Category Archives: World Wide Web

Facebook Update – September 2011

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There has been a large up cry about the new Facebook updates, and I’m a little surprised at it this time.

First off, this has happened a half dozen times in the past, and Facebook has yet to take something back that the users didn’t like.

Secondly, I didn’t think the changes were really that big.

Now, correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that the main complaints are partially due to a misunderstanding in how Facebook functions.

Facebook now gives users the chance to choose how much of a certain person they wish to see. You can use the subscribe button to see all of someone’s posts or only the “important” ones or none at all. This is entirely up to the friend, and not the owner of the account. I think this is nice, because I can go in and subscribe to friend who I care about, and possibly block some people I don’t need to follow. (Though, maybe it’s time to unfriend them…)

If you don’t want the whole of the Facebook world to see your posts, you have to limit your post to a list. (This is the way Google+ works, and to be fair Facebook has always had this functionality, but it has never been so easy until now.) If you don’t want all your friends on Facebook to see what you said to family members, you need to have your Family members in a group and when you post, choose to share it with them. No one else should be able to see the post, or the comments on that post.

Now, you don’t have control over who sees your comments on a post, (say, for example if you comment on a public posting) but Facebook has never allowed this as an option that I can remember.

I also see a lot of complaints about the new Top News section. I have never been a fan of the top news, I always want to see the recent news, and apparently Facebook tweaked the algorithm and isn’t doing a very good job right now. I don’t think it has ever done a good job. I just went through and unclicked all the “top stories” it suggested and I currently only see recent stories… not sure how long that will last, but it is a start.

I think the live feed is scary to some people, mostly because it’s live. The live feed doesn’t show anything that I couldn’t see by browsing my old news feed or glancing over someone’s profile. The fact that it is in real time and allows for quick and easy commenting only makes the site more like an instant messenger program than anything else.

Ultimately, everything that gets put on the internet should be treated as public knowledge. There is no safety or privacy out here.

That said, if you have Facebook friends who you’d rather not be sharing things with, you maybe should consider unfriending them.

Your Facebook account is FOR YOUR OWN BENEFIT. You don’t need to friend people if you don’t want to. You don’t need to share things if you don’t want to. You don’t need to use it if you don’t want to.

Facebook has been testing and tweaking their new code for months. This isn’t something they threw together overnight and they will probably continue to tweak it over the following months. I’m willing to predict that in 2 weeks most people will have gotten use to the change, or stopped complaining, or stopped using Facebook. All of these are acceptable options, but I will also predict that most of these changes will not be undone by Facebook.

The people working at Facebook have a vision of a sharing and happy utopia, something many of the users don’t share with them. As users we find a way to use our sites and we make due. When Facebook comes along and tells us we should use their site differently, we ultimately must fall in line or drop out. Facebook is a privately held company. You don’t own the site. You don’t own your profile. Facebook claims you own all your information, but you are putting it in their hands. You are putting it on their site. You have to play by their rules.

I’m not happy with all the changes they have made, but I’m doing my best to understand them so I can use the site how they would like me to do so. (That said, nearly everything I put online is considered public.) Feedback to the Facebook team is much appreciated, but telling them to “put it back how it was” is not an option they will be willing to consider. They live in a world of technology, and technology never moves backwards.

And look at the bright side. In 8 months they’ll change everything again and we can complain about that too.

Video Distribution as Restaurants

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I had this idea the other day. It’s not a perfect analogy, but I don’t think there is such a thing. If you have any suggestions for improvements or additions, leave them in the comments.

Broadcast cable or dish:
For a hefty monthly fee you have full access to all food currently being served. You can eat as much or as little as you like, but some dishes will be served at specific times so don’t be late. You meal will be interrupted every 7 or so minutes by a salesman who has paid for the pleasure to talk to you. His short pitches are potential entertaining, but repetitive. You have a few options for how much food you would like access to, but all your meals must be eaten at home.

Netflix:
For a moderate fee you have access to a large buffet of food and you may eat as much or little as you like. If you put down a meal you can pick it up at a later date without much trouble. You may choose any dish they offer to eat at any time. Certain menu items can only be delivered as take out and for a small fee will be delivered to your door within one or two business days. You may eat the meals anywhere you have access to the service.

RedBox:
Stop buy for a quick and cheap meal whenever you like. Menu is limited, but the prices are low. Meals must be eaten within 24 hours or a second fee will be charged.

Hulu:
Stop buy and get a free meal anytime you like. Menu selection is limited and you must have appropriate access to eat. Your meal will be interrupted several times by salesman who have paid to talk with you, many of whom represent global charities showing you dying children and asking for money. For a moderate fee, you can gain access to a larger menu, including popular dishes that chefs made over past weeks, but your meal will still be interrupted by salesman. You are allowed to eat most meals anywhere you have access, but not all meals are available on all platforms. There is, however, a large selection of appetizers, which are usually followed or preceded by sale pitches. Occasionally when ordering a meal you will be directed to a different restaurant where the meal is originally from and told you may order it there.

New Server!

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If you are reading this, that means the my site was successfully transfered over to a new server. I’ve finally taken the step away from shared hosting and moved into the “big boy realm” of the web. My good friend Bob Martens has offered to share his server with me, which is great. He worries about the techy-server command line stuff that I don’t feel like messing with and I grumble about how easier things were back on Lycos and Tripod… JUST KIDDING! I haven’t used them in years… Are they even around still?

Anyway, the move is so far successful, minus a few WordPress plugins that didn’t seem happy with their new home. They were quickly replaced and things are looking good. If you notice any glitches over the next few weeks, drop me a line. I’ll be tweaking things while I adjust to my new surroundings.

Timing and a Killer App

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In 2008 I bought the Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth Anthology. I paid $22.48 with shipping. Here’s my receipt from Amazon:
Original Purchase

About a year later, I wanted to play multiplayer mode with my family and friends, but I only have one copy of the game. I figured $20 would be well worth it for the fun that it would generate. I headed off to Amazon only to find this:
Year Later

After 12 months the game had jumped from under $20 to almost $200. If I wasn’t so attached to the game I would have thrown my copy up for sale to see what kind of cash I could rake in. I didn’t though, because it’s a good game and I still have to beat it.

Out of curiosity, I went back again on September 8th to check the price. The price had dropped tremendously, but was still more than I was willing to spend.
Weeks later

It’s really amazing how games change prices over time. There needs to be an app or service which you can use to track the changes in price. How about a piece of software that tracks the current price of an item on a number of different sites and offers the option to auto-buy an item if it drops below a target price? (Provided you have an account on that site, of course.) Now I think that sounds like a killer app!

Price Check:Battle for Middle Earth Anthology on Amazon

Welcome to 2009

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While signing up with my credit card for paperless statements. (Figured don’t really need to get the mail every month and I pay online anyway.) I was met with this nice set of instructions:

You must have a valid Internet e-mail address, Internet access and access to a printer. You must also have one of the following hardware/browser combinations:

Microsoft® Windows®
Netscape Navigator® 4.07 or higher
Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher
AOL 5.0 or higher
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and above

Macintosh®
Netscape Navigator 4.06 or higher
Internet Explorer 4.51 or higher
AOL 5.0 or higher
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and above

Your browser must have cookies enabled.

Welcome to 2009.

Current browser versions:

Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.6 (Official support ended on March 1st, 2008.)
Internet Explorer 8 (Mac version has been discontinued since 2003.)*
AOL 9.1
Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1

I’m sorry, but if I was dealing with people’s credit card or banking information, I would want them to have a recent browser. You know, a browser that isn’t so full of security flaws that it like keeping a burglar out by opening a second door.

*Oddly enough, I just talked to tech person who has been ‘in the business for 13 years’ who had no idea that IE wasn’t available for the Macintosh platform.

TechPhobia.info

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I am about to try something new. In the back of my mind I have been toying with the idea of creating a website to help teach people about technology. I like learning new things and I find both enjoyment and challenge in explaining the concepts that I take for granted to people who have no technical knowledge.

For the past year I have been writing short three to five hundred word articles for my college newspaper on technology. I decided I want to take that to the internet.

This new site is a calculated whim. I have toyed with the idea, but never to any great extent. I know there are a lot of sites out there attempting to explain technology. I didn’t go and look at any of them. I bet there are probably some really good ones out there, but I have decided that I want to try my hand at one and I think I can do just as well, if not better, than the next guy.

The target audience is multi-faceted. My number one target is people who haven’t experienced technology before and need help finding there way around. I also want to help people who use their computer for paper writing, email checking and Facebook, but don’t know what else their computer will do. Finally, I would like to deal with a few issues that are more in depth and perhaps require more experience. As a side objective I would also like to develop a list or database of questions that new users have and concepts that new users don’t understand so that developers, designers and creators can see where users have problems.

I have a few concerns about this project. The first concern I have is getting traffic to the site, I have never been very good at advertising, but I have also never done something like this before. My biggest concern is finding my content level. I want to start out with the extreme basics, I don’t want to leave people in the dust, but I also don’t want to insult people by simplifying things too much.

Targeting this group of people is also hard because these people are not going to be out surfing the net looking for this type of information. I’m not sure how I will combat this, but I’ll figure that out as I go.

I acknowledge that these are lofty goals and it won’t be easy, but this is what I like to do. I like to dive into technology and I want to see if I can make this take off.

Without further introduction, I announce my newest venture: TechPhobia.info

Finding the right todo list

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UPDATE: I changed the title of this post to something more appropriate. A future post will talk more about my general complaints with web apps.

The last week in February I went out and finally bought myself an iPod Touch. I had been wishing I had one since January 1st when a good friend showed me his. The original idea I had, although now seen as rather naive, was that I would get an iPod Touch, Apple would shortly after announce the SDK and within a week or so I could have some sweet calendar and to-do apps running on my iPod.

For over a year I have been working with a Palm Zire 31, and have been very pleased with it, but when I got my iPod, the Zire went to ebay. I was really hoping that the iPod could fully replace my Palm Pilot. Well, Apple made their announcement and it wasn’t what I expected. They told me I had to wait until June, or more likely, early to mid July, before I could use my iPod like I wanted too.

I figured I could live with this and that I would simply have to run off Web Apps until June, which wouldn’t be entirely hard because most of my time is spent on a well wireless campus. I already had a preconceived idea of how a to-do list should work and I was hoping someone had made a really wicked awesome web app that would fulfill all my needs, hopefully making things easier and more user friendly than my Palm.

I was first recommended towards Ta-da Lists, which I was really hopefully about, coming from 37 Signals. It was a neat app, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I really wanted something with due dates, so I can put every assignment for the rest of the semester into it, as well as a long list of things I want to try to accomplish in my free time. I quickly decided that Ta-da Lists was not what I was looking for and moved. (I really like the idea behind it and I love the simple to use interface, but it’s just not what I needed.)

I did some searching via Google and came across a site called, Just Another Mobile Monday, which had a list of several good applications for online to-do lists. A site called Toodledo caught my attention and seemed to have everything I needed. I like Toodledo, it did pretty much everything I wanted to do. It has priorities and allows for grouping in folders, and maintained a “Hotlist” of all tasks that were overdue or coming up soon. For anyone looking for a good to-do web app, I would put Toodledo on my list of “web apps you should try.” For some reason though, I wasn’t satisfied. I had used Toodledo for a few weeks and I really liked it, but I decided I needed to try something else, to see if it fit things better.

The next web app I decided to try out was Listingly. The interface looked neat and method of breaking things down into lists looked promising. After trying it out for a bit though, I was not very impressed with the site. The images wouldn’t always load and the text never sat right in the buttons. I played around with it for a day, but by then I knew I needed something else.

I heard Leo Laporte mention that Remember the Milk was a really good to-do list for the iPhone. I had seen it before when searching for a to-do list, so I thought I should try it out. Remember the Milk looks really promising, but unfortunately, it’s not as nice as I would like yet. After playing around on my Laptop I decided to give it a try on my iPod. I finally found the iPod optimized version of the site and discovered that it was for “pro” users. This means that there is a $25 yearly fee to use the service. Fortunately, they have a 15 day trial period for the software, and I was quickly up and running.

Remember the Milk has a very nice interface, although there are some things that take some getting use too. I have used it for 15 days now and don’t fully understand how location and tags fully work, but I really liked the rest of their set up. The little side graphics looked wonderful and they color scheme was nice too. There were a few more options in adding a task than I really needed, but it worked how I expected for the most part and worked well.

Today, however, my trial is up. Ideally, I want to use a iPod based app, rather than a web based app to store my to-do lists. Over the summer I won’t always be in a location that has wireless connection, in fact, after another year of college I can’t guarantee I’ll have wireless connection anywhere. I’m really hoping to find a great to-do list app for the iPod in June or July. One that will sync with iCalendar and everything. As much as I like Remember the Milk, I don’t feel that $25 is worth 3 months of usage, especially if $25 is suppose to give me $12. Personally, I can’t justify the spending of that money. I can work with the “non-optimized” mobile version of the site, but it really isn’t the same if you know how it could be.

Surfing the Apple website, after my trial had ended, I stumbled across Noter, a simple little to-do list on the web. It took me about 2 minutes to decide that it had no chance of serving my needs and again I needed to move on.

Which actually brings me up until now. I decided to write up my experience, and actually in the process have discovered two things. The first is that there is a site called Vitalist, which like Toodledo and Remember the Milk, look promising. The iPhone interface is free, and it appears to have a good feature set. I have signed up for an account and will probably spend the next day or two playing around with it and seeing how well it works.

The other thing I realized while writing this up was that I really did like Toodledo, and if Vitalist doesn’t live up to my expectations I can always fall back onto it for a few months until I am finally able to run apps on my iPod.

In Conclusion

There are a lot of web apps out there for staying on top of your to-do lists. I think my favorite has to be Remember the Milk, but I don’t agree with their policy of charging for an iPod interface. I understand it makes sense financially for them, but I just wish it was free.

Toodledo is probably my overall favorite because I have used it the longest, but I’m curious to see how well Vitalist works in comparison. After I spend more time with it I’ll have to post up my experience, but I’m hoping it’s going to be a good one.

Land of Chaos Redesign

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LandofChaos.net, has been in much need of a complete overhaul and today I just sat down and did it.

I went out looking for inspiration at a number of different CSS gallery sites. As I looked I noticed a common theme throughout about 75% of them. They all had a logo in the top left corner and the main links were in the top right. This was what I was originally thinking for a design, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be so cliche.

I decided to be cliche, but give it my own “chaotic” twist. I thought it would be neat if the drop down logo sat at a slight angle, just enough so that it looked like it was on accident. I think I ended up with too much of an angle, but I decided to leave it. The other thing I thought would be neat to not have the main navigation menu line up. As I started playing around with it though, it looked to planned, like I had an artistic theme and not like it was annoyingly off kilter. So rather than try to set something up so it would be pixel perfect, I decided to go with a completely random method by setting up each menu item to be spaced a random distance from the top of the page. I toyed with some side-to-side randomness, but nothing worked quite how I wanted it.

Beyond that I moved a few links around and added a complete RSS feed of latest posts from the Land of Chaos Store, Apathetic Thursday, Blogging While Paused, Flickr and YouTube.

Let me know what you think of the new look.