, and I eventually became befuddled by all the various links and routings of the midi signal.  When I gave up on that pursuit, I had loaned Jeff these speakers, and he used them for a year or two.  About six to nine months ago, I asked for them back so that I could use them with some other pieces of gear that I had purchased back then, but this time I wanted them for use in producing podcasts.  I realized, after a while, that I really didn’t need them, and Jeff did.  Hence my trip to Georgia.

While I was in town Carole and I had a chance to attend a concert by the East Hall Middle School choral group on Thursday night at the Airline Baptist Church, in which my 13-year-old granddaughter, Maegan (in the middle in the photograph) sang.  I was glad I was able to get this photograph of the family together in the auditorium.  Pictured from left to right is Deanna, Maegan and Jeff. 

More photographs from my visit can be found on my Flickr site.  They were the ones uploaded on October 6, 2006.

And on the same day I left for Georgia for the week, my friend and former associate, Don Vernine, and his friend Don Robaldo left from Tampa for a 16 day trip to Europe (primarily to Italy) to investigate purchasing a sail boat so that he can decide whether he wants to spend the next couple of years or so sailing around the Mediterranean.  This morning I received an email report of his trip thus far, and it sounds like he is really enjoying the scenery and the travel.  Both of the Dons are of Italian heritage, so the trip is especially meaningful to them.  They will return on October 18, 2006.