Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

http://30boxes.com is a brand new webservices. The public beta was launched last Sunday.

The purpose of the site is to solve the surprisingly difficult problem of calendaring. What’s wrong with calendaring, you might ask? Well, lots of things. Existing calendaring applications are complicated and clumsy, unpractical for sharing and social interactions, and, well, “traditional”.

http://30boxes.com chose a fresh approach. They have totally and completely minimized and simplified the user interface.

Entering events can be done with as little as filling in one single text field. Application understands human language like “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, and “next week”. You can have “buddies” which is just their term for contacts. All you have to do to add a contact is specify email address. You buddies can have calendars of their own, you can share calendars and even use the system to send invitations and confirmations/denies for events. You can track a lot more information about your buddies too - Flickr photos, LiveJournal entries, MySpace blog, and any other RSS feed. When there are new items - you get a small icon on the appropriate day of the calendar and can quickly check what they are up to.

The interface looks very clean and works pretty fast. It’s also based on AJAX technology which allows you to see updates without refreshing the page - feels nice.

Check it out - it costs nothing, and can do a lot for your organized life!

Whenever I was linking to my own site, I’ve been using relative URLs. Relative URLs are shorter and they don’t need to be changed when site moves to a new domain. But, it seems, there are numerous problems with RSS feeds and software that aggregates them. The main issue is that most RSS aggregators are rather stupid and don’t know how to convert relative URLs in RSS feed items to absolute ones. This causes far too many people to swear far too much. So I decided to switch to absolute (full) URLs from now on.

Changes of my domain changing are too slim too.

As you might know, Google has offered a new service to the Internet community - an RSS/Atom aggregator called Google Reader. I’ve heard many people liked it. Being an active user of RSS/Atom aggregator BlogLines I thought I would check it out. There are a few things that I want that BlogLines hasn’t implemented yet, and there are a few things that could have been implemented better. So I was wondering if Google Reader had it right.

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I am trying my best to be objective and open minded. I am not always good at it, but at least I’m trying. The other day I wrote a somewhat negative post about iPod. Ok, and a few negative comments too.

Because I try to stay open minded and because I don’t want to become an always complaining gramp, I try to find positive sides too. I thought about the iPod issue a bit and I think that obviously there is a good thing about it too. And not just some theoretical crapy good thing that is good for some abstract iPod user, but a really good thing for me and you.

iPod hype has increased the popularity of podcasting.

What good is in podcasting? Well, I happen to think that podcasting is a good idea by itself. It is one of those applications that make Internet more popular with the masses. And that’s a good thing. Podcasting, in turn, increased the popularity and common knowledge of such modern technologies as feeding (RSS and Atom) and audio compression (mp3 and ogg). That’s another good thing.

So, with iPod, as with any other thing there is good stuff and there is bad stuff. I found both. Now is your turn.

The scariest thing just happened now with me and BlogLines. I was scrolling through my feeds, reading occasional items. And there was one feed that I wanted to unsubscribe. I never ever tested the unsubscribe from feed functionality from my phone before, so I was somewhat worried. But I click it anyway. And it says OK. And done.

I wanted to go read the rest of the items, but it looked like there were no feeds. It got me worried even more. I quickly went to my blogroll page to see if any feeds are there, but it was empty. Nothing. Not even one.

By this time I was practically freaking out. So I jumped to my computer and used the normal browser to navigate to BlogLines. I was hoping to see the plumber, but BlogLines seemed just fine.

I clicked to open my feeds and the folder was empty. I started to feel the pain of a heart attack. Decided to re-subscribe to a few feeds that I could at least remember. And, oh thanks to all the superpowers, I see this error message:

There is a problem with the database.

And before I finished writing this post all my feeds were back. And before finishing this post, I did the backup of all my public feeds into OPML file.