Either Bloglines does not update half of my feeds or this is the most silent weekend ever. With my 200+ feeds the only things that I get to read are Delicious feeds and posts by a couple of hardcore bloggers who live in a different time zone.
I understand that not everyone can shoot ten posts a day, like I do it. But at least one a day is a fairy deal. Don’t you think? Am I alone on this?
I always find it fascinating how some people get an idea, develop it, implement it, and then turn it into a real success. Bloglines is a good example. Today I came across an interesting post that shows where from the Bloglines started:
I looked at a couple of RSS aggregators the other day. These are programs that you run on your machine that allow you to subscribe to various weblogs that support a protocol called RSS. These programs make it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs.
I was very disappointed in what I saw, at least in terms of Linux based programs. Every one I looked at sucked. Couldn’t get any of them to work.
What’s interesting is that people have been focusing on creating client side RSS aggregators. I think the world needs a very good server side aggregator. I’d use it. You could do all sorts of interesting things with a server side aggregator. You could probably fund it with advertising (at least the Google style text advertising en vogue these days).
Did you ever read the Orson Scott Card book Ender’s Game? In the future world depicted in the book, there’s a vast computer network, a la the Internet, with discussion forums. While we aren’t lacking in discussion forums these days (mailing lists, USENET, web boards), I think a closer analogy to what was in the book would be blogs as viewed through an aggregator.
That’s from Mark Fletcher’s blog. Mark Fletcher is the CEO of Bloglines. The post was written on 4th of March, 2003. That’s slighly more than two years ago.
Until now I’ve been using http://www.rambler.ru/dict for all my translation needs. I realize that it might not at all be the best out there, but it is was good enough. I wanted something fast and simple. No need for phrases, just quick word translations from Russian to English, and back.
I think I’ll be switching to http://lingvo.yandex.ru now. It is also a good enough alternative. And fast enough. It also takes care of the greatest annoyance I have with the Rambler dictionary – language switching. When asking for the translation, I think, it is pretty obvious which language the original word is in. So, if I type ‘muse’ and ask for the English/Russian translation, it is obvious that I have typed an English word and I want thus a Russian translsation. For some strange reason, with Rambler, I had to specify. But I would have minded it aswell, if not the ugly interface. Check it out. What is the problem? Well, the language switch is after the submit button. That’s inconvenient.
I’ve been coping with this for far too long. Enough!
P.S.: Yandex dictionary has another nice feature – it shows the meaning of the word in other languages too. Educational.
While trying to convince the administrator of Cyprus Forum to add RSS feeds, I’ve wrote this rather long post that explains what is RSS, why one would want to use it, and how to use Bloglines to manage one’s RSS feeds.
Nothing new and fancy – just a simple explanation for RSS newcomers, with a screenshot of my Bloglines interface. You might find it useful. Or you might find it not. I’ll leave that up to you.
As I have already mentioned before, my mother is very interested in blogging. She is about to start blogging herself. I am helping her to find the proper tool and get used to the idea. I think it is important to remind here that she is not by any means an advanced computer user.
Features that she needs:
After talking to her for a couple of hours yesterday, I realized that she sees my blog as an ideal example. I would have, of course, installed a copy of Nucleus CMS for her on my server, but I am not so sure about the user friendlyness of it. I mean I can easily modify HTML and PHP code as needed for my blog. This is not an option with my mom.
So far I have inspected the following web services:
None of the above services fully satisfy the requirements. Out of all these, Blog.com has most of the features. It has an a very easy to use interface, themable blogs, multiple blogs per one account, categories for posts, image hosting and photo albums, comments control and much more. It even offers easy blogrolling, linking, syndication, and book lists. Surprisingly, the service is free. There are a few limitations though:
I personally see these limitations as minor ones. Most people use web services which don’t even offer half the features Blog.com does, so few cut offs are an OK in my book. In case there is a need for more disk space or bandwidth, or if those limited features are all you need, Blog.com offers a really nice pricing scheme.