However you can’t really call Tumblr a precise alternative for a number of reasons. One is that you can give the appearance to visitors that your tumbelog is hosted on its own domain by redirecting the IP address. Also, a tumbelog really is more like a mini weblog. Techslut even shows you how to integrate your tumblelog (and Twitter tweets) into your WordPress setup.


If you do decide to “self-host”, they warn you that they’re not in a position to help you configure your tumblelog, so you should  ask a friend. On the other hand, if  you set up your tumblelog the regular way, there’s less headache and you get a subdomain.
Here’s my tumblelog, which display diagrams that I’ve created for various weblogs that I either write for or own. (What I should have done is provided a link to each article, so each diagram could be seen in context. In which case my tumblelog would be an index to my slice of the blogosphere.)

Features of Tumblr

Here are some of the other features and functionality of Tumblr tumblelogs:

1. Themes. Customize appearance by editing the HTML and CSS. You can even borrow theme fragments from WordPress, though you’ll have to do the conversion and twiddling yourself.

2. Content variety. Easily post several types of content: articles, quotes, links, IM conversation text, photos, and videos. The latter two can be from Flickr and YouTube; just specify the link.
3. Moblogging. Post photos from your cell phone by mailing them to a secret email address set up just for your tumblelog.
4. Bookmarklet. Post quickly using the bookmarklet. Depending on your web browser (I’m running Firefox), you can drag the bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Bar. Then, whenever  you’re on a page that you want to Tumble, just click the bookmarklet. The content type defaults to a link, but you can change that.
5. Twitter integration. Integrate your Twitter tweets into your tumbelog. (I haven’t looked deeply into this. It might amount to using the Tumblr bookmarklet to post while you are still in Twitter.)

The interface is pretty easy to use, and the text editor is WYSIWYG. However, some of the functionality doesn’t work properly in the Firefox browser. (Try adding a hyperlink to some text.) Like a blog platform and Twitter, Tumblelogs have RSS feeds with which friends can subscribe. Your feed can be full text or short, and sites like Technorati and My Yahoo! can be pinged whenever you add a new post.

What you Cannot Do With/In Tumblr

Here’s what you cannot do:

1. You cannot send or subscribe to Tumbelogs by SMS. At least not that I could see in the Tumblr FAQ.
2. You cannot pull in web feeds to generate content.
3. You cannot actually host the content on your own server. Again, not that I could see.
4. You cannot interact with other Tumblrweeds (or whatever they’re called). I.e., there are no social networking features.

So in essence, Tumblr is more like a Blogspot service than a Twitter service, but with some interesting features that make it different enough. Call it mini-blogging instead of micro-blogging. Tumblr has made it easy to post a small range of content types. It’s much more stream of consciousness than Twitter because of the content types supported, but it’s not a replacement.

What can you use it for?

I can already think of a number of uses for Tumblr that Twitter simply cannot fulfil:

1. A scrapbook. Or create a family photo album for family and friends, complete with captions or little snippets of conversation (copied from an IM text chat session).

2. Personal portal. A portal/index to all your posts, if you blog at multiple places.
3. Lens. Alternative to Squidoo lenses. Tumblr’s not an authority domain yet like Squidoo, but it could be soon.
4. Mini-blog. Burn the feed in Feedburner and use their BuzzBoost HTML/Javascript badge to display the content as a mini-blog on an actual blog, in the sidebar. So you can produce “what I’m reading/ listening to” lists on your blog, without having to upgrade your theme.

Missing features

Being a geek, I’d like to see a number of features that would round Tumblr out:

1. Social features. This might include comments, or some sort of ability to interact with other Tumblrweeds.

2. Audio. Embedding of audio files, for podcasting or for recording messages in a family photo album.
3. RSS feed importing. Tie-in with RSS feeds in a variety of ways, including importing, to generate content. This would be a very nice display vehicle for some custom Yahoo feeds.

Overall, I’d have to say I like Tumblr, at least for mini-blogging. My head hurts with ways I could use it.

I’m hoping to follow in the large footsteps of Chris and Brian by running several new video tutorial series at Tubetorial. I’ll be covering tools on the following topics: blogging; content; audio (podcasting, etc.); video; illustration, CGI (3d), diagramming, and image, and anything else that is related to producing content for websites. Hopefully you’ll check Tubetorial, if you haven’t already. My first tubetorial, on mashing together two RSS web feeds using Yahoo Pipes, is up already. I have at least 50 more tubetorials sketched, including a few more Yahoo Pipes videos, as well as other Web 2.0 mashup tools.

Current Solutions

Let’s say I have a set up of Office 2.0 applications. I love all of them for specific reasons; some are stronger in some points than others. Now let’s say I want to integrate these applications together. In order to get my Zoho Word Processor to work my del.icio.us I only do one thing. Either I can use their respective APIs and try and create a mashup, but that still want provide the opportunity for them to talk together the way I want them to, but that will result in quite a mess as I add more applications. Or I could submit a request and wait for ever and a day until the “beta” stage clears and then maybe they’ll respond.

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But I figure why use any of them when there are VoIP clients that can handle text, audio and sometimes video. One cool example is Sightspeed, a competitor to Skype and Gizmo Project. All three are both IM clients and VoIP clients. Thus, if you have a microphone and headset, you can make free VoIP audio calls to anyone running the same software.

In fact, Gizmo Project allows you to also contact people on specific other VoIP soft client networks. Unfortunately, Skype isn’t one of them, as they do not have an open interface.

On the other hand, if you want free video VoIP calling, free video email, and video conference calls with up to three other people, Sightspeed is the way to go. (Skype now has video enabled, but it requires a plugin, and their website does not make much effort to promote the video features.)

I’ve got ALL of the above-mentioned IM and VoIP clients on my laptop, and my fave at the moment has to be Sightspeed. While the free version does not let you do video conferencing, the paid plan is only US$4.95/m or $44.95/yr, which also gives you unlimited 60 second video mail stored for an unlimited time. The free plan gives you unlimited 30 second video mail store for 30 days.

Besides regular VoIP audio chats, you can do VoIP video calling, send video mail to one or more people - even if they are not Sightspeed members - or publish videos to a weblog. The latter two options are done by recording a new video message with your webcam and uploading it (free) to Sightspeed servers. If you are sending video mail, your recipient(s) will get an email with the appropriate URL link. If you want to publish the video for a weblog, Sightspeed will generate a URL link, which you can include in your blog.

Now if that’s not enough for you, anyone who is not a Sightspeed member can still have a video/ audio VoIP chat with you. Both the free and paid plans give you a free web page, where a plugin (IE 6+ only) lets them have a video chat with you.

I tried a cheapo USB “snake” webcam (< $100) on both Skype and Sightspeed and only Sightspeed picked up the signal. Neither seems to be able to receive video from my Palm Treo 650 - though I may have something on it configured incorrectly. (Skype provides a shortlist of Skype-certified webcams on their website.)

The interesting thing is that my laptop RAM is only 512 Mb and the webcam doesn’t function too well on it in other video capture applications (such as Snagit screen capture software). But the camera actually functions well enough in Sightspeed, even with my RAM usage maxed out. Still, I’d recommend either a gigabyte of RAM or dual processors, or both. (I have both on my desktop, and the videocam functions much better over there, but I kept that computer offline, so I haven’t tested it with Sightspeed.)

To put Sightspeed to the test, I called up their friendly Support Guy in audio mode first. I jokingly said that I looked really scruffy, not having shaved in days, and I wanted to see but didn’t want him to see me. He laughed and told me how to change my camera settings. I then called him back in video mode and it worked like a charm. However, I haven’t tested it in the other direction, where I’d be able to see the caller and they couldn’t see me.

I also recorded and uploaded a video mail and emailed it to myself. Very simple process. The email just contains a link, not the actual video. That’s true for blog use as well. I haven’t figured out if I can embed the video on blog, to make it viewable from there instead of having to go to the Sightspeed website.

I’m going to love this software, and you just might too. Now if I can only get my relatives across the world an Internet connection, I can see and hear them at the same time. The drawback is that Sightspeed does not currently allow you to communicate with other audio or video IM clients, so you may have to install several software packages like I have.

Sightspeed is available for Win 2000/ XP and for Mac OSX 10.3.9 and up.

1. Be cognizant of other viewers and demographic.

When we design for the web, we must understand that the majority of the time your website will not look the same as you see it on your screen. Web design is a difficult field, because the designer has some many constraints in designing their sites. Here are a few considerations when you are designing:

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]]> http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/30/chris-poteets-10-greatest-web-design-taboo-list.html/feed http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/22/mobile-browsing-a-guide-to-self-inflicted-eyestrain.html http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/22/mobile-browsing-a-guide-to-self-inflicted-eyestrain.html#comments Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:08:55 +0000 Jonathan Moeller http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/22/mobile-browsing-a-guide-to-self-inflicted-eyestrain.html Recently, I had to spend a great deal of time configuring a number of PDAs, and soon came to loathe them wholeheartedly. A PDA’s screen combines all the fun of tiny print with the thrill of a harshly-glowing screen. A stylus is great for menu navigation, but pecking a long URL into the pop-up keyboard (or, worse, the tiny push buttons at the bottom of the unit) is an exercise is maddening frustration. You can read e-mails on a PDA, and use it for all manner of busywork, but it’s almost impossible to get any real work done with one.


The PDA: bling for management.

That said, you might need to use a PDA, oh unfortunate reader, and you may find yourself discontented with your PDA’s included web browser. Here’s a look at the good, the bad, and the downright ugly among popular mobile browers:

Microsoft has a hold in every facet of the IT world, and mobile browsing is no exception. If you have a PDA running either Windows CE or Windows Mobile 2003, odds are you’re using Internet Explorer Mobile. It’s serviceable enough, with the familiar IE interface, and the navigation bar is fairly easy to use.

Still, it lacks tabbed browsing, like most modern browsers, and beyond a few basics, it’s almost impossible to customize the settings. You can deleted cookies and clear the browsing history, but beyond that, you’re stuck with the hardwired settings. To make matters worse, IE Mobile has virtually no support for Java of any kind, so if you need to visit a website with Java components, you’re out of luck.

IE Mobile’s okay if you don’t have anything better, but if you do, then there’s no reason to stick with it.

Minimo:

Minimo is the Mozilla Foundation’s attempt to create a mobile browser. Mozilla Firefox is the leading challenger to Internet Explorer, so I decided to give Minimo a shot. After all, Firefox is great, so why not Minimo?

Wrong.

In the Mozilla family, if Firefox is the favored child, then Minimo is the deformed homicidal cousin no one talks about it. For one thing, it’s big; the installer file is over eight megabytes, and the installed program takes up an appalling amount of precious memory space. Minimo currently only works on Windows CE 4.2 and 5.0, and not at all on Windows Mobile 2003, which means you’d have to install it on older PDAs, where space is often very tight.

Assuming Minimo does install, it doesn’t work very well. It’s prone to odd errors and hangups, and on three separate occasions I saw it completely freeze up the PDA. This does not make for an enjoyable browsing experience.

Still, Minimo is very, very new, and currently is only at version 0.016. Perhaps it might develop into a more robust browser in the future. In the meantime, however, Minimo is best avoided by all but Mozilla fanatics and those who enjoy riding the bleeding edge.

ThunderHawk:

Bitstream Wireless produces the dramatically named ThunderHawk browser. It’s a fairly solid product. It provides excellent support for standards, a reasonably small memory footprint, and fairly snappy performance. It’s far more configurable than IE Mobile, too, and you can switch off support for various standards as needed.

The best feature is “landscape view”, or, to put it more bluntly, full-screen, removing the clutter at the top and bottom of the PDA’s screen. Furthermore, the display is turned sideways, making the best use of the screen height. It’s far easier to read a long document in landscape view than in normal view.

ThunderHawk is not free, alas, but there’s a thirty-day evaluation version to try before you buy.

Opera Mobile/Opera Mini:But Opera Mobile and Opera Mini are far and away the best mobile browsers available today. Opera Mobile is probably the only mobile browsers to feature tabbed browsing. Granted, on a small PDA screen, keeping a large number of tabs open becomes impractical, but it’s still a useful feature. Opera Mobile also features support for most standards.

Opera Mini’s selling point is, well, its size, or remarkable lack thereof. It takes up less space than any of the other browsers I looked at, yet still manages to retain a great deal of functionality, including JavaScript support. It cannot connect to a secure site with an improperly signed certificate, however. While this might be a security feature, an appalling number of “secure” corporate intranet sites run off self-signed certificates, which might make Opera Mini impractical for many corporate users.

Neither Opera Mobile nor Opera Mini are free, thought there are trial versions available for download. All in all, if you have to buy a mobile browser, the Opera browser is the best value for your dollar.

Correction: Opera Mini is, in fact, free, which definitely makes it one of the best choices for mobile browsing. Thanks to the commentators for pointing that out.

]]> http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/22/mobile-browsing-a-guide-to-self-inflicted-eyestrain.html/feed http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/01/irc-who-uses-irc-today.html http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/01/irc-who-uses-irc-today.html#comments Thu, 01 Jun 2006 06:20:59 +0000 Fahim Farook http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/01/irc-who-uses-irc-today.html

At the dawn of time, during the early days of the Internet, those of us who are old enough to have been there used to spend a lot of time on IRC. In the multiple-IM (Instant Messenger) world of today, IRC might seem a little passé but boy did we enjoy hooking up with people from all over the world those days :p Of course, it’s not that IRC is still not used but most people just don’t know of IRC (or prefer not to use IRC) any longer. Recently, a web community that I spend a lot of time at was taken down and all the members of the community found themselves at a loss as to where to hang out. So somebody suggested an IRC chat room and everybody was given a URL to access the chat room via a java applet. Me being the old-time IRC user that I am, I decided that I needed to find a good IRC client instead of the crappy java applet and so my quest was born – to find the perfect IRC client :)


In the old days, everybody used mIRC. But the mIRC interface still looks like it did in the Windows 3.1 days and so looks a bit dated now :p I then thought of my favourite IRC client from way back when, pIRCH. But it looks as if they never continued development on pIRCH and it still looks the same as it did ten years ago. I needed something new, fresh, something which had all the features that I wanted but also looked good. So I decided to make a list of features that I wanted.

When I originally used IRC, I wanted a lot of features – I wanted the client to be able to connect to multiple servers, it should log channel conversations and it should support aliases. “Aliases? What are those?” I hear you ask. Well, when you use an IRC client you have to employ certain commands to carry out tasks. For instance, to join a chat room, you’d type “/join #chatroom”. Now the thing is people generally (and me specifically) are lazy :p So instead of typing /join for instance, they like to shorten it to /j and that was where aliases came in. Aliases allow you to define a new command (or combination of commands) which could be executed via a user-defined keyword. And that was one nifty feature to have in the old day.

Of course, that was all that I wanted those days. But today, you have other nifty concepts. TAB completion of nicknames, auto-start channels, highlighting of specific words/phrases so that you’ll be notified when somebody mentions something you’re interested in (or says your name). All these are things that you (or at least I) need in an IRC client today. And of course, it helps if the client is free and looks good too.

There is a long list of IRC clients available on wikipedia which should allow you to find your own personal favourite. Me, I opted for HydraIRC after checking out several other offerings. There were a few others that I really liked but they each lacked one or other of the essential features from the list above or they had quirks which made them not quite useable. For example, one of the clients I tried (I forget which one) pops open a private message window each time somebody tried to use a sound-effect for instance. I do understand the reason why the private message opens (because the sound effects are sent using CTCP) but it is really annoying for anybody else who is in the same chat room with you.

But that’s neither here nor, there. If you are an old-time IRC user and have a hankering to get back there, or you’re an IRC newbie trying to pick the best tool to use, the above list might help you make a decision as to the software you want to use. Or maybe this comparison chart will help :)

]]> http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/06/01/irc-who-uses-irc-today.html/feed http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/29/get-the-latest-and-greatest-from-google-and-microsoft.html http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/29/get-the-latest-and-greatest-from-google-and-microsoft.html#comments Mon, 29 May 2006 12:00:59 +0000 Fahim Farook http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/29/get-the-latest-and-greatest-from-google-and-microsoft.html

Everybody and their grandmother today knows that two of the key players to watch out for new stuff (I hesitate to say innovations since some might disagree :p) are Google and Microsoft. But the question usually is, how do you know what they’ve each got brewing at their respective camps? Sure, you know about the overly hyped tech innovations from both sides months (if not years) before the stuff is even available. But what about the not so flashy stuff? The stuff which could be useful but might not have mass-market appeal? Where do you go to find out about those things?


The short answer is that you can go to Google Labs or to Microsoft Research :) But that is only half an answer. You know where to go now but do you know what you’ll find there? Sure, you can simply go there and find out for yourself. Or, I can give you a short preview of what you can expect to see there and you can decide if the trip’s worth it :p

On the Google side, you can get anything ranging from Picasa for Linux, Google Notebook, Google Trends, Google Related Links, Google Mars and Google Reader. “Oh sure, give me a list of meaningless links and don’t tell me anything about what any of these things do!”, I hear you say :p So let’s try to rectify that. Picasa for Linux is fairly easily explained even if you know nothing about its older brother, Picasa for Windows. Basically, Picasa is a freeware image organizer which allows you to organize, edit, print, search and share the images on your hard disk. Of course, Picasa for Linux is the Linux counterpart of the Windows software :)

While Picasa is for your desktop, Google Notebook is another one of Google’s innovations which takes your standard app/task and gives it a web-enabled twist. I’m sure you have used an information management utility or a web clipping utility at one time or another. These apps simply let you capture snippets of information from all over the place and store them in one easily searchable location. Google Notebook takes that concept and puts it online. So now, you have your information on the Google servers and you can access it from anywhere. (And yes, people who are scared of how much access Google has to their information will point out that this is another instance where we’ll be handing Google our private information quite freely :p)

Google Trends is simply an adjunct to Google’s raison d’être - their search facilities. Google Trends simply shows you what people are searching for and allows you to compare between two different search terms to see how they stack up. Similarly, Related Links is an adjunct to another venture of theirs – ad sense. Instead of simply providing ads related to the content being browsed, related links strives to display links to other content which might be of relevance to the content on a given web page. Currently however, there is no monetization to be gained by using Related Links.

To round off the list, Google Mars provides detailed maps of Mars while the Google Reader is another one of Google’s ventures which puts a web-twist on a familiar app – this time it’s the turn of your trusty newsreader. The Google Reader simply provides you with the ability to read any of your favourite news feeds from anywhere in the world by simply logging into your Google Reader account. Kind of “blah”? I guess it is :)

On the Microsoft side of the fence, you get stuff like GroupShot, PHLAT, Strider URL Tracer and MapCruncher. To be honest, unlike the offerings from Google, the Microsoft stuff sometimes seems a bit esoteric , or at least more niche market. However, I can see the potential in some of these apps to be something pretty useful. For instance, take GroupShot. I’ve been searching forever for an app that would allow me to create a panoramic image based on a collection of many separate images. The reason? I wanted to create level maps for a computer game by taking screen shots from various locations on a level :p Did I find something which could do this easily? So far, the answer has been “No!”. Either the app is expensive, or it has restrictions on the images which can go into the collage or it just won’t work. Now you get GroupShot and while I have not used it yet, it’s free and it appears to not have the limitations that I experienced with other software earlier.

As for PHLAT, it’s a new interface for something that MS has been talking about for a long time but never managed to get right till Google beat them to the punch – desktop search :) Ever since Google made desktop search a new buzzword, everybody has been coming out with desktop search engines and Microsoft has several in the works under different names and apparently to provide slightly different functionality. PHLAT is simply a frontend for Microsoft’s existing Windows Desktop Search but it has some unique features – like the ability to tag items so that you can search for them using tags rather than the contents of the document or file.

As far as Strider goes, I’m not absolutely certain that I understand the usefulness of the app. Sure, it allows you to find misspelt URLs and to root out typo-squatters but I’m still not sure how useful that app will be. If you use online mapping tools, MapCruncher however is going to be extremely useful. MapCruncher basically combine multiple maps together to get a better overview of a given area. At least, that’s what I understood it to be but since I don’t use that many online mapping services, I might not have gotten the full picture.

What is interesting to note however is that there are hundreds of other projects to explore at Microsoft Research and many more at Google Labs as well. If you trawl through all that stuff, I’m sure you’ll find a few more hidden gems :)

]]> http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/29/get-the-latest-and-greatest-from-google-and-microsoft.html/feed http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/29/using-office-2007-beta-2-send-your-feedback-instantly-to-microsoft.html http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/29/using-office-2007-beta-2-send-your-feedback-instantly-to-microsoft.html#comments Mon, 29 May 2006 07:00:59 +0000 Fahim Farook http://technopedia.info/tech/1969/12/31/using-office-2007-beta-2-send-your-feedback-instantly-to-microsoft.html

If you’re using the public beta 2 of Office 2007, the Send a Smile software is something you have to install :) Don’t take my word for it – just try it out. It basically allows you to click on a smile (or a frown) icon on your system tray area to send instant feedback about something you like (or dislike) in Office 2007.




Just click the happy face or the sad face and the following feedback dialog pops up:



Fill in the details, click the Send button and Microsoft will know what you think, instantly! No going to websites, no tedious procedures to follow :) Of course, as to whether they actually spend their time reading all the feedback, that I can’t tell you …

]]> http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/29/using-office-2007-beta-2-send-your-feedback-instantly-to-microsoft.html/feed http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/26/blogging-with-word-2007.html http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/26/blogging-with-word-2007.html#comments Sat, 27 May 2006 03:38:01 +0000 Fahim Farook http://technopedia.info/tech/2006/05/27/blogging-with-word-2007.html

By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Office 2007 beta 2 is publicly available for download. (If you hadn’t heard the news, then you can download it from here). Unless you’d been living under a rock for the past year or so, you have also probably heard about all the new UI (User Interface) changes in Office 2007 and how it is supposed to make working with Office easier, faster and more intuitive. I’ve just downloaded and installed beta 2 and while I can’t yet comment on how good an experience the UI is, the build of Word that is included with Office 2007 has a not-so-much mentioned feature that I’m excited about :) So what’s this feature? The ability to blog directly from within Word!


I discovered the feature quite by accident since I don’t believe I saw any mention of this feature in any of the early beta review articles. But once I found it, I was surprised to discover that they had put a lot of thought into how things worked from within Word. So let me give you a little taste of what the blogging feature is all about and you can judge for yourself if this is something that you’d want to have/use.

First, a look at the main interface in Word 2007 and a quick list of new UI elements that I will refer to in the article:



Now, if you want to write a blog entry in Word 2007, you’ve got to go click on the MS Office Button – this is where the standard File menu items from previous versions of Word (and then some) went to :) Here’s a screenshot of what the new MS Office menu looks like when you navigate to the blog option:



When you click on the Blog option, it will open up a new Word window. This window is different from normal word editing windows in that it has a separate location for the post title. Not only that, if you haven’t set up any blogging accounts till now, it will also prompt you to create a blogging account with an established blogging services like MSN Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint etc. or to provide the details for your own blogging server as long as it supports Atom or MetaWeblog APIs. The other difference in this new window is the ribbon bar – instead of the standard ribbon bar with nine tabs that you see in the first screenshot, you get a new blogging ribbon bar which has only three tabs:



And here’s how the document window itself looks:



If you have multiple blogging accounts defined (you can use the Manage Accounts button on the ribbon bar to Add/Modify blogging accounts), then the Account selector appears just under the entry title. You can select any of your defined blogging accounts from there and make your entry. Making the entry itself is as easy as typing out a normal document using Word :) After you’re done typing, all you have to do is click Publish on the ribbon bar or click the little arrow next to Publish to get the option to also publish an entry as a Draft. That’s about it. Happy blogging!

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