I apologize for the lack of posts lately. Apparently, one of the two hinges that connects my laptop screen to the base/keyboard is messed up, so I can’t see ANYTHING on the screen. So, in the meantime, please know that I am not gone, follow me on Twitter, and bear with me while I sort it out. It’s frustrating for me, as well.
While Personas has been out for a while, I (and everyone I’ve talked with) have never heard of it until now. In a sense, Personas is like a wallpaper for Firefox – it just fills the grey space of your toolbars, while making the tabs and input boxes semi-transparent.
After a few minutes use, I like it so far. It’s a nice change to the usually bland, grey space (I use Windows 98 theme instead of Aero) of the window. It gives your toolbars a nice feel of floating icons, especially since I have my Persona set to a sky and sunset theme.
I will be interested to see if this change affects browser performance (especially load time, as plug-ins and add-ons often do). In the meantime, go ahead and try out Personas – it’ll liven your browser with anything from nature scenes and models to guitars and basketballs.
Get Personas
I’m trying a new service from a site called MailChimp, that allows free email marketing and list organization to basic users. MailChimp makes it easy to send out mass newsletters and track statistics, as well as create customized forms for your website and emails.
The website is very user friendly, and email campaigns are easy to set up. The MailChimp blog offers you a wealth of information on getting started – with topics ranging from design to switching to HTML emails. As with most new web companies, you can find MailChimp on Facebook and Twitter.
The free plan allows for 100 subscribers and 6 monthly newsletters. If your campaign takes off, you can either pay $0.5 per email as you go or purchase a monthly plan. MailChimp has lots of well-known customers, from Mozilla to Canon to the University of North Carolina.
I will be trying out this service for a while to send (bi?)weekly newsletters, with tech news links, blog post updates, and podcast links. If you’d like to sign up to get the newsletter, use the form on the sidebar to register.
MailChimp
Google announced yesterday that Profiles now appear in name search results at the bottom of the page. For me, at least, this is fantastic news. Since I share the name of an NBA player, getting my sites to appear on the first result page of a search on “Ryan Bowen” has been all but impossible.
As soon as I heard the news, I googled my name. I was very pleased to see my Google Profile and picture on the first page.
If you haven’t yet created your Google Profile, I’d suggest it. It’s pretty straightforward – like a simplified Facebook, where you can add services (like Flickr streams) and links to your social networks.
Google Profiles
ConvergeSC is a web conference where designers, developers, business and marketing professionals can gain insight into all aspects of our industry from some of the best and brightest the Carolinas have to offer.
To all those in the Columbia area, I encourage you to come to ConvergeSC on June 27th. Speakers Jason Beaird, Jessica Cook, Jason Dew, Chris Eargle, Mark Gunnels, Jeff Johnson, Greg Lunn, Mike Mann, Robert Prioleau, Matthew Smith, and Joel Stevenson will be speaking.
If nothing crazy happens, I will be attending ConvergeSC this year. If you’re a student at the University of South Carolina, you may attend for free, though you need to go ahead and register now. Everyone else can register for $40.
Hope to see you all there!
ConvergeSC
Thanks to a great post by Martin at ghacks, I believe I have fixed my Feedburner problems. Unfortunately, I won’t know for a day or two (until Google caches the new post), but I’m 99% sure it will be fixed.
Basically, XML files don’t like the ampersand symbol. Obviously, I had no idea, so I used it to save space in a previous post. If you must use the symbol, you can fix it with some quick HTML (check Martin’s post).
Either way, I apologize for all the problems. Within a few hours, everything should be back to normal – so make sure and subscribe!
If you have been trying to join the ranks of the few (most likely confused) people who subscribe to this blog through the FeedBurner RSS feeds, you may have noticed that something is amiss.
Unfortunately, I just found this out yesterday while double-testing some links, so I’m not sure how long this has gone. It seems like the link to my FeedBurner feed is broken (and for some reason, Firefox reads it as a PNG file). So far, I’ve received no responses in the help forum, so I’m working on it. Those of you subscribed should have no problems getting new feeds, however.
Anyway, I apologize and promise that I’m working on it. For the time being, if you’d like, you can subscribe to this feed to make sure you don’t miss a beat. It’s the default WordPress feed, so please notice that it most likely doesn’t show the full post in the feeds.
Hopefully, everything will be fine in a day or two, but in the mean time and in between time, accept my humble apologies.
Cheers!
You’ve heard it before. From podcasts and blogs to tweets and sharply dressed men on TV, if you’re into technology, you’ve heard the term cloud computing. In case you haven’t, or you have no clue what it means, let me explain.
Basically, cloud computing is the idea that instead of using external, flash, or hard drives, everything you do on the computer will be saved online (in a “cloud”), where it can be accessed from anywhere. So, if you type up a paper at home, you can access it from work or school without having to save it to a flash drive and check your pockets every 5 minutes to make sure you have it.
One of the most obvious problems with cloud computing is the fact that it’s a lot quicker to save something to a physical hard drive than to wait for it to upload to a web server, depending on your internet speed. Google, as always, is not only taking the initial steps in making cloud computing a reality, but also finding solutions to this problem. Currently, Google offers many web services for the collection of personal online items – Gmail, Picasa, Reader, Docs, and Calendar. All of these free services allow the user to store their materials online.
As I said though, Google is making great strides in online document storage. Instead of working on a report in a text editor and uploading the document to your web space, you can just type it up within Google Docs (and it saves as you type, so you don’t even have to worry about a power surge, dead battery, or crash). Don’t worry about using a desktop email client to receive your messages from different email accounts, Gmail gives you 5 gigs of space and allows sending and receiving from multiple addresses.
Google has finally mentioned the new service (GDrive?) that has been rumored for years. Rumor has it that this online file storage will free (if not expand) the 6 gigs of space (currently restricted to Gmail and Picasa) so that users can store any files. If so, this will be a big hit to online backup or storage companies – but a big step for cloud computing.
So far, we can save email, documents, photos, schedules and news clips online. We can use online services to do many of the things that formerly required a desktop program. And now, with the release of Chrome, web browsers are beginning to behave like operating systems.
So what’s next? What’s the future look like for operating systems and computer desktops?
I’ve decided to go ahead and announce my new site, ryanlbowen.com. As you know, the big thing nowadays is to own the domain of your name. I bought this a while ago, but only recently have decided to do anything with it.
Basically, the site will serve as my personal portfolio, link base, and picture gallery. Or anything else I want it to be, because as is the beauty of personal property, I can do with it what I please. I designed the site myself, and though I like the basic structure now, it is a work in process. I want to get some screenshots of other sites I’ve worked on as soon as I can, but school is coming down to the wire and I need to study more.
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[tag]Microsoft[/tag] unveiled [tag]Internet Explorer 8[/tag] at the [tag]Mix09[/tag] conference March 18-20. The following day, an article was released on their site, explaining the new features and usability comforts, as well as using popular web companies, such as Facebook, ESPN, and eBay as testimonials. But seriously, wouldn’t you? I mean, with still over 70% of the browser market belonging to IE, wouldn’t your company do anything it could to support and encourage a browser that, despite its constant shortcomings, reaches millions more than [tag]Firefox[/tag], [tag]Safari[/tag], and [tag]Opera[/tag] put together?
But, down to the point. [tag]IE8[/tag] boasts developer tools, the ability to easily connect to the “news, stories and videos that people are buzzing about right now”. Great. Seriously, that’s wonderful that you’ve done that. But yet again, there is a lack of basic usability features and improvements.
For example, CNET reports that [tag]Google[/tag] Toolbar crashed IE8 on first run. According to user reviews, many sites would crash the tab, IE would sometimes randomly crash, there is no history button, and CSS and HTML rendering is still off from the standard (Firefox, Opera, and Safari). [tag]CNET[/tag] users rate IE8 2 out of 5.
