Technical Bent

More on Juitter, a way to stream Twitter on your site

2009-05-04T08:51:00.001-05:00

I wrote a piece last week for Old Media, New Tricks on Juitter. You can check it out there.

Aggregating Swine Flu news & learning nimbleness

2009-04-28T21:45:00.012-05:00

As the swine flu (dare I say) hysteria was building over the weekend, my boss thought it was time to test our nimbleness and mettle. This story is growing -- that's born out in the news tonight that a close-by school district is shutting down for two weeks, right in the middle of TAKS standardized testing -- and won't be going away anytime soon.

So the charge for my team yesterday morning was to build a news aggregation site by the end of the day. Alas, we didn't quite make that deadline, but it was an, um, eventful day. But we did have a site going some 30 hours later, though DNS propagation is still keeping us from seeing it within our own building.

It went down like this:

Domain searches started some time Sunday or early yesterday, from what I can gather. All the good swine flu domains are long gone ... swinefluinfo or swinflunews, etc. Many are for sale, of course. (I hate domain stalkers.) We ended up with swineflucare.net, certainly not among the better choices, but it's what we had to work with come Monday morning.

It was about 9ish when my team was brought into this effort. The charge was laid out: Build an aggregation web site under this new domain. It needed basic blog entries, links to other sites, resource links to CDC, etc., simple metrics, maybe a twitter feed and/or news feed. We'd start with Google AdSense, more for SEO than revenue, but we figured we could graduate to Yahoo! APT if we felt need.

The team got together and discussed CMS platforms. We wanted something more than hand-coding. We've done a lot of development work in Django, so that came up, but we've also been doing a quite a bit of work in WordPress, and we were all pretty sure that was where we were headed ... I just wanted to talk it out.

Wordpress was the easy choice, and for ease and quickness we probably should've started at wordpress.com and to get going. But we knew SEO-wise we wanted our own domain. Where do we put it then? We host three external WordPress environments now: An MU environment for our community papers and a more traditional site for our Spanish language daily (ahorasi.com) -- both hosted by an external vendor -- and our Collective Vision photo blog, on our own load-balanced servers. That load balancing thing was a trick, so we opted to piggy-back on ahorasi.com.

That decision has caused much grief for us over the last two days, but I'll get to that.

So Andy Nguyen, who championed bringing WordPress into our publishing environment, started going to work on this new site. Within a couple of hours, he had most everything working ... blog rolls, a juitter feed for the #swineflu Twitter hash tag, blog entries direct to outside stories ... just damn nice, rock star work. He was working with our host, Westhost, to get all going, told me we have to upgrade, used my Amex and we are off to the races. We could get this thing launched by late afternoon, I'm thinking.

What I didn't understand is this upgrade wasn't a simple server reboot that would take a couple of minutes ... Westhost had to move our existing ahorasi.com site to a new server, with a new IP address. (For the un-tenchnical, that's like you moving and changing your address with the U.S. Post Office. On the Internet, it takes 24-48 hours for everyone to learn the new address.)

To make matters worse, when Westhost upgraded us, and when we changed our DNS to point to the new server IP address, the new server was not actually up and functional yet. Remember, we had an EXISTING SITE on that old server. So suddenly, DNS started propagating to this new server and it didn't exist! Not only did the site go blank, but we couldn't log into it, we couldn't ssh into the new server, nothing. I thought we were in for a short downtime, but now the Publisher and editors of the site are saying they can't get to it, and I'm learning it could be 24 hours before we get back. This Swine Flu story is huge for them ... this is a Spanish language website where the main following is from Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak.

I was sick to my stomach. The worst day of my TSG career. Ahorasi.com isn't the most visited site we work on, by far, but I hate the way this happened, on what was a really, really big news day for them. They were trying to do the right thing ... good journalism specific to their market, and the rug was pulled out from under them.

It was about 6 p.m. when the new server came up and ahorasi.com was back online and publishing. Of course, work on the swineflucare.net site had stopped when the server went down, so Andy still had to finish up today and we ended up launching by about 2 p.m. The only initial feature we didn't have that we targeted was the Google AdSense ads, and that's just because we didn't have an existing account and Google has to approve it. They say that could take a week.

Maybe we could've done some setup faster, but I think creating on a new domain in a short timeframe will always be tricky. Anyone have any suggestions on the quickest way? I'm sure this isn't the last time we'll do this. I'd like to make that by the EOB deadline next time.

Quick on-page audio player

2009-04-01T18:39:00.006-05:00

My paper started a new Statesman News Update podcast (and the blog that goes with it) this week.

Our Internet editor Robert Quigley sent a shoutout on Twitter to announce it. One of the suggestions he got back was the need for an on-page audio player, which we didn't really have in our web toolkit. The reader pointed us to KUT for an example.

Well, some quick research showed they use a free WordPress plugin by 1 Pixel Out for their audio player, but we don't use WordPress on our home page. 1 Pixel Out points out a tutorial by Journalism professor Mindy McAdams that dissects that plugin, which I used to whip up a player in about half an hour.

It took:

* Putting a .js file and .swf file on our servers.
* Putting an MP3 file on our server
* Dropping javascript code on the homepage

I was able to change the size of the player a little, and I could even change colors, but we choose not to at this point.

So, hopefully tonight, when the the new podcast comes out about 8 p.m., you'll be able to play it on our home page!

Next up is how to get that on-page player for the blog to work. That will be a bit tricky since you have to change id's for each instance of the player.

Juitter allows for refreshing Twitter search

2009-03-25T22:32:00.005-05:00

During the SXSWi festival, the Statesman hosted the Texas Social Media Awards. It was the brainchild and culmination of months of work by Robert Quigley (@robquig and the voice of @statesman) and honored some 25 people who "get" social media.

As part of this, we had a wonderful party at Ballet Austin, catered by Austin's Opal Divine's and Sweet Leaf Tea. During the social time, we wanted to post an updating Twitter feed on a wall so we could see we could all watch and contribute to the "social" flow of the evening.

That's a long intro to introduce Juitter. This is a little JQuery app (pointed out to us by Stephanie Romanski) that searches the Twittersphere for hash tags and allows you to create a dynamic, self-updating page.

The end result was this page. I was able to put it together in about 30 minutes the day before the party. It took a little javascript know-how, but I'm *by far* no .js wizard or even proficient.

Now, this page doesn't really show off the power of Juitter anymore because no one is tweeting on the #tsma hashtag anymore. However, during the party it did flow along rather nicely. In fact, we started out with "sxsw" as the keyword, and since we were limited to showing 8 tweets at a time, it was too active ... it was difficult to keep up with the tweets before they cycled to the next set. But at the party several folks (@dan360man, @michellegreer, @elisewho) lobbied me to change the Juitter feed to the #tsma keyword, which I did with a quick edit of one of the .js files.

While I think Juitter is a cute little app, it should be totally unnecessary. The old Summize-now-bought-by-Twitter search page would be all we need if it would update with actual tweets instead of onlyh the note at the top saying how many additional entries have been added. Weird that it requires a page refresh.

During one of the SXSWi sessions (I think it was Wireframes for the Wicked) the presenters put up the search.twitter.com page and then set their browser to automagically refresh every 30 seconds or so. It looked like they were using Safari, but I can't find the function in Safari 4 for PC. Pretty damn cool feature, though, and *much* easier than editing javascript files required for Juitter.

Why Twitter wins (again) at SXSW

2009-03-17T22:39:00.004-05:00

As SXSW Interactive was ending, I was thinking today why Twitter is so successful in a convention setting.

I didn't make it to the convention center until Saturday, the 2nd day, but I was struck by how awful the phone service was. It was hard to get a call out, and even hard to get SMS messages out, especially from within the conference rooms.

I found out later I wasn't alone in my frustration. AT&T admitted their cell service was slammed by the amount of usage in the area, and I'm not surprised considering the iPhone to BlackBerry ratio was about 10-to-1 (as was the Macbook-to-PC ratio. It was like a flippin' Apple commercial.)

On the other hand, Wi-Fi in the convention center was pretty good. Hallways were sometimes rough, but I rarely had problems getting connections when I was at a panel. I know many folks were relying on Twitter to communicate directly with peers instead of SMS.

But of course there are other reasons it was successful.

* Those panels that encouraged the use of hash tags allowed both those within and out of the panel to follow along easily. I use Tweetie on the iPhone, which has a decent search, so I was able to flip over and see what other folks were saying about particular panels, even if I wasn't following them. Some examples: #sxswid (For panel on OpenID, OAuth in Enterprise; #wickedwire (for panel on Wireframes for the Wicked, which did a good job taking questions from both Twitter and the audience microphone); #sxswomnt (Old Media New Tricks, the panel by @statesman's Robert Quigley and @colonelTribune Daniel Honigman.) #tsma (Texas Social Media Awards) which was a party/awards ceremony hosted by the Statesman.)

* Finding and meeting friends. This is really a no-brainer and really part of what always make the Twitter community cool, even outside of conventions, but it was really handy here. Lunch sessions and flash mob coffee's were set. Meetup locations changed based on crowd control and more.

Trade show Pano from SXSW

2009-03-15T12:25:00.001-05:00

Panoramic iPhone app

2009-03-15T09:59:00.002-05:00

This photo was taken at Sxsw interactive at a 10a panel on Sunday. I sent to it by emailing to blogger.

6th photo on the 6th page

2009-01-04T11:33:00.004-06:00

I was tagged by Lessa to show my 6th photo from the 6th page of my Flickr stream, and here it is. Not all that exciting ... it is from an Austin United Capitals soccer camp in Brenham in July 2007, taken on my iPhone and emailed to Flickr.

That email feature is the only reason I use Flickr. I much prefer my Picasa account because I can have unlimited albums, and I really like the embed features it offers.

With my poor math skills, I've deduced that the 6th photo of the 6th page is the 114th photo, so here is my 114th photo in my public Picasa galleries:

From Troop 448 Rifle Merit Badge campout

It is of Boy Scout leaders at a campout in Bastrop at Lost Pines Scout Reserveration. We were there to work on the Rifle Merit Badge.

Testing blog entries from my iPhone

2009-01-02T21:41:00.001-06:00

I'm at the UT vs Appalachian State game and the score is 52-30. I'm
bored, so I'm seeing if I can update my blog with my phone. Part of
that New Years Resolution to update this and the family blog more.

UPDATE: I had to come back into the entry to fix the link. It looks like it will convert a url into an href, but you can't write out html. Good enough ... was just testing.

MonoPrice.com a great buy for HDMI

2009-01-01T11:55:00.004-06:00

I was blessed enough to receive a Blu-Ray player for Christmas. All excited to hook it up, I sighed as I found the HDMI cable in the box. It was about three feet too short to snake through the wall from my 47-inch Phillips LCD above my fireplace to the component rack next to it.

Off to Best Buy to buy a 10-ft HDMI cable, I was stunned to find the Monster cable costs nearly as much as the player itself. Ridiculous.

I went ahead an bought a rocketfish cable for about $90, still an outrage, and twittered my anger to the social media world.

A buddy I work with replied back to try monoprice.com, which he had heard about on an AVS forum. I was able to find a better cord at one third the price, $32 with shipping. It is supposed to ship today, and hopefully I'll have the new Blu-Ray installed before the weekend closes.

How we discovered our paper was for sale

2008-08-20T08:42:00.006-05:00

The Austin American-Statesman is for sale. This came as a shock to us that work there. I've been working for Cox Newspapers for 17 years in four different locations and I really like the company. But, as you can imagine, emotions where bristling last week.

Here's how it went down for us.

The prelude: All our sister metro papers (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Palm Beach Post and the Dayton Daily News) have had layoffs or buyouts recently. We know they are hurting for circulation and revenue, but I can't say I'm privy to how badly they are hurting. But if PBP is laying off 180 of their 300 newsroom employees, you know that ain't good.

So when we got a company-wide email on Wednesday, Aug. 13 a little after 11 a.m. about a mandatory company-wide meeting, we all suspected our time had come. Management here has said we are a strong company. Profitable, though we know we aren't making the same cash we were five years ago. Who is? But, we figured if nothing else the newspaper division as a whole has to cut, so maybe we were to share the pain.

There were two meetings scheduled at 2 p.m. and another at 2:30 p.m., all in different parts of the building. The online group I'm in met in Editorial, which I knew would be a tough crowd.

About 1:30 p.m. I got a sad face IM from a friend in Atlanta. They wouldn't chat anymore. Just a sad face. That didn't tell me much at the time other than they knew first. We have been sad for the other papers as they have gone through their own buyouts and layoffs.

At 2 p.m. we gathered in the newsroom to hear Publisher Mike Laosa tell us that the newspaper was up for sale. I was shocked. This was not the news we expected.

A couple of minutes into the meeting I was sitting on my Twinkle send button, but I didn't want to push the tweet out until we had the story on the Web site. I know our staff, and our philosophy about the web, and I knew we would publish the news before the meeting was over.

Well, Jason Meek beat me to it, which is fine. A Cox employee from Palm Beach, William Hartnett retweeted before I got it, too, but in retrospect I'm comfortable that I waited. I didn't want KXAN tweeting it before we did.

As the meeting drug on for an hour or more, Emotions rollercoastered and questions came fast and there were lots of "we don't know yet" answers. Who would buy us? Who could buy us? What about our healthcare? Should I retire? Too many individual questions for a group so large, IMHO ... questions that anyone who thought about it knew there were no answer for at the time.

It was a shocking day. My emotions over the last week have more or less modeled the stages of grieving: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Denial flew by pretty quick but the anger hung into the weekend. Not sure how I can bargain out of this and I hope not go delve into depression. Not sure I've accepted it, though.

I was dour and sour that Thursday and Friday. The weekend gave me time to reflect a little, and forget a little, and Monday was a new week. Let's get on with it.

I really believed (still believe?) in Cox as a company. I've been with them for 17 years at four different papers. They've done well to me and I have done the same in return. Intellectually, I understand why we are being sold instead of my former paper, the AJC, but emotionally it's not comforting that our "parent" has rejected us. I have a passion for journalism, but now Cox has clearly decided to get out of the newspaper business. Yes, they still have some papers, but I wouldn't bet on those properties being in the family in ten years.

I'm not in fear of my job at this point. It's going to be one hell of a job to extricate our web sites from COXnet and it will take people like me and my team to make it happen. I do worry about who we will lose.

A different fantasy futbol league

2008-08-13T22:53:00.009-05:00

I've enjoyed doing Fantasy Football leagues with the NFL since 2000, and I've been in the championship game several times in one of the Statesman leagues. I like it because I learn about more players and watch more teams than just my "favorite" team (the Titans, if you must know -- even before they got Vince Young).

But now my love is soccer, and the English Premier League is arguably the best soccer in the world. Last year I cheered for Manchester United because of Cristiano Ronaldo, who ended up being leading scorer in the league, if a bit of a jerk after the season, flirting with a move to Real Madrid.

So, knowing a couple of soccer fans within other Cox Newspapers, I convinced a colleague to start a fantasy league (at http://fado.fantasyleague.com/) among other newspaperers. I'm not sure if any of us has ever done it, but what the heck.

So, here is my starting lineup (subject to change with unlimited transfers before Aug. 23rd. In fact, it's changed twice already.)

Goalkeeper: T Howard, Everton (an American)

Defense: J O'Shea, Manchester United; Y Kaboul, Portsmouth; J Woodgate (Tottingham); L Buxton, Stoke City (he was really cheap and from the club aligned with the Austin Aztex)

Midfielders: C Fabregas, Arsenal; M Ballack, Chelsea; S Gerrard, Liverpool; M Petrov Manchester City

Strikers: Emmanuel Adebayor, Aresenal; Fernando Torres, Liverpool

Remember The Milk worth all the cookies

2008-06-12T22:52:00.004-05:00

I live and die by my To Do list. I'm a multitasker by nature, so I always have too many things going on at the same time, and a To Do list is the only way I can keep from diluting my focus too much.

I used to use the Yahoo Task list that's integrated with their Calendar, but I wanted to move to Google's Calendar so I looked for an online replacement.

That search led me to Remember the Milk, what I call the best Web 2.0 application out there, as least for usability. Here is why I love Remember the Milk (or RTM). I was going to rank these, but that was too hard.

* keyboard shortcuts: Like GMail, RTM uses single stroke keyboard shortcuts. If I want to start a new task, I hit "t" on the keyboard and then start typing the task name. After hitting return, I hit "d" and put in the due date, then tab through the list until I get to tags, enter then, hit return. Then I hit a number key to prioritize the task, then "n" to select none and move on to the next task. That may sound like a lot, but I can do it very fast and not touch a mouse. If I'm looking at the lists of tasks, I can move my cursor up and down the list by using the "j" and "k" keys, hit return when I'm on the one I want, hit "c" to complete it or "p" to postpone it. It's a very keyboard-centric app and I avoid using the mouse whenever I can. It's very fast.

* Selecting Overdue and Postpone: This, unfortunately, is used every day. Each morning, I check my tasks, click the "Select Overdue" link and then hit "p" to postpone everything that was last yesterday to due today. Almost too easy. Sigh.

* Time/dated notes: You can add notes to tasks about partial completions, or add other information as needed. Since the notes are timed and dated automagically, you can use the notes as a log of your work on a particular task.

* Integration with Jott: Jott is a voice-recognition site that I can call and dictate a task to be added to my list. (Also works with Google Calendar, I Want Sandy and others.) The downside is it adds the task to my "Inbox" which I rarely use, so I sometimes miss them. Feature request: Be able to add the voice task to a specific task list.

* Repeating tasks: Some tasks I have to do weekly. Setting as a repeating task will put it at the top of my list on the day I have to do it, then I can complete the task and it will creep up the list again until the day it is due.

* The tag cloud: This may not be a big deal to everyone, but I really like the tagging of task. There is a tag cloud that gives me an idea of the complexity of my current list and what subjects in that list will denominate my time. Clicking on the tag gives you a quick list of all the items in that list.

* The mobile platform: Remember the Milk won best IPhone Web Application at the most recent WWDC, and I do subscribe to the Pro RTM so I can use the iPhone version, and it is really cool and pretty, and, and, and ... and I still use the regular mobile phone version. Sorry guys, the iPhone version is really pretty, but the regular version is easier to use and faster. Maybe once I get the G3 iPhone, I'll change to the "i" version.

* Integration with Google Calendar: This was a huge deal for me when I was looking for a replacement for Yahoo, but I find now I don't use my task list that way anymore. I keep at Firefox tab open to RTM all the time, along with another for Calendar, so I don't really need them together anymore. But I still think it's cool that they integrate.

* So I've gone on and on, but there is tons more to RTM that I haven't used: Sync, Groups, Locations (Google Maps), Offline (Google Gears) and more.

Most phones age badly. The iPhone got better.

2008-06-06T22:46:00.005-05:00

A year ago this month, Apple introduced the iPhone, and on Monday, odds are they will announce the next generation. Rumors abound on what is to come. GPS, G3 support, more memory, etc.

But I want to wax poetic on the first version. I waited a whole two weeks before buying my iPhone, and I paid the whole $599 and I got 'burned' buy the price drop some weeks later. I considered it the cost of early adoption.

But here's what's cool: I like my iPhone better today than the month I bought it. Not only do I like it better, it IS better. Apple upgraded the software so we could edit our home pages. They made maps and directions better by adding GPS-lite triangulation. They opened up the handset for development by others, and we'll soon reap the benefit of that, but even before that, iPhones have been the greatest catalyst to mobile-specific websites based on the iPhone-size screen.

Tell me, before the iPhone, did you ever have a phone that you didn't hate after a year? You were begging for that two-year contract to end so you could replace your dying battery, scratched screen, sticky number pads.

The iPhone was the 8th most popular browser on our news website, behind two versions of IE, Firefox, three versions of Safari 3.x, and Gecko.

So, yes, I want to upgrade my phone, but only because iPhone 2.0 comes out on Monday. I wouldn't trade my current phone for anything else.

Groupware: Google vs Yahoo

2008-06-03T21:36:00.005-05:00

I'm a Google guy. I started out a Yahoo! guy, but it seemed that each time my paper signed a new deal with Yahoo, I discovered how much better a Google web application was over it's Yahoo! counterpart, and I moved over, bit by bit. I felt like a betrayer, but Google is just soooooo much better.

Usually.

This week I've been trying to figure out the best way for our new soccer team to stay in touch. Mainly we just need an email list and a calendar, but since not every member of the team might be web savvy, it needs to be simple and integrated. I was surprised when I couldn't match a Google Calendar with a Google Group in an elegant way.

I so much prefer Google Calendar over Yahoo!'s Calendar ... it was the first service I moved. I like having separate calendars for different aspects of my life that I can turn on and off. I think it is super cool that you can embed those calendars on other web pages for those who may not have a Google account. The iPhone interface is usable, though not knock-your-socks-off.

Yahoo! just falls a little short. Too much visual noise, not enough feature.

I like the Google Groups email list and archive better than Yahoo!, too. It's not a clear frontrunner like with Calendar, but Google is clean and elegant and I like the threading. But here is the kicker: there is no way to gracefully connect a Google calendar to a group. In Yahoo, it's just built in. You can create pages within Google Groups, so I figured I would just embed the calendar into a page, but it won't take it. I can "edit html" and put in the code and preview, but once I save it says it doesn't support javascript.

Of course, Yahoo! has its flaws, too. Oh, they both do.

Some of my groupware wishes:

* Yahoo! Groups has a photo gallery, but why isn't it the far-superior flickr?
* I like the task and event combination in Yahoo, and wish that Google had an integrated task list. That said, Remember the Milk is the best, most useful web application in the 2.0 space. I could (and will) devote a post or even two to RTM. I use it all day, every day, for my task list. It's the only way I stay sane. RTM does have integration with Google calendar, but I found it much more functional used separately.
* There are other features available with Yahoo Groups: databases, photos, polls, files, etc. Google has fewer of those features, but to be honest they concentrate on the things that matter and do them very well: member management and email list/message archiving. Pages and files are useful (with the exception of that embed problem.)

But why, oh why, can't Google just bring their Groups together with the Calendar.

I thought about starting a whole Google Apps site, but we don't really need all that. (I once experimented with moving all my cmcdonald.com email accounts over to Google Apps and while I liked the family calendars and such, I couldn't port over my existing Blogger and Picasa accounts, so it just wasn't workable.)

Tweeting the news

2008-05-13T23:22:00.005-05:00

At the RefreshAustin meetup tonight we talked out a collective idea about how to use Twitter as an ultra-fast reporting tool for a traditional online news site. Or at least how we would like to see it.

The concept is simple enough. Let's say there is a popular political figure holding a rally in downtown Austin at 6th and Congress. (It's been known to happen.) The news organization sends their best reporters and columnists to the event ... three or four people. They use their cell phones and laptops to tweet minute-by-minute updates and off-the-cuff analysis of the speech. Those dispatches are combined together into a single feed for the news site, but it's also a feed on Twitter so folks can follow on their own accounts and on their mobile devices, maybe even from the same event. Sort of like CoverItLive, but more accessible and mobile.

Or there is popular 3-day music festival at an iconic downtown park where a mix of popular Austin and Texas acts intermingle with nationally touring headliners. (It's been known to happen.) Our music critics and editors at the festival send in bursts from the festival grounds, from the shortest bathroom lines to the latest inflatable farm animal. (Where's Willie? He's right here!) Imagine last year's coverage of the fire behind the food stand.

Now, for a broader view of the festival, lets put those tweets next to (but not mixed with) a scan of other posts from the festival. (Tweetscan? maybe follow @replies with some keyword, or some location-based scan. BrighKite?).

All that sounds easy enough, but there are hurdles. Some technical, some institutional.

As journalists, we feel it is important to edit news. It's part of the getting it right ... another pair of eyes is more than a spell checker. We double check facts, ensure clarity, demand fairness and all the things that makes journalism more than just another opinion. That thought above of "off-the-cuff analysis" probably makes the hair raise on the skin of good copy editor, and rightfully so.

We also have a technical issue of combining the tweets from several different mobile sources into a single account, but that's solvable. We could even develop a quick editing system between the submission and the publishing, but that would be wrong. Ultra-fast publishing is the aim here.

Now, about those adjacent tweetscans from the public? Not sure how we keep f-bombs from the front of our entertainment site. Maybe we just put that page another layer deep into the site. And I wonder if we can collect those for the Twitter users ... to have them all together into a single feed that people could subscribe to. This may already be out there with tweetscan or some other site ... I'll have to check that out.

It's worth more good talk among smart people, and it's worth doing in some fashion.

LiveBlogging with CoverItLIve

2008-03-21T16:14:00.005-05:00

A quick note to note this:

Austin360 and Statesman.com are using CoverItLive software to do live blogging of the Longhorns first round game in the NCAA tournament.

Matthew Odam is running this one, though John Bridges did the first during the Big 12 tournament. Matthew is able to moderate comments and create polls on the fly. Pretty darn cool.

Officially, a new job

2008-02-10T22:23:00.001-06:00

I've been working for two months as the interim Technical Solutions Manager for the online group at the Statesman, but this week I got the job for real. I'm really excited about the opportunity. I hope that it will lead to a more regular updating of this blog on techy things.

Gmail's IMAP has saved the iPhone

2008-01-31T23:52:00.000-06:00

I had written earlier about the email hassles for iPhone ... how Gmail just sucked and Yahoo's mail sucked the life out of my phone.

Well, it's old news that Google did come through with IMAP for the iPhone. It works great, and at much better battery life than Yahoo's mail.

Of course, Google couldn't just "fix" the mail in iPhone, they had to one-up it. So they created a web app for Safari on iPhone for Gmail that pretty much rocks. I'm still using the native Mail app because, well, it's native, but I have to admit that the features on the iPhone webby version are quite nice.

A technical bent

2008-01-31T23:37:00.001-06:00

A technical bent
More than a year after I "thought" I would write a blog about online news, I finally get around to writing another entry.

I'm currently working as Interim Technology Solutions Manager for the Statesman. Other than the "interim" part, that's a pretty damn good title. My son calls me Head Geek, which my COXnet brethren loved, but I like being the solutions guy. That's worth living up to.

Because that is what we are about: Solutions. People need stuff built, or fixed, or figured out, and we do it. I have the opportunity to build a new team, with a new vision and a new goal and I'm just tickled.

I've been gawking at the likes of Adrian Holovaty, Chris Heisel and some of my other buddies and aquaintances more on the dev side of things (as opposed to editorial)and I've felt like I've been missing out. I get excited about geocoding and SSL and now I dabble in the command line ... I want to do more ... crave it ... and I'm sure that soon there will be no turning back.

I so excited to learn all these new things and tackle all these new projects, but my first task is to build a team who can help me take all this on. (What "this" is will have to wait on another post.) I've met some great candidates, and I've already been turned down by a few, but hopefully for the right reasons.

Ahh ... enough of this ... let's build something.

Yahoo can't save iPhone failing

2007-09-09T18:16:00.000-05:00

The Yahoo Mail experience on the iPhone is much better than the GMail experience. So much so (with one exception below), that I was ready to bail on Gmail and start using Yahoo. And too boot, the new beta browser Yahoo Mail is pretty cool, too.

Now, I'm really a Google apps fan ... I used to be all Yahoo but have switched everything but fantasy football to Google in the last year. Mostly that has to do with Calendar. I use the heck out of Calendar, but that's a post for another day.

Anyway, let's say GMail problems would have to be pretty severe for me to switch. Well, on the iPhone, they are, and they are documented elsewhere. The gist is that mail on the iPhone is a copy from your web account, so you have to manage both independently. You end up deleting messages twice ... once in your browser mail and then on the iPhone. Even that is tricky since 50 new messages will be downloaded. In short, I don't like it. To make matters worse, messages you send out come in as new messages on your iPhone.

(Now, in researching for this diatribe, I did find there is a way to set up GMail using a third IMAP account. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm tempted.)

But really, this is supposed to be rant on Yahoo. I forward all my work email (which is behind a firewall so I can't access directly) into a Yahoo account so I can keep track of what's going on when I'm out of the office. When I read that mail on my iPhone, it marks as read on the browser. When I delete on the browser, it deletes on the iPhone. It's a beautiful thing, except it's all forwarded so I have to delete from my work account all over again. I can't change the firewall, so that is OK ... but I want that functionality with my home email!

You see, I have my own domain with it's email address. I currently pull that mail into Google and thread ith with my GMail account and I'm very happy with the browser bit of it. And I thought ... If I could only pull that e-mail into a Yahoo account, with its superior iPhone support ...

But, alas, while it is possible, I get an error when I download. It seams the POP server my ISP uses does not understand the "LAST" command to pull only messages that have not been seen since the last download. Because of this, I get either no mail or I get all unread message whether I've got them before or not!

I messaged Yahoo customer service and they said (after many miscommunications) that it's my ISP's fault. This despite that gmail has no problem with their version of "last". They download from my domain account just fine.

I also saw where someone forwarded their GMail account to a Yahoo account then set the Yahoo outbound address to GMail. That's fairly clever.

OK, the Yahoo exception metioned above ... I think that Yahoo mail constantly checking on the server stalls the iPhone sometimes. I also think it drains the battery, but that is just a feeling.

The iPhone is awesome, but ...

2007-07-27T08:48:00.000-05:00

Some cool things about the iPhone

* During a 4-day residential soccer camp, I e-mailed photos to Flickr to keep a running account of the camp. Parents got to see their kids at camp in near-real-time.
* I was able to post a blog entry on the iPhone (to my family blog), though it was quite a bit of work to get the photo in. I had to email that to a site, figure out the url and then add it to the blog.
* I needed phone numbers for my soccer team, and I was able to log into our player system for the club and get them.

Some hassles about the iPhone

* Battery power could be an issue. You pretty much have to charge it every day. I wonder how it will be when the battery life wears, as iPods tend to do.
* I've had some challenges with the Safari browser:
* Crashes on pages, espcially my bank's page. Though I've also had trouble with statesman.com and other sites.
* I tried to create a new blog using Blogger and could do everything but the last step. I could click on "Continue" and nothing would happen. It was frustrating.
* While you can write blog entries and work Gmail direct through the browser, you have to do it in "edit html" mode. You can't use the rich text editor. The keyboard doesn't recognize it as form field.

I'm sure there is more, but ... I must move on.

The iPhone switchover hassles

2007-07-16T23:29:00.000-05:00

OK ... two issues came up when I bought my iPhone. Both could be avoided.

First, my Mac OS was too old. I was running Panther (10.3.something) and when I finally got my iPhone out of the box and was ready to activate it (an excruciating six hours after I bought it) http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifI found my Mac didn't recognize it.

I hopped onto apple.com/iphone and checked the tech specs and sure enough, you have to have Mac OS X v10.4.10 or later.

I had to use my XP PC to activate my iPhone. That was just, so ... wrong. I felt dirty. I really didn't want to sully my new iPhone with an XP machine, so I just made sure that iTunes wouldn't try to sync anything if I had to connect to it again.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: So I did figure out how to get to my old numbers. Even though the phone says the SIM card failed, I was able to get to the phone numbers. I just had to cancel out of the failed screen.

The second thing that went wrong is I lost most of my phone numbers off my old phone. See, I was already an AT&T customer (and before that, Cingular, and before that, a younger AT&T!) so my old SIM card became useless once I activated my iPhone.

When I've switched phones in the past, the reps at AT&T/Cingular/AT&T would sync all my phone numbers onto the SIM card and they would transfer to the new phone. That leads me to believe that new numbers are added only to the phone, and I really believe that now once my old SIM card on my Nokia went kaput at the activation of my number on the iPhone. I could no longer get to most of my phone numbers on my old phone ... only the most recently added (since my last upgrade, I imagine.)

Now, I don't know if those guys at AT&T/Cingular/AT&T can reverse-sync a phone, but you might want to ask them before you activate your iPhone to your existing number.

Work stops over the iPhone

2007-07-16T23:20:00.000-05:00

I bought an iPhone. You would think such a device would be a great time saver in life, and I'm sure it will be once I stop playing with it.

But the "play" problem extends beyond me ... My productivity at work over the last couple of days has definitely slipped because everyone wants to see it, or play with it, or talk about it. Of course, I love talking about the iPhone because I think it great (not perfect ... I'll get to that) but I have to say it does cut into my work a bit.

I surely can't flaunt it ... not that I should. But when I'm taking a brief break on the catwalk, checking my e-mail, invariably someone walks by and says "oh coool .... you got an iPhone? Do you like it? Is it as cool as you imagined?"

Of course, it is, and after 10 minutes of showing it off (15 if I'm on AT&T Digital Edge) I'm finally off my five minute break that has taken 20 minutes.

Hufflepuff

2007-02-12T23:33:00.000-06:00

While doing research for Sean's Harry Potter birthday party, I came across one of many sorting hat quizes. This one placed me in Hufflepuff.

Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?