Comments by Richard Peat

Update came through the App Store update page last night. Certainly a big improvement on the previous version, and also seems a lot more stable - none of the previous hangs or crashes that I used to get.

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I am using FriendFeed, but I’m running with SocialThing as my homepage - the big problem with FriendFeed is that nearly everybody I want to receive updates for is not on FriendFeed, and the process to set up imaginary friends for all of them is tedious in the extreme.

With SocialThing, I just pointed it at the services and I’m getting updates for all my friends on each service.

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I’m signed up on both FriendFeed and SocialThing. From my point of view the biggest advantage of SocialThing is that it pulls in information from all my contacts on the various services whether they are signed up to SocialThing or not - FriendFeed is dependant on either you manually creating imaginary friends for all your contacts, or persuading them all to sign up themselves.

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I’ve been trying out Plaxo for a few days but there are some major and significant problems with the Outlook sync. The two that are of most concern to me relate to recurring appointments. I have a number of weekly and monthly appointments which occasionally occur at a different time or different location or which I make a note on the Outlook appointment. In this situation Outlook just asks me whether I am changing just that occurence and if I am has no trouble. None of these variations are picked up by Plaxo.

The other worrying thing I found looking through what Plaxo had compared to Outlook was that any recurring appointments that carried on after the clocks had changed were all timed an hour later!

If your calendar is all one off events I’m sure Plaxo is just fine. Any sort of regular appointments - forget it.

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The aerial coverage for our bit of the UK on Microsoft is still vastly inferior to the stuff on Google in that although the maps are correct, the aerial view is more than seven years old so it still shows the two old houses that were demolished to make way for the road we now live in.

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After your regular positive comments over Google Reader, I made the switch from Rojo and started up a link blog. With Google Reader I can pretty easily keep track of all the feeds I read, and with the keyboard shortcuts and automatic loading, skip past the stuff that doesn’t interest me. In terms of being able to deal with the volumes, it has much the same effect that reading this post had on dealing with my e-mail.

In answer to the specific questions:

1. I’m not that bothered about the number of items - it’s one push of ‘J’ to go past anyway. The only annoyance is that some of the stuff you link to is on feeds I read anyway, so what is apparently the same posting comes up twice, and of course sometimes stuff that you skip over on the feeds is of interest to me.
2. I’ve got it subscribed in Google Reader.
3. My link blog is at http://www.google.co.uk/reader/shared/10133637988496888680, and also embedded into my main blog using a WordPress RSS sidebar widget.

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Actually, there is a second Geek Dinner a couple of days later on Saturday 2nd, after the fourth DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Day at Microsoft HQ in Reading. Details over at HughPage .

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I’ve had a self-hosted WordPress blog for quite a while, but when my wife got fed up with her poems getting lost amongst the technical stuff I tend to post she set up her own on WordPress.com (called et Uxor)

I have to say that I do have to spend a bit of time every month upgrading all the various plugins and things I have on our main blog, and whenever a new version of WordPress or K2 comes out I have to be careful to not break the existing customisation, but it does give a lot more flexibility in what you can do.

However from my wife’s point of view, all she wanted is something that looks good, is straightforward to use, and is generally no hassle, where she could post her poems, occasional thoughts and so on, without getting buried amongst all of my stuff, for which the hosted service offered by WordPress.com is great. What you’re trading for the convenience of having someone else doing the upgrades, and worrying about spam, is the flexibility to install any of the multitude of WordPress plugins that are around.

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Is a while since I’ve been to that part of the US - have to add the library to the places to go next time I’m out that way.

I have to say with Joshua’s talk, after getting my head around his statement that a public library is not primarily about books, there is then a moment of amazement where he says that the building is laid out exactly like his usage chart, but when it is wrapped in the glass shell it looks superb. I particularly like the book spiral idea, which effectively puts all the books on one floor.

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I certainly enjoyed Ken’s talk too. For anyone who works with young people the message that he gives about how we label them through our education system is profound.

In fact, so far I have enjoyed all the videos I have watched from the TED site. I never thought I would have enjoyed twenty minutes of statistics (Hans Rosling on Global Health and Gapminder), nor a guide to a public library (Joshua Prince-Ramus talking about how he designed the Seattle Public Library)!

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I’ve had Coding Horror on my blog roll for several months, definitely agree that it is one of the best coding blogs, well worth reading once it recovers from being Scobleized! :D

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