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Laptop woes

My laptop developed a fault last Friday where the power lead got damaged to the point of failure.  This meant that I was without a laptop for over a week now.  I am going to pop into Toys 'R' Us on Friday and pick up an Asus Eee PC 900A as a replacement until I can get my EOL MacBook's power supply fixed.  I'm hoping the compact design and light weight will mean I can take the Asus with me more often and focus on my writing for this blog.

The Web as a Social Network

Social Networks have become big business on the World Wide Web, with companies like MySpace and Facebook worth millions of dollars.  They make their money through a combination of advertising and customer lock-in, where people have to use their service because that is what their friends use.

Blogs are a form of social network on their own.  People can upload their photos, share their favourite links and write posts and memos.  Some will let you use microblogging; others can integrate this from other platforms such as Twitter.  All will let you comment on them somehow, and using RSS and Atom feeds you can subscribe to other blogs and keep updated on what your friends are doing.

All of these mean you have an extremely flexible and extremely open social network that is accessible to any operating system, with an enormous number of desktop- and web-based clients.  You have the ultimate redundancy in that it would be impossible to bring the whole network down in one go.  Blogs hosted at larger sites will have some sort of fail-over of their own, vastly increasing the resistance of the network as a whole to attack or failure.

And all it takes to join this network is a blog of your own—either hosted yourself or with a third party—and a feed client.

Resorting to paper

As a self-proclaimed geek and gadget lover I have always used gadgets to manage my time.  All of my phones since around 2002 have had usable calendars and organisers, which I have always used because they were convenient and I always had my phone on me.

I have also however had the joy of trying to synchronise all these devices into different desktop systems, which is not as easy as it sounds.  Synchronising one device with one computer is relatively easy, but add any more devices, or other computers, and the number of problems you will experience increases exponentially.  The number of times I have had to save my calendar and contacts by trawling through them and removing duplicates is more than I care to remember.

Electronic devices like this are supposed to be making our lives simpler, but instead they are introducing their own complications and problems.  So I had the idea recently of getting rid of all of this complication, and working purely on paper for organising myself.  I bought myself an organiser and dug out my favourite fountain pen from my school days, and started copying all my appointments and my important phone numbers into it.

Initially I wasn't sure how well it was going to work.  I like the ability to set alerts and recurring appointments when I am using Outlook at work, and I like the ability to add people to events and have them confirm or deny their attendance.  But I realised that, although I liked these features, I wither didn't use them as much as I thought, or the people I was organising meetings with didn't use them either.

As it turns out, having a notepad, day planner and contact list in one file makes it a lot easier to keep track of what I'm doing over the week.  I use the A-Z organiser dividers to group projects and companies together, and make use of the notes pages to keep track of everything I need to remember about that company/project.  The contact sheets mean I can keep contact details with the projects, and I can find everything within a few seconds.

I wasn't sure how much difference it would make, using a planner instead of Outlook, but being able to use it when I'm not near a computer, and being able to make notes in it faster than on a screen, have made me feel a lot more productive.

Using RSS and Atom feeds

Two weeks ago I gave you a few tips for writing your own blog, and hopefully it provided a few of you with the incentive to get out and start a new one, or breath some life into your existing one.  Blogging is not just about writing though.  A large part of it is reading other people's blogs, and adding your own comments or trackbacks (posts in your blog that are replies to, or reference, posts in another blog).

With so many blogs out there it would be tedious to visit each one in turn, checking to see if they had any new posts.  In 1999 Ramanathan V. Guha from Netscape created RSS as a way of pulling other website content onto the Netscape homepage, and Bloggers quickly saw the potential for sharing their blogs with a wider auduence.  All the major blog platforms added RSS feeds to their site, and later the similar Atom format was adopted as well (it was technically better than RSS, which had some compatibility problems between versions).  Software for the desktop was created which allowed people to subscribe to these feeds, and be notified when there was new content.

Over the past couple of years RSS and Atom have started appearing all over the web, easily identified by the bright orange 'radio wave' symbol.  If you see this logo on a site or in your browser, it means there is a feed available for you to subscribe to.  Popular feed readers are Liferea for Linux and FeedReader for Windows, but many other programs and websites are able to use the feeds and display them.  Microsoft Outlook can display them as a folder of messages similar to your email, and My Yahoo and Google Reader allow you to view them on a website.

Subscribing to a feed generally means clicking on the orange icon on the page, or clicking the feed icon in your browsers address bar, to load the feed in the browser window.  This will give you a preview of the feed and normally will give you a couple of options such as adding it to Live Bookmarks.  When this page has loaded, copy the URL from the address bar.  Next, switch to your feed reader and press the New Feed button.  Different feed readers use different buttons, menus and terminology, so look in the Help menu for that program if you are not sure.  Paste the URL you copied into the New Feed dialog, and the program will download the feed and make it available, highlighting all the unread messages.

As you read, the program will mark the messages as 'read,' similar to an email message, and you will be notified when there are new messages available.

Hopefully that will be enough to get you started with RSS and Atom feeds, and get you started on reading many more blogs and websites.  As you read them jot down any ideas you get for your own blog.  Reading other people's blogs is a great source of inspiration.  Just make sure you link back to theirs if you mention them.

Feed icon from www.feedicons.com.