posts by tag

Update: My Gmail account is back up now. I contacted Google support around 10:00AM on Friday (8/15/08) morning, and they responded (and corrected) the issue by 1:00PM.

Around noon yesterday, Gmail stopped working. I figured it was a small hiccup, as Google is typically pretty reliable. It lasted the rest of the day. Well, I was busy all evening, but thought I’d check before I went to bed. Still not working. So I reported an issue.

I woke up this morning hoping things would be back in order, but they’re not. Now, not only is my Gmail account still not loading, but my iChat buddy list is empty (since it’s based off of my Google contacts). This sucks.

All of my other Google services are working just fine (such as Google Reader), so it’s weird. And I know of several other people that aren’t having a single issue with Gmail. I didn’t see anything on the known issues page, either.

Does anyone know what in the world is going on? Are you experiencing the same “502 Service Unavailable” errors? I’d love to at least know that I’m not the only one, but at this point, it feels like I am.

Here’s a table showing the uptime for Google, and I just have to say, wow. The table was compiled from a year’s worth of statistics. The worst case was 99.991% uptime, which equated to a downtime of 48 minutes in one year. That’s incredible.

Just the thought of their server farm scares me almost as much as this insane (and the exact opposite of fun) carnival ride. Actually, that ride scares me a whole lot more than any server farm ever could, but you get my point.

It appears that West Virginia University is re-creating the city of Morgantown using Google SketchUp. And here’s proof.

Last night before bed, I checked reader to see if there was anything pressing… there wasn’t. However, I noticed a few changes to the reader itself:

• the ajax loading block was no longer in the middle of the screen, but was at the top, similar to their other orange notifications
• there was a way to open/close the sidebar (by clicking rather than pressing “u”)
• the feed counts bumped up an order of magnitude, and would display the actual count up to 1,000 (so instead of 100+ it would show 192, but over 1,000 would show 1,000+, which is much better)
• it felt at least 2x as fast

I didn’t thoroughly check for more features, those were just the apparent one’s. I figured I’d give it a more in-depth run this morning, but it’s back to normal now. Personally, I think they had to rollback. I say this because my photography feeds reported 1,000+ unread and I know I don’t have over 1,000 unread posts just for photography. Either way, I’m guessing a few minor updates are just around the corner.

I don’t know what’s going on lately (the last 2 weeks), but for me, Gmail has been lagging beyond the extreme. It’s taking nearly 10 seconds to archive or open an email. I’m only using 30% of the alloted space, so it doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s to the point where I’m not reading email more than once a day. That could arguably be a good thing, but not under these conditions. Hopefully things speed up soon…

In their defense, consistencies among different applications may not be a valid complaint (like why the new top bar doesn’t show up in reader… and where’s reader search?) But one thing that I don’t get is their usage of “tags.” Is it a tag? Is it a label? Is there a difference? Reader has two options for organizing: add tags and add to a folder. However, they both end up with the same result… folders in the sidebar. It’s somewhat misleading, I think. Docs & spreadsheets represent tags as folders as well, where gmail chooses “labels.”

When I think of tags, I think of a N:N relationship, which means I typically tag something with multiple tags at a time. That’s exactly what they let you do, but I don’t necessarily want my feeds and files to be strung out across multiple folders. To me, folders are more of a 1:N relationship. From all aspects of a folder, there’s not one thing that says N:N relationships exist. In a file system, do you keep your files in multiple folders? Probably not. But if you could tag your files, would you give them more than one tag? Most probably would. It’s all fine, I’m just making a point (and probably being too critical). It was obviously intentional, so I’m sure they have very logical reasoning behind it.

And on a side not, after seeing the new interface for docs & spreadsheets, I would much rather have folders than labels in gmail.

Over lunch, I saw a post about Google 411. I cannot stand using the phone, but for whatever reason I called 411 from my cell phone twice last month… at $1.75 per call. I didn’t know they raised the cost again.

Out of curiosity, I tried out Google 411 at lunch. It worked better than Sprint’s 411 service. I called for Radio Shack in Fairmont, WV, and it gave me 8 of them (Sprint returned 2). You may think returning irrelevant locations (i.e. 8) is unnecessary, but it will list them as options starting with the closest location. So it works if you know exactly what you want, and it works if you know generally what you want. Plus, you don’t have to talk to anyone—it’s all automated. Pretty cool.

Oh, and I used 411 to call Radio Shack prior to today. I didn’t just waste $1.75 to compare them, just so you know.

I like to somehow mark interesting things I read. Whether it’s via del.icio.us or a Google Reader star, I save interesting/helpful posts, thinking I might need or want it some day. The problem I have with starring feeds is I’ve starred so many that, in the event I should need something, it becomes somewhat overwhelming to find. Devoting stars to one concept cuts the benefit down to about 5%, so that doesn’t work, either. I know this is the exact idea behind tags, but I find I sometimes tag inconsistently (‘photography’ vs. ‘photos’ vs. ‘photo’ vs. ‘flickr’).

Google Reader has this nice little feature known as “sharing” that I’ve yet to use. Actually, I never had a reason to use it. And maybe I still don’t have a reason, but it’s stupidly simple, so why not. As you may know, photography is increasingly taking over my interests. Sharing items may be a reasonable way to keep track of all the interesting/helpful posts related to photography.

If you’re at all interested in photography, you can catch all of what I consider to be “golden nugget photography posts” via my shared items page. Oh, and there’s a feed for my shared items as well (shared items RSS). The site itself is somewhat useless, as you can’t search it or easily access older posts, so the feed is probably the way to go. But it’s a place for me to see valuable photography posts inside of Google Reader, which is kind of nice.

I’m really not concerned with SEO, but every now and then I’ll type my name in Google to see what comes up. I could care less if I’m even in the results to be honest, but once I began to hold a solid position in 5th place, I started wondering if I could raise the bar a little. A recent search (Valentines Day) shows that I’ve managed to move up to 3rd, while displaying my true incompetence!

What a lovely time for Google to update its indexes. I am an application error.

I’m not sure how long this has been around, but it’s new to me. Google Reader Trends allows you to see the frequency of data coming through your reader, and in theory, can help you become more efficient at reading that data. If you’re heavily into RSS and your subscription list is getting out of hand, this might help you to recognize the feeds you might not want anymore based on how often you read them, and how often that feed is updated. Of course, this assumes you use Google Reader. I thought it was interesting to see when I read my feeds the most. Apparently I read the most while at work (over lunch, but still)—sorry Lee! I’ll be interested to see if those numbers come down (reading while at work that is) now that I’m doing stuff I like again. C# and .NET simply wasn’t keeping me focused.

Sometimes I want to find something in Google Reader. Something I read awhile ago, but don’t remember where. I star posts I think might be useful, but sometimes I don’t know they’re useful until I need them. Google, being the number one search company, does not provide a search for Google Reader. I’m not sure why. Nevertheless, I came across a Greasemonkey script to do just that. It takes a decent amount of effort, though (it’s easy, it’s just not a “click to install and you’re done” type of script). And I’m sure (if you wanted this) you could figure it out, but I’ll explain it anyway.

Here are the steps to add the custom search to your reader:

1. Download your OPML file from your reader to your Desktop (or wherever).
2. Sign up for a custom search here: Google Co-op—for your search, just fill in whatever you want as the name, description, keywords, etc.
3. Click “Next” then “Finish”. Then click on “control panel” then “advanced”. Look for the annotations section. Upload your OPML file you’ve just downloaded.
4. Install this Greasemonkey script.
5. Right-click on the monkey and choose “Manage User Scripts”.
6. Select the “Google Reader Custom Search” and click “Edit” to open the JavaScript (Note: if you haven’t chosen a default editor for Greasemonkey scripts, it will prompt you to do so the first time).
7. Near the top of the file, you’ll see a variable named SearchURL. This variable needs to have the address of your custom search. To get that URL, go back to your custom search homepage, and search for “anything”.
8. Copy the response URL and paste it in the JavaScript file as the value of the SearchURL. You’ll be replacing the text “REPLACE-THIS” that’s there by default (Note: don’t remove the quotes).
9. Lastly, remove the “&q=anything” from the URL you pasted in place of the “REPLACE-THIS” text. Save everything and “ok/close” all open windows.
10. Refresh your Google Reader and you should have a custom search at the top.

The down side? You have to do this on every machine where you use Google Reader. The ideal case would be for Google to go ahead and implement a search for their reader, as I’m sure it would work a lot better than this solution. Until then, this might get you by.

I’ve been waiting on this to show up in my account since I first read about it; it finally did. Like many other people, I have (and use) more than one email account. It can be a pain to deal with. I have my college email, work email, and two personal emails. Now, Gmail let’s me check all four emails via the Gmail interface, which I love. And when you “reply” to someone who has sent mail to one of your other addresses, it uses that address as the reply address, instead of your Gmail address (which you can optionally set as the default). I’ve already added filters to automatically label my school and work emails. I’ve had the “send from another account” thing setup for a while now, but was never able to check other accounts until today. They were quietly sneaking it in people’s accounts. Unfortunately, I guess I wasn’t downloading my email from the server in all of my years at IRC, so now I’m getting thousands of email from 2 years ago randomly showing up. It’s kind of sporatic, but once I get through all of them, it looks like this setup will be really convenient for me. They’re spam filters work really well against my junk email, too.

I think Gmail is the most efficient and effortless way to keep track of email. It’s fast, smart, reliable, and innovative. Well, I guess it’s the Gmail team who is innovative. It just works extremely well. I’ve been having some issues with Outlook goofing up on me, causing me to almost be late for a meeting or two, and ignore an email from my boss for 2 weeks. Not a good thing. Like a lot of the things I use and love, I could go on and on about Gmail and its features, just in case there’s someone who may read this post and not have or know about Gmail. But how could that be? So I won’t go into all of that.

If you have a Gmail account, and you don’t know if this service is available to you, here’s how to find out: Gmail Mail Fetcher.

To receive a notification every time any one of my feeds are updated would be extreme. But at the same time, navigating to the Google Reader tab and clicking refresh get’s old (I’m not sure how frequent it refreshes itself, so I always click refresh). The perfect solution: Google Reader Firefox extension. It shows the little blue RSS icon from Google Reader with a count of the total feeds down in the right-hand corner of the browser. It’s very subtle, but exactly what I need. It auto-updates every 120 seconds, too (and you can change that). It also has a respectable amount of options, all of which add to its usefullness. The best part is when you hover over it, you’ll see the count broken down into your categories (but only if that category of feeds has been updated—see below for a screenshot). It’s a pretty handy extension. At least to me it is.

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon this, but if you type “techtalks” on a Google Video search you’ll get a lot of good content. I haven’t gone through it extensively, but I’ve glanced through the titles and watched a couple of them. Some of the topics include: Python, MySQL optimization, Behavior-driven Development, User Experience at Google, Intro to SQLite, and so on. If you’re looking for a new tutorial or screencast, you should give it a go; maybe you’ll find something worth your while.

Wasn’t it just today/yesterday when I was complaining about the things I didn’t like with Google Reader? Well, lo and behold, they’ve met my needs graciously. Last night, Google upgraded their reader and I’m thrilled with the new changes. Let’s review what I didn’t like, versus what’s new—shall we? Here’s the basic list:

• Problem 1: inability to load list with desired feeds by default (such as a specific label, or excluding feeds in a black list)
• Problem 2: going to a new page to add a new feed (way too inconvenient)
• Problem 3: previewing a feed before subscribing
• Problem 4: scrolling to the bottom of the page to read (long) feeds (basically, losing sight of the feed column)
• Problem 5: inability to know if there are new feeds per subscription

Now that I’ve mentioned the basic list of issues I had, how does the new reader correct these things? Let’s take a look:

Solution to Problem 1: Get rid of the feed column entirely, and replace it with a subscription list. Not only a subscription list, but a sophisticated subscription list with collapsible folders and the ability to toggle between all feeds and updated feeds—much, much easier. Oh, and the list is constantly working for you by performing a consistent checkup on your feeds via Ajax. A nice touch.

Solution to Problem 2: A fancy little drop-down to add new feeds. When you subscribe to a new feed, you don’t leave your current location throughout the entire process.

Solution to Problem 3: Eliminate the feed preview before subscription. Really, this was unnecessary. Admitedly, I can see the value, but usually a person knows if they want to subscribe. I viewed the preview as an unnecessary intermediate step and I’m glad it’s gone.

Solution to Problem 4: Keep the feeds in an expanding container. I always hated reading long feeds beacause I had to scroll to the bottom of the page, sometimes losing complete site of the feed listing. The use of spacebar helped the issue, but it was still inconvenient. I usually just skipped what I couldn’t see, unless it was really interesting. Now feeds scroll inside of a container, allowing the subscription list to always remain visible.

Solution to Problem 5: Display a count of the new items per feed subscription. I probably get the most satisfaction from this upgrade. Not only are the feeds marked with a count, but they’re distinguished as bold (in case you want to view all feeds). Wait, I’m not done—there are counts per folder (or per tag), too!

Not only are my quirks corrected, but we have a few bonus features as well. Things like updated shortcuts, an addition of a “home” section to show what’s new (including the latest post from the blog), previous/next buttons for easier navigation, a “mark all as read” link, and an option to mark items as read simply by scrolling down the list. Not to mention the ability to toggle betwen “expandable” and “list” views, which might be familiar to all of those gmail users out there. If you think about it, a feed reader is like an inbox. Now you have the option to treat it like one. Plus, the UI has been carefully crafted in my opinion. Have you noticed the subtle difference between (in expandable view) a new item and a read item? I’m a sucker for the subtle things. Overall, I have to say, I’m impressed with this reader and it gives me more motivation to keep up with my feeds. I’ve come across several new things while writing this post, so I’m anxiously awaiting to find more of the new features that have slipped by.

Despite what I love about Newshutch, Google pulled me back in. Ultimately, I’ve come to realize that speed has so much precedence over any other feature (to me); I had to give Google another try. Interface is up in the rankings, too, but Google isn’t too bad at that. The major reason I left Google Reader for Newshutch was because the organization of the feeds. Some like the “give me what’s new no matter what subscription it’s in” view. Populating the list with the most recent feeds across a subscription list is not good with me. What if I wanted to read Digg through my reader? I can’t with this model. I’m then forced to rely on the subscriptions menu (Google Reader). In Newshutch, I like the way I’m aware of something new, but had the choice to view it based on the subscription. I think the count is important, too. Often I read feeds depending on how much time I have. If there’s only (1) post, I can read it now. If there are (8) posts, I better wait until I have a few minutes.

The problem with Google’s implementation of my desired “view by subscription” option, is not showing any indication of new feeds. It’s kind of irritating, but at the same time, the speed is unbelievable. I thought of labeling certain feeds with a key label so I could pull my top feeds based on that label (similar to the “categories” I used in Newshutch), but I don’t like that as much. Although, Google’s “Related Subscriptions” menu is pretty handy—maybe that will satisfy me for a while. Either way I don’t think I’ll be able to get over the quickness of Google’s feed display. Plus, their shortcuts are sweet. Particularly, g+l for labels, j/k for next/prev, and v for viewing in a new window (tab).

I use Firefox as my primary browser and I love it. For whatever reason, I’m extremely picky about my bookmarks. I use folders on the toolbar to keep everything organized. I gave up on live bookmarking, because honestly, I would rather use my feed reader or just visit the site (I enjoy site designs almost as much as reading the content). Someone tried to convert me over to Flock, but it didn’t work. I completely see where Flock is going, and the benefits of what the browser can do, but I didn’t like the way it handled my bookmarks. Sometimes they wouldn’t be there, or they were in the wrong folder and so on.

Anyway, I maintain two computers consistently. Because of my compulsion’s, I have to update my desktop with any new bookmark my laptop get’s. That get’s old. So, you can imagine my excitement when Google came out with a browser sync for Firefox. I immediately installed it the day it came out, and I have to say, it’s been flawless for me. It not only updates my bookmarks, but it syncs my history, saved passwords, cookies, etc. It’s awesome. If you maintain two computers, use Firefox and not the browser sync, you’re crazy. Go get it.