Some suggestions to Blogger

After using Blogger for some days I am still impressed by its simplicity and customization ability. As a normal blogger myself some of my concerns for a blogging platform are:
1. Free hosting
2. Layout customization
3. Integration with desktop publishing tools
All of the above are achieved by Blogger. There are other aspects that Blogger is have advantages:
1. Bearing the name of Google
2. Simple setup, particularly good for novice
3. Reiterate that. FREE
However according to the Blog software comparison chart, Blogger is actually the platform with least features! The good thing is it is having the most important features enough to draw in new bloggers, yet to achieve sustainable growth I would suggest the following to be added at a higher prioirty:
1) Category / Tagging
To sort the entries in terms of its relevant topic, each topic can generate its own XML feed.
2) RSS feed
RSS is afterall an open standard. Though Blogger is upholding atom feeds, it does no harm to offer one more option to the users.
3) Trackbacks
It is particularly important as author tends to link up his essays right after he has composed it. It is pretty inconvenient to login to haloscan, record the perm-link and trackback link... It simply takes too much time.
We can't ask for that much though, Blogger is a free service afterall...

Is the world really ready for blogs?

Did you say dogging or blogging? | Tech News on ZDNet

A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers--often seen as barometers of popular trends in the United Kingdom--found that nearly 90 percent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 percent had never heard of blogging.

Following my previous post about the Decline of Desktop I start to ponder if the current RSS model is really fit to become the future mainstream. As much as it was attractive to technology geeks at the beginning, the greatest misgiving of all maybe the lack of concrete standard for the feeds. The current de-facto should be RSS 2.0, yet there are older versions like 0.91, 0.92 and 1.0 feeds which are still valid; and there are atom feeds from Blogger, which in terms of architecture is quite different from the others.

Giants like Microsoft and Google are placing much effort in RSS. We are anticipating the RSS capabilities in IE7 and Windows Vista, the latest Google Blog Search finally include feeds in her index. Proprietary RSS standards may evolve that again impose risks that tear the whole idea apart. The parsing difference of HTML in IE and Firefox well implicates that client software may be the driver for the XML standard to evolve, which again, the giants eventually rule.

Blogger access problem resolved

Mysteriously my access to blogspot from home is resumed just now. It remains unknown to me what caused to problem.

Nevertheless it teaches me one thing: Do ask for help (or cast complain) the moment you encounter any problem.

Decline of the Desktop

Decline of the Desktop - Computerworld

Here comes the definite trend: desktop computers are being phased out.

During each transition period, as you may notice, there must be some intermediate products emerging in the market for a moment, contribute a little, then disappear. One of the example is the “ZIP” drive which happened to be popular for a while when 3.5”floppy disks were about to be abandoned. Yet not long afterwards there are CDROM and DVD, and now DVD-R and DVD-RW are seemingly the most widely used mobile storage in not only PC but also domestic electronics (which happened to phase out video tape recorders too).

Will notebook computers be as long lasting as desktop PC? To hit the main goal of being “mobile”, I think tablet PCs can serve the purpose even better. Imagine a person who wants everything (e.g. daily schedule, phone book, publishing software) in one device light enough to be carried around. He may want to have it ready to function the SECOND he wants an access; and he wants the operations to be as smooth as using mouse clicks (instead of relatively clumsy touchpad)…

Current notebook computers still require too long to start, and they are not too handy to be carried around (I mean carry around other than business trip occasions). The real next generation computers should have the quick start capability of PocketPC, touch-screen control flexibility as well as being light and thin enough for everybody to carry.

With endeavors to make desktop computers smaller, think about iMac and Mac Mini, you may want them to become the mainstream products, yet hardly has it come true. Nevertheless, I do have a fancy feeling that Apple can be the first to come up with tablet PCs “impossibly light”. Until then, we all have to wait and see…

Cannot access blogger...

It is so weird that in these few days I can’t get access to any website of blogspot.com . Once I thought the whole server is down but the fact is only my home computer is blocked from access (seems)…

I have placed enquiries to my ISP and Blogger and hopefully the problem can be resolved very soon.

Dilbert Comic Strip Archive

Isn’t that a classic picture familiar to all of us? Just kidding… 

Handbook for Bloggers published

BBC NEWS | Technology | Blog censorship handbook released

Being a blogger myself, instead of being overwhelmed by enthusiasm to maintain a neat and newsy journal, I become more aware of credibility of its content and who my audience will be.

Several months before I have published a quoted article from SCMP about the potential of future employers trying to search your background in google before hiring you. That alarmed me to a great extent and I have stopped writing for a period of time. In fact your blog may influence you in a lot of ways as it tells your thoughts, your opinions towards certain affairs, your writing skills as well as some of you personal particulars and interests. So deep down inside, writing a blog may bring unexpected consequences, which may or may not be good.

The Reporters Without Borders has published a handbook featuring how to start a blog, how to publicize it and how to maintain its credibility. I think it may worth your time reading it. Lets brush up our skills and nourish the web with high quality materials.

IKEA 360 Kitchen

IKEA 360 Kitchen

 

Nice flash production. Quoted from the ExtrajetztR weblog

"Tired" vs "Sleepy"

Don't confuse the two, they are different...

In my experience, ‘sleepy’ is just sleepy, you simply want to go to sleep. You can be sleepy any time, even during the time you shouldn’t be tired. Ever tried attending some lectures or seminars that eventually you fell asleep in the course? You may have the best intention to stay awake but the environment, lighting, speaker’s tone and most importantly the ventilation will cast spell on you.

‘Tired’ is the other way round. You really need some rest, and better be deep rest. Your body may give you explicit signals that you are tired, but not necessarily you can go to sleep. And that’s what I am experiencing right now! I feel like I can be awake long enough to finish another long chapter of textbook, but physically my body tells me that I may not have that much energy.

So… By no mean you should feel sleepy during work, but it may be understandable if you feel tired — Even though both terms will not be acceptable for your boss.

The path to GM

Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk : The path to GM -- some thoughts on becoming a general manager

Same as many other books that talk about wealth/career management, this article is also recommended. As I backquote the summary below:

Be patient.  If you take your time and work with your management chain, your chances of success definitely go up.
Be excellent.  The first key is to be among the very best performers at your core discipline.
Gain adjacency experience.  A good, but not necessarily critical, next step is to gain experience in an adjacent discipline.
Respect and understand all the disciplines.  It is not possible for any one person to work in all the disciplines you might manage someday, but you should spend a good deal of effort learning and understanding the other disciplines before you have to manage them.
Work on multiple product lines.  Figure out for you and your organization what the right type of experience change you should have and seek that out when you feel like you’ve reached a good level of functional excellence and performance at your current role.
Find a mentor.  See if there is someone in the company who followed a path similar to the one you would like to follow and meet with them to discuss your career.

Among all I do think “Find a mentor” is the hardest. It all depends on your luck and the people you can get along. Hence in my “Total Self Management” scheme, broadening my social network contributes a crucial part too.

Chill out!

Unfortunately I feel like suffering from some sort of mental disorder recently. I am anxious about nothing and can hardly sleep at night sometimes.

Despite of my utmost effort in planning and organizing everything (and indeed my productivity and efficiency do increase in a lot of sense), I can’t escape from the fact that I am placing too much expectation on myself. Maybe that is what I gotta do next: to chill out.

Compass.idv.hk

About two years ago I was thinking to renovate my personal homepage to phase 2 featuring a lot of interactive flash components. I was inspired by some very successfully flash site like fullsail.com , pixelranger.com , 2advanced.com … maybe I could do the same thing for myself.

Blogs started to become popular and I have made a blogger account available for myself as a buffer place before the official site is launched. As I graduated things started to go rough and I got less time to work on the fancy stuffs, I have decided to transform this blog into the official site directly.

The renovation is about to complete and the new domain name compass.idv.hk is in effect. Later on I will bring in flickr and del.icio.us, activate the four buttons above and the whole process is done.

Do check it out often and give me comments :)

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

iPod Nano

 It’s pretty amazing that Apple can make iPod even smaller, with iPod Mini and Shuffle I think MP3 players are already reasonably small. It makes me ponder what will happen to the PocketPC market. Can they be even smaller? What about the screen size and the fonts within?

No doubt Steve Job has done a really good job. I am not sure if Mac can share the same market with PC but at least the iPod series and electronic music store have helped Apple to be viable throughout the years.

With profound search technologies will Google get involved in the music store market? What about a Music Froogle?

Testing BlogJet

I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It's a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso