I’ve been a happy user of several Banana Guards since I got some twoish years ago, although apparently they have a new version out. Via Digg yesterday I see that there’s another contender, Banana Bunker. My first thought was that such a product would violate Banana Guard’s patent (which I have not read), but then realized that it works in a somewhat different manner. Still… to me it just doesn’t look like it would be as effective. Now who wants to do some comparative testing?
My practice in the past when going through my newsreader quicky, was to “keep as new” any item which was interesting and required me to give more thought to than I could at the time.
When I went through last week and finally caught up on these, it seemed like Jon Udell’s posts were about 1/3 of these. Considering my 230+ subscriptions, that’s pretty significant, but not surprising. Jon is one of my favourite bloggers, not afraid to tackle wide-ranging ideas, and putting into clear language what is often a blur inside my head. I only subscribe to about three podcasts, and Jon’s is one of them. So, congratulations on your new job at Microsoft.
Jon’s also been extremely important in screencasting and my interest in it. I can’t believe that I first planned on creating some in early 2005 and I still haven’t gotten around to it. Actually, that sounds exactly like me… anyhow I will learn how to create them soon.
So aside from the work of moving to another host, etc. I’ve also been catching up on some other things. I reduced my unread emails in gmail from about 880 to zero (woohoo) during the course of three or four days. “Fortunately” my old Hotmail account is continously deleted due to my lack of using it, so I didn’t reply to an emails from before May 2004. I’ve also gotten my draft emails and my “marked as new” items in Bloglines down to zero.
That feels good.
So, to continue with my trend of finally dealing with things, there are a couple of people I’ve been meaning to mention. Firstly, my sincere apologies to Tara Calishain, one of few blogs that I have been reading continuously since I started reading blogs. In 2004 Tara sent me a free copy of her excellent book, Web Search Garage, and I completely failed to give it a proper write-up here on Puzzlepieces. I’m sure she’s got another book up her sleeve, and I’ll be the first one to buy it.
And speaking of books, I wanted to thank Richard MacManus, who gave me a prize for my lame comment on his blog about how Atom isn’t an acronym.
I also wanted to apologize to Gary Price, who publishes ResourceShelf and Docuticker while he sleeps, on his way to give a presentation. Back in my Feedster days, I said that I would make Docuticker a feed-of-the-day, and I never got around to it. It certainly deserved it though.
So for all of you (~2 people) who complained that Puzzlepieces was dead, I’m happy to say it is back and doing well.
During this between-semesters holiday I’ve finally gotten myself a new host, and have (almost) successfully moved all of my websites over. My University of Waterloo search engine (UWhub) doesn’t work, but that will be fixed once I change all my file request function calls to use CURL instead. There is also a minor problem with Fagan Finder’s older .shtml pages, but I’ll worry about that later.
So, congratulations to me. Also, I’ve finally gotten myself a website, faganm.com, and so I intend to move this blog over to somewhere there instead of hijacking my old website’s domain.