Blogging
- May 27 2011 - Timeline tools ... My memory is awful, it really is. I maintain a private personal blog which I use for capturing extremely short pieces of content that I want tagged and timestamped. Works well for those random thoughts that are maybe not suitable for sharing but which I want to capture nonetheless. Anyway, I'm looking for sometime similar to aid my memory at work and have been considering something more along the lines of a timeline of sorts where I can jot down major company moments, hires etc in a format that's easy to explore and I came across the following online timeline makers which all seem to fit the mold of what I need....http://www.timetoast.com
http://timerime.com
http://www.preceden.com/
http://www.allofme.com/
http://www.xtimeline.com
Once I actually decide which one to go with I'll report back. Data portability will be important for me as I'll need to invest quite a bit of time into putting it together and would hate to lose it into the cloud. Easy of entry is probably second highest and visuals are third.
Also check out http://moreofit.com, great tool for finding competing tools/solutions once you have found one you like. - Jul 17 2008 - code samples in blogger are a pain ...
I can’t say I enjoy writing in the blogger post interface, in fact it’s pretty frustrating. For a while there I was using google docs to write posts(which I loved), then I would just publish to my blog. That actually worked great until the actual publishing process which doesn’t allow you to control the title very effectively and totally messed up my rss feed even if I did fix the title. Then I tried scribefire which again was really promising but it’s a cramped UI and again the publishing process was really clunky for my workflow. (things remain drafts for me for weeks at a time)
Anyway, I’m looking at my last post and those code samples are embarrassingly poorly formatted. Not only that but if you check the source the blogger editor is introducing tons of html space entities which drives me nuts considering I’m using whitespace:pre on my blockquotes anyway.
I’m really inclined to just use the tools I have when it comes to this site, primarily so that I focus on writing and not tinkering. Since moving my website from a hosted environment to blogger I have actually started to focus again on my writing and my projects rather than tinkering with a wheel that’s been built a thousand times (photo gallery scripts, php and perl cgi trickery for mundane templating etc). So while I will probably end up spending time on this at some point I really just want to find something that “just works” for showing code in blog posts. More to come I’m sure. - Jun 13 2008 - Gadgets in Blogger ...
So I’ve actually started my blogquotes project which was intended as a widget style provider for random quotes (from a personal library) to appear somewhere on my site. I’m using the new Google app engine for this project and so far I have to say it’s pretty damn easy. From barely knowing python to having a django templated, gql driven tiny quote engine. Granted it’s the “hello world” of web apps, but still considering I have an application running on Google, with built-in authentication and datastore …. I’m pretty impressed.
I’ve played with ruby on rails before, but so far I’m far more comfortable with what I’m building here than I ever was with Ruby. (I don’t think I’ll start detailing that here and now as this post is more about my gadget plans and I don’t care)
So I have my application, and I have the beginnings of the backend for my quote providers. I just went to draft.blogger.com where google tests out new features and clicked “add gadget” from the layout view of the blog. I actually thought that what I was looking at was a mistake. 43,000 page elements and gadgets? How is that useful to anyone? How am I not just making the problem worse by adding another one that no one will find and no one but me will use? This is just insane.
I did a search for quote on that page and it returned 13, thankfully none of them are what I have in mind. They are all basically syndication style “[fill in topic] quote of the day” style widgets. There actually seem to be a surprising number of gadgets like that. Things that just don’t really allow the user to add anything meaningful or contextual to the web. I suppose a lot of people use their blogs as their home page, but for me having the weather and a stock ticker on my blog just doesn’t make sense. My Google home page sure, but on millions of public blogs not so much.
There also seems to be too many thinly disguised marketing devices and cheap looking ad-style nothing widgets. Personally I would like to see more of the types of gadgets that Google themselves are creating, where user generated content is the focus (my youtube videos, my picasa albums, my google docs etc) as opposed to content that is one size fits all for millions of blogs. At least it gives me some hope that what I’m doing is not a complete right off.
The data won’t stick, but if you have a google account you can log in and add a quote to the pre-alpha-hello-world-version of blog quotes at http://blogquotes.appspot.com
