Stefan Hayden

Eric Meyers came by Boston today and gave a talk on A List Apart similar to what he talked about at Web Essentials 05. It was much more informative with the slides in front of my face as opposed to just the podcast. While the ideas and concepts were nothing new to me it was good to have it reiterated and pounded in to my head. As much as I know about semantic mark up I constantly find my self making common mistakes.

While I love my laptop that Sconex got me I don’t know how good the wireless card is that is built in. It found the wireless network in the MIT building but couldn’t connect. All well, no live blogging for me. I’ll have to play with my wireless dongle and see if that works any better.

I have no idea if I like it or not yet. It’s in the flavor of Gmail with tons of JavaScript. All I do know is that loading 181 feeds from bloglines in to Reader seems to be taking forever. Updates to come as I continue to play with it.

All the Digg.com kids are having fun bashing it. Slashdot too. Lot of people saying they like Bloglines better. In general bloglines is okay but but it’s still painful to use.

Update: In general the feed reader has an interesting focus and one that Keri might agree with. Gmail has shown how google can really get to the heart of what people are trying to do with technology and I think they realty hit the head with their feed reader. The way I use bloglines is almost like bookmarks. If I find an interesting web site I subscribe and that’s how I have 181 feeds in bloglines.

When the feed updates bloglines bolds the feed and tells me how many posts. There are a lot of feeds I am subscribe to that i don’t check daily like Slashdot, Robert Scoble and Metafilter. I have my list of favorite sites and I start checking them until i run out of time. When I come back later I start back at the top of the list of favorite and work my way down again. This way some of the blogs on the bottom of my list rarely to never get checked. Some blogs I don’t really ready everything and like to wait till they have a bunch of post and then quickly look at the headlines to see if anything jumps out. I believe this way lets me see what I’m really interested in as well as get a general knowledge of what some of the people I don’t have time for are talking about.

Google reader really focuses on the individual post. When a blog updates the post is put at the top of your queue and that’s it. This system is a very Post driven reader as opposed to bloglines which is Subscription driven. The current way i read blog is extremely Subscription driven though I can see how a system based on new posts is more focused on reading new content now and not saving it for later. Right now I like saving it for later and then skimming it and stopping if I’m really interested. It does allow for free tagging though I’m not entirely sure how you navigate the tags.

In general I say I like it but there is something about it that I find off putting and I can’t put my finger on it.

Update: TechCrush has a pretty fair review.

Kottke has been talking about the WebOS and how a lot of the feed back talks about how as fast and cheep high speed internet spreads people will be offline less and less. Jason points out that if the system fails then you either don’t have access to your stuff or you might possibly lose it all. Not to mention that librarians will point out that broadband or even dial up is as far spread as you might think.

While trying to use a service who’s site has gone down is a pain I think the bigger picture of WebOS is ownership of data. While it would be nice to have access to all your gmail while you are offline I think the better reason to keep a copy is for portability. If you want to change emails clients today you need to find some way to get the mail off the old website and over to the new website. While it can be done I don’t think any two email services have made moving to and from their service easy.

In the future, with all my mail on the server and my computer, I can just abandon the old email service. The new email service only has to reorder the email on my computer to match their new service. Barring the addition of any sort of email DRM it should be relatively easy to read the email text files on my computer and reorganize with new file structure, new files name and new structure in the files. How awesome would it be if every email client you logged in to automatically displayed you’re entire email history?

I think it would be swell.

Whiteboard is not going to get me to leave Writely anytime soon.

Tantek has a great presentation up on Semantic XHTML. To many designers, my self included, get lost in DIV soup when there are tons of usable tags that come with meaning already built in. If you know CSS and are looking for a way to hone that skill this is the presentation to look to.st

Some stuff like Semantic tables still really confuses me. I know I can get it if I try!