Web work

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Here comes yet another product from Automattic and WordPress.com team – Jetpack.

This is a WordPress plugin that brings WordPress.com goodies to your self-hosted WordPress site. The project is starting off with just a few, most requested, bits of functionality, but according to this blog post more is coming.

For launch we’ve brought eight of the most-requested features into Jetpack as one easy bundle: Hovercards, Stats, After the Deadline, Twitter widget, shortcodes, shortlinks, easy Facebook/Twitter/WordPress sharing buttons (Sharedaddy), and for our fellow math nerds, LaTeX. We’re excited about this initial set of features, but we’re even more excited for what’s coming down the road.

Gmail glitch – an example to follow

Once again Google demonstrates the proper way to handle issues. Due to their software update, some users temporary lost access to emails. Instead of hiding and silencing, Google published a blog post explaining the issue, as well where and when more information would be available. Not to mention that loss of service is an extremely rare occasion, and loss of data is even more so. This time, it seems, all data is recoverable from tape backups. All it takes is a little time.

Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we’re making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.

In times like that, keeping your users up to date is vital. All the press releases and marketing newsletters in the world won’t buy you a fraction of the trust that a simple blog post during the downtime will bring you.

Giving Picasa a try

Those of you who know me, know that I am a big fan of Flickr. I’ve been using it for years, and I have more than 10,000 photos upload there. I am also a big fan of Google. And even so, I ignored and disregarded their Picasa service. Why? Because it is boring.

Flickr is a fresh and very much unique solution to the photo sharing problem. It is a photostream. It is social with all the commends and groups. It helps with organization of photos by sets, collections, and tags. It utilizes EXIF image data. It allows to geotag pictures. It was one of the first to introduce easy Creative Commons licensing. And more.

Picasa is very straightforward and … boring. Create albums, upload images, share the selected. That was pretty much it. Later on of course comments came in, geotagging was implemented, and even face recognition was added. Sort of. The strength of Picasa was not in the web service. It was in the photo management application that you’d install on your computer. And that was exactly what I never wanted to do.

My computer is unreliable. It crashes, and dies, and gets outdated. It runs out of disk space. I lose it. And I can’t really share and discuss things off my computer with other people. I can, but it’s not easy or convenient. Flickr solves my problem – I upload pictures there, and everyone can see, comment, and reuse them.

That however created a new problem for me. Since I know that other people will look at my photos, I want to edit them a bit before uploading – crop, contrast, saturation. Things like that. But when I take a lot of pictures at once – event or travel – I have to work a lot to process them. If I get several events in a row, I get stuck, overload, and lose interest. Like now, for example. I still have photos from my 2009 trips that I haven’t uploaded anywhere.

A few days ago, I realized that there might be a workable scenario for me with Picasa. Picasa these days is much more feature rich than it used to be. It still lacks the social functionality, but it offers something more for photo management. Picnick – an online photo editor. With that, I can upload all my photos to Picasa as soon as I have them. I can keep them in a private album, edit them when I have the time, and then share them later. Or share them immediately and edit them later – there is less social pressure because there is less social interactions and functionality.

On top of that, Picasa is better working with my new Android phone. I already use it to backup photos from my phone. Having their all photos together makes sense.

One other thing that Picasa does better – uploads. Both services have API, so there are plenty of tools to move pictures around. But I always prefer the simplest solution. Flickr provides five file upload fields on their site. If I need to upload few hundreds of pictures, I’ll spend too much time with that. I am, sort of, forced to install an application or a browser plugin or something. Picasa web albums allows to select multiple files for upload – as many as you have in the folder. So in just a couple of clicks I can select and start the upload and come back later when it’s done.

Having seen all that in the last few days, I decided to try it out. I am no uploading all my photos to Picasa as well. I’ll keep them in private albums for now. If I like it enough, I’ll share them later.

What about you? Where do you keep your photos? How do you share them? And are you happy with your current setup?

Sold domain – slonn.com

I’ve been buying domains for a few years now. Every time I have an idea for a project, I go and buy a domain for it. Sometimes the project idea actually gets implemented and lives for a while. Most of the time I just put it on the shelf. I keep domains for two-three years just in case I go back to the project and then I expire them. A few domains I keep longer, in hopes of selling them later. I sold a few domains before to clients of mine, but I’ve never sold anything to an unknown party.

Today I did. Well, technically it took longer than just today. But today the deal is officially closed. I put one of my domains – slonn.com – on the auctions at GoDaddy and someone bought it for $500 USD. While I could have bargained for a better price, I really didn’t want to. It’s a 5-letter .com domain with no promotion, no prior website. I had it for about 5 years. I thought the price was about right and GoDaddy made the rest of the procedure ridiculously easy.

I have a few domains up for sale, but at the rate it goes, I don’t expect it to be my primary source of income any time soon. Heck, it won’t even qualify for business by any measure. Just a little extra PayPal cash.

Moving from Delicious to Evernote

First things first:

I absolutely love Delicious. I’ve been using it for ages and it saved my life several times. I’d easily pay for it if there was an option.
My move to Evernote has nothing to do with recent rumors that Yahoo will shutdown Delicious. I know that that is not true – they will probably just sell it or find some other way to chop it off, but they won’t shut it down completely. And even if they would, someone will always start a clone. And there are no worries about data export what so ever – Delicioius was always excellent with that.

Now that we got those things out of the way, I can relax and tell you what’s going on. Yes, I am moving all my bookmarks from Delicious to Evernote. I already moved the large chunk and I’ll sort out the rest in coming days. So, why do I move? For a number of reasons.

First of all, there was just too much hype to ignore. I kept hearing about Evernote from all sides. That alone, of course, wouldn’t push me to move, but it made me look closer. I looked and I liked. Here are the things that I liked:

Notes. I love how Delicious handles bookmarks. But bookmarks aren’t the only type of notes that I have. Sometimes I just need to jot something down. Sometimes I have a picture. Sometimes a file of different type. If it wasn’t on the web, I couldn’t save it at Delicious. I had a local application (gnote) running on my laptop for such things. But my laptop is not always around. I needed a web notes application forever.
Web clipper. Collecting bookmarks for several years, I only now realized the risk of losing all that data. Bookmark stores the URL only. Maybe the title of the page. And a brief description at best. But if the bookmarked page will disappear, bookmark becomes useless. With web clipper though it’s a different story. You select full page or a part of it in your browser, press a button, and it’s clipped to your notes. So even if the source page will disappear, you still have a copy.
Tags and folders. Delicious was the first (or one of the first) applications to bring tags mainstream. And tags are great. But they aren’t perfect. So are folders. But a combination of both can take a long way. Evernote organizes things into notebooks (folders) and tags. That’s way more convenient and flexible.
Document indexing and image recognition! Not only this has tremendous practical value, but it brushes on my geek nerve. It’s just elegant use of technology. If you upload a PDF or some other document to Evernote, it will index the text in that document automatically. And you’ll be able to find the document by the text it has inside. But what is even better – it’ll do the same for images. Just imaging drinking out somewhere. You order a bottle of something absolutely breathtaking. But you’ll never remember how it’s called tomorrow. So you just snap a picture with your mobile and attach that picture to the note. Evernote will analyze the picture, find any text on it, and will make this picture searchable by that text. Brilliant! We need more applications like that.

Those things got me thinking. So I did a little test run. I used Evernote for a couple of days, to see how it will hold up. And the more I used it, the more I loved it! I started migrating my bookmarks from Delicious not because I wanted to leave Delicious, but because I wanted to have this data in Evernote.

By the way, a few words about the move. There is no direct import from Delicious. There are some scripts and converters which would tell you how to export data from Delicious, convert it, and then import it into Evernote. And I tried some. But my problem wasn’t with the data conversion. My problem was with the data itself. As I said, some bookmarks were pointing to non-existing websites. Some moved to different locations and had to be updated. Some simply became obsolete – like bits and pieces of technology news which I thought were interesting at the time. So after trying to fix data automatically (and I did some), I said that this collection is too valuable for me. And I went manually. One by one – checking the bookmark, clipping whenever possible, filing and tagging the note in Evernote. Care to guess how much of the material was outdated? Around 35-40%! With any kind of automated migration, I’d be inserting a lot of junk into the system that I was only starting to use. I didn’t want that. So manual it was.

Somewhere in the middle of the migration, I got myself an Android phone. Immediately a mobile app was installed which, given Internet access, brought all my notes so much closer to me. The only thing that I wanted to have now was some way to synchronize selected notes to my phone, so that I’d have them even if there is no Internet connectivity. Turns out that Evernote can do that too. But for premium users. For around $35/year you get the VIP goodies. Offline synchronization is supported on the folder-level. Just pick some folders and say that you want them on the mobile no matter what. And you’ll have them.

I wanted to write this post for a few days now, but my migration isn’t completely over and I was stalling. So what did finally push me to write this before I even finished migrating? The new version of the Google Chrome extension. One of the new features is as elegant as Evernote’s image recognition. From now on, Evernote has an option to suggest notes next to your search engine results. That just solves another big problem of mine.

You see, the thing is that even if I have something useful bookmarked, I often forget I do. I run straight to Google and try to find it again. Works most of the times, but not always. Now, whenever I search Google for something, Evernote searches my notes in the background and lets me know if I have any notes matching.

By now you must be thinking that there must be something wrong. Evernote sounds perfect, but we all know that that is impossible. So, OK, I’ll tell you a few things that I don’t like.

Import from Delicious. Even though I’d still chose to import manually, for many of my friends that won’t be the case. There should be a simpler procedure to import data.
User interface. It works, but it needs polish. Again, I myself don’t mind too much. But it’s a bit awkward to show Evernote to certain people.
Social. One of the greatest benefits of Delicious is that it’s a social platform. You can link with your friends, follow their bookmarks or tags, share bookmarks, and even send interesting bookmarks to your friends using Delicious. In Evernote you can share a folder (with RSS feed). And that’s about it. There is no easy way to follow shared notes from my friends. There doesn’t even seem to be a concept of friend yet.

These are the biggest concerns for me. But they aren’t big enough. As I said – the service is awesome. The technology is fantastic. And it doesn’t even matter if you are running on free or premium account. Have a look at it, try it out, and let me know what you think.

P.S.: I have several public notebooks, but since I’m still organizing everything and moving things around, I won’t link to them at this time. I’ll write another post with all the yummy links when the dust settles down a bit.