Ian’s blogomatic

(image sesame letterpress)

I was drawn to Posterous because it was so simple, but as I settle in and make it my permanent home I start to want more stuff. Yesterday I gave the URL to my sister so she could follow what the family is doing on the weekends. Her comment was "looks like a blog for computer nerds".

The easy solution to this is to tag the posts. I guess I would end up with FAMILY TECH TEACHING and something like INTERNETCULTURE for the cool stuff I find and can't help meme-ing. The founders are working on this, and I am looking forward to it since the next easiest thing to do is to have more blogs which is too much like hard work.

In my previous life as a software developer I was often faced with these decisions. The easiest thing to do is just to keep adding the features the users and marketers are asking for. The hard and best thing to do is to try and drill down and understand why they want it and then dream up something so intuitive that the real need is met without anyone really noticing it.

But Gary, seriously, need tags.

I can't post to Delicious from inside det.wa.gov.au today. The error message says "you've been temporarily blocked for accessing Delicious too rapidly". All WA school activity would show up as the proxy IP address, so I'm wondering if that's the cause, although it hasn't been a problem in the past.

I reported it to Yahoo (the owners) so we'll see what happens. I'm not even able to view my del.icio.us links - this sucks because I use it extensively to make quick collections of links for my students on a topic. Luckily I also have a Diggo account so I guess I can use that. I prefer Delicious since the students are not exposed to advertising on the links page.

<evil laugh> take that kids! For parents: If you find you kids are whipping you at video games, you need to get a Wii.

Also further news from the Chrome experiment - had to do this post in Firefox. When I tried to drag the image into the post, Chrome thought I wanted to replace the whole tab with the image instead of dropping it into the rich text editor. The problem must be in the drop rather than the drag, since I dragged it from Chrome and dropped it into this post in FireFox.

Took Google Chrome out for a run this morning. Shiny. Bumped into a couple of rendering bugs but it seems pretty complete for an initial release. I didn't particularly notice the huge javascript speed increases, I suspect this is because on my satellite connection the major delay is the lag to fetch every piece of data.

So the things I missed most from Firefox:

• the right click "Open in new tab" is not in the exact same place
• my addons - GTDInbox, Twitterfox , expecially twitterfox. Seriously, if I think of something witty I need to share it straight away or it’s lost forever.
• popup blocking behaviour was to put little window bars down the bottom, which I kept accidentally opening to see what they were. I guess I would learn. 

The install did a great job of picking up my passwords from Firefox, which worries me. Note to self: don’t let browser remember passwords for important stuff.

Other lauded features:

• The window/tab dragging thing was cute. 
• Having the most visited pages from the history show up as options in the new tab was sort of cool, although I would possibly want to customise this.
• The combined address bar / search bar was quickly adapted to.

It seems good enough to persevere with, just need those add-ons guys.