Blog April 2008

In a recent post, Lee Robertson of Epiblogger gave us seven reasons for why Firefox is better for blogging than Internet Explorer. Actually it’s got nothing to do with Firefox at all, but more to do with the add-ons that are available for it.

Why Firefox should have such a glut of add-ons in comparison to IE I’m not sure - and please don’t mention it’s because it’s open source: Firefox is cool because it’s written by nice people who make their code available for everyone to break, and IE is horrible because it’s written by Microsoft who are all fascists. I digress. I do that sometimes.

I really like Lee and Rhett’s work: Rhett has critiqued my friend Kev’s blog and is a regular listener to, and critic of my podcast. They’re both good writers with good ideas, and this latest post by Lee is no exception: i just don’t agree with the argument.

To demonstrate that, I thought I’d look into each of Lee’s points and try to rebut them, if only for the sake of balance. It’s got nothing to do with fairness, I just think IE7 is a better browser than Firefox. So to point 1:

1. “Firefox might not have been the first browser to offer tabbed browsing, but it is one of the greatest features for bloggers to have.” Agreed, and it’s implemented into the core of IE7.
2. “Firefox add-ons extend Firefox to make it much more than a web browser...” I used to be a desktop software developer and find the continuing blurring of the lines between desktop and web apps unsettling. I don’t like the idea that soon everything from watching IPTV to listening to Internet radio will be done through a web browser. I think web browsers should stick to being web browsers. Lee then goes on to look at the add-ins that make Firefox a great blogging platform.
   1. CoLT is a plugin that allows you to copy and paste the text and URL of a link so you can easily paste it into your post editor. Can I not do that already? I highlight the link text then hit CTRL+C to copy, or right-click the link and select Copy Shortcut. Or am I missing something?
   2. ScribeFire is an alternative post editor, so if you don’t like your WordPress/Blogger/etc interface you can use this. Windows Live Writer does this already, is browser-independent and is surprisingly good. I’ve used it before and was impressed at how well it worked with a standard blogging platform or - I imagine - anything that implements XML-RPC.
   3. FireFTP is an FTP client for Firefox. IE has supported FTP since version 5 (and in stable form since 6), or you can just use Windows Explorer. When Dreamweaver fails to connect I go straight to Windows Explorer for my FTP, and have never needed any third-party software.
   4. Zemanta suggests pictures and links related to your blog post. This sounds really cool, and according to the FAQ they’re testing an IE version. Either way, one point to Firefox.
   5. Web Developer gives you a massive set of tools to help test your web pages’ functionality and appearance. A brilliant add-on and another point to Firefox. If you develop for the Web and use Firefox but don’t have this add-on, get it. Chalk up another one to the mighty ’fox.
   6. Twitterfox is a Twitter client for Firefox. There are a whole glut of these and they’re very useful but I found that - as I documented in Adventures in Browserland - being too closely connected with such a vibrant community was distracting. Nevertheless, it’s something IE doesn’t have.
   7. Dictionaries and language packs What Lee’s referring to here is, not a dictionary but a spell checker. Some blogging platforms include their own but are often horrible (WordPress is no exception), but as I mentioned in How to Make Sense of your Blog, ieSpell is a great add-on for IE that gives you multi-lingual spell checking support that works really well.
3. “Multiple Home Pages - This goes along with tabbed browsing. You can open several pages as your home page.” Very true, but another feature that was implemented at the same time as tabbed browsing into IE7.

Obviously some of the features I’ve documented here are very much in the “me too” vein, where Microsoft have been trying to play catch-up with the rest of the online community, but whether a development camp thought of an idea first or whether they’re implementing something that has gone missed for ages is by the by.

In all of this I’m completely discounting IE6 and all those who have gone before. IE6 is a dreadful browser with more bugs than a dung heap in Mexico - see, I do jokes too - but its successor far surpasses even Firefox in my opinion. I still think there’s no reason to use anything other than IE7 on a Windows machine unless you need to use some of the tools I’ve mentioned that IE doesn’t have (mainly the Web Developer toolbar).

So that’s my rebuttal. If you think there’s something I’ve missed or you just want to call me Microsoft’s bitch or a capitalist pig-dog please be my guest! I am a capitalist pig-dog but no, I have never suckled at the mighty Gates teat, and never will.

I’ve just added my name to the list of attendees at WordCamp UK, a big bloggy love-in for all fans of the amazing blogging platform that powers this site, amongst many thousands of others.

If all goes well it will be taking place between the 19th and 20th of July, at a place (in Birmingham) yet to be decided. Stef has been busy putting a logo together and suggesting ideas for venues, and a tagging system has already been put in place to group all related posts together (see the wordcampuk tag below).

At the moment details are sketchy but a potential crowd of 200 could be expected. Lots of people have been putting their hands up to offer help and services - myself included - so we’ll see who gets to do what.

I find the excuse “I’m just not technical” a little strange. This phrase was hammered home ad nausium on last week’s episode of The Apprentice by the almost totally ineffectual Lucinda, and I’m not sure I really buy it anymore. Even Nick Hewer pointed out that the actions being performed in the latest task - copying some images from a digital camera to a PC - were really not complex.

The problem of being “non-technical” has nothing to do with technology in my opinion, but has almost everything to do with listening. Because people feel left behind by an industry that is a) moving incredibly fast and b) runs just about every aspect of their lives, I think they switch off and become unable to follow instructions.

I think it has a lot to do with fear: of the unknown, of the damage they might do if they click the wrong thing, but computers are very good at coping with that and just as pencils have rubbers so do computers have undo options and recovery functions. I do have sympathy with this, but I think people are perhaps a little too quick to jump to the “I’m not technical” argument.

As a web developer I often get calls from clients saying “I got an error and I don’t know what to do”. I ask them what the error was and they can never tell me in the first instance because they don’t take the time to read the message, but when they do read the message they almost always know how to deal with it. However bugs in software or problems when two perfectly well-written programs butt heads can throw up unexpected errors and at that point the non-technical card can be played quite legitimately.

Maybe the NUT’s comments on the importance of teaching technology at a young age will help to improve this mindset, but there is another side to early adoption, which is over-reliance. When I was at uni even my technology-obsessed brain instructed my feet to walk to the library and seek out a book on a particular subject. Yes I might use the library’s computer to find it, but I always knew that what I was looking for could be found amongst the thousands of tomes this relatively small library held.

When I was in my second year a lecturer told our group that some first year students had come to him complaining that they couldn’t find the information he’d tasked them to collect. When quizzed on this they told him that the Internet was down or they couldn’t get into the computer room or some other guff of that nature. When asked why they didn’t think of going to the library, a light bulb seemed to go off in their heads. This demonstrated quite clearly to all attending that 12 months had obviously had a massive impact on the way technology was taught at or regarded within schools and colleges.

There is an important balance here, and one which the NUT seem aware of, between being able to “work” a computer and becoming so reliant on it that all other forms of research seem archaic or pointless because obviously you can find everything you need on Wikipedia!

Actually a law student friend of mine told me that he delights in pissing off his mathematician mates by changing some of the results of equations on Wikipedia and watching the look of consternation on their faces when they discover that the numbers didn’t in fact add up and that for once the Internet was wrong.

I tried that once myself in an article about Bruce Forsyth but my less-than-subtle amendments were quickly spotted and rectified. Better luck next time.

I’m a sucker for change. I like to shake things up, and I get bored very easily, so I’m always interested by new browsers, search engines, social networking sites, gadgets and other assorted whatnots. Now Flock is hardly new: I tried it back in 2005 and enjoyed the experience, but it was pretty much useless if you weren’t using del.icio.us... which I wasn’t. However, something spurred me to try it again and see how far it’d come. But first, to give you a bit of background:

Flock is a web browser based on Firefox, but with a much more attractive interface and a whole raft of social features. In fact it is this feature set that fuels its marketing as a “social web browser”.

Now let me get one thing straight. I’ve never liked Firefox, and I don’t like the assertion that it is God’s gift to web browsing. Certainly there’s a hell of a lot to be said for the Gecko engine on which it’s built, but the interface is dull and unfriendly and it’s less flexible than IE6. And why? Even IE6 supports liquid layouts without the use of tables, but which the Gecko engine never did. (I won’t go into the whys and wherefores of that, but it is true).

I wholeheartedly invite someone to supply a link to a site that successfully uses liquid layouts in CSS: I would genuinely like to be proven wrong because it’ll save me a whole bunch of time in the future!

Also the argument that people constantly trot out about it being open source is, for the 95% of people who use it (mostly web professionals because no-one else cares enough) frankly, bollocks. It matters not one jot whether you can download the source code if you’re not a programmer. Unless you’re a developer who wants to get his hands dirty, open source does not matter. There, I said it.

All of the above applies to Windows users only, by the way. For Linux and OSX it’s the best browser available, it’s just that for Windows, IE7 is better.

So, why Flock and not Firefox? Well for one the interface is much better. The dialog boxes are still too clinical and unfriendly for my liking, the scrolling isn’t as smooth and intelligent as in IE and editing in WordPress has some weird side effects. But all of these petty little issues were overridden by the rich feature set. For example:

The People Sidebar shows you an at-a-glance view of your social network identities. You can update your Twitter status, read through your Facebook minifeed, browse your Flickr library and go straight to YouTube...and more besides.

The Media Bar gives you a river of images and videos from sites to which you subscribe, using something they call media feeds, a bit of black magic I still haven’t managed to figure out (it’s not based on RSS, so I’m not entirely sure what is, in fact, the deuce.)

The Feeds Sidebar shows you a folder-based list of all your RSS feeds, marking out those which have unread items. You can read through them, marking off the ones that you’ve read (it’s supposed to happen automatically but rarely works) or easily sharing them via your blog.

If you’re a Google or Yahoo! Mail user you can check your inbox and compose a new message with a mere two clicks. You can share your favourite links via del.ici.ous, keep clippings of web pages and write new blog posts directly from your browser window. The search facility is great too (it defaults to Yahoo! but we all make mistakes).

And it is precisely because of all of these features that I’m getting rid of it. My small but ever-growing RSS list coupled with my subscription to a constantly changing Flickr photo stream means I’m forever seeing little red icons that demand my immediate attention.

This is not Flock’s fault. Of course this behaviour is by design and it’s great, not to mention being what I thought I wanted, but now I realise that these features simply distract me from work. I thought I wanted to be updated when someone published something new, but at the moment it feels like I’m being notified every time someone farts and it’s all too much!

There are a few other issues aswell, like not being able to sync all my accounts, settings and feeds with my laptop or even my Pocket PC, but the real reason is that all these fantastic connectivity tools are just far too tempting. You can’t have a Media Bar and not fill it: that would be a hideous waste of the developers’ precious time!

Plus you could say “why don’t you just ignore the red icons until you’re ready?” but you’re crediting me with self-control that I just don’t have. I want to know what’s going on right now, but my conscience tells me there’s work to be done.

So it’s been a fun few weeks playing with Flock and spending the time getting it just the way I like it - including installing the English rather than American dictionary for the excellent spell checker - and if you can control the urge to press the big red buttons that say “do not press” then check it out for yourself: it is of course free!

And if you feel like berating me for my earlier rant on open source web browsers please feel free to leave a comment: I’m all about debate!

Right then. Start, Control Panel, Uninstall a Program...

Last year when Google Checkout was setup, eBay prohibited its use throughout its entire global network: strike one for anti-competitiveness, now it’s piloting a scheme which makes paying via PayPal mandatory. Strike two.

Now I’ve not used Google Checkout (yet) and I’m quite a fan of PayPal: I find it quick, convenient and fairly hassle-free for both buying and selling, however I have more than a few concerns with its coupling with eBay.

Primarily my issue with PayPal and its owner eBay rears its head when I want to sell my stuff, because I get charged first to list the product on eBay whether it sells or not - a policy that Amazon.co.uk Marketplace have been sensible enough to scrap - then a second time if my buyer decides to pay through PayPal; and since I can’t choose my own gateway I’m locked into the service. But at least I had the option to offer another form of payment, even if that meant eBay covered their ears and went “la la la, not listening” because I wasn’t using their toys.

Now, if the new scheme that eBay are trialling in Australia - a haven for no-nonsense and often polemical policies - goes ahead, we’ll all be locked in to PayPal and of course, no-one will lift a finger because the suits who decide who gets prosecuted for being anti-competitive will be too distracted with the Microsoft/Yahoo! debacle.

So the scheme will go ahead, Google will throw its toys out of the pram and someone in the EU might raise an eyebrow, meanwhile those lads over at eBay will be looking through auction listings for larger wallets within which to stuff their crisp new dollar bills.

Welcome to the Internet. Sit down, shut up and hand over your card details.

Corporal Lachlan MacNeil of the 16 Air Brigade is taking part in a unique project run by the Guardian. He’ll be blogging his way through the next six months via text and video, mainly to give us “back home” the chance to see what life is like for a British squaddy in in Afghanistan, but also to give a voice to some of his troops so they can communicate - albeit one way - with their loved ones.

I’m more than a little intrigued to see how it pans out over the coming weeks and months. Other than a headcam I’m not entirely sure what the Guardian have kitted him out with, nor how the pressures of life under fire will affect the regularity of his posts, but if nothing else it should prove an interesting experiment.

I doubt we’ll see other social media tools put to great use in the Army: the idea of troops twittering their current location is probably unlikely.

Social media websites need to make money to live. Facebook does it by showing you targeted ads based on keywords of interest, but Phorm, the new centre for unmitigated digital evil want to explode that model and use it across the Web so that targeted advertising follows you everywhere. The Guardian say they won’t use it, but beyond what some are referring to as an illegal invasion of privacy, could a system like this work on an opt-in basis?

Attendees of the Birmingham SXSWi brain dump discussed the merits of Amazon’s recommendations, of which I’m a big fan, and to which my bank balance has fallen prey on many occasions. So how about a single website where all the buying decisions you want to make public can be discovered by others?

What if, when you sign up for a new ecommerce website you tick a box to say “share my buying decisions with x” (where x is a cool name for such an app), and when you buy your product, the site talks to the x API which records the sale and adds it to the stuff you like? Once you’ve received and played with your new product you can return to x (or to the original site) and rate the product very simply with a thumbs up or thumbs down rating.

When you login to a social networking site (or any other kind of site where you provide your email address), that site talks to x which brings back a load of tags which the site matches against its list of ads. It displays the ads, you see something you like, you buy the product. That purchase goes back into x and the cycle continues.

There’s an idea, now go and build it!

With yesterday’s words of inspiration brought about by the latest Birmingham bloggers meetup still ringing in my ears I decided to go live with a project that’s been gestating for a while now.

I wanted a central place where bloggers could practice their art easily and freely, so I setup bloggingbrum.com, a collaborative blog where anyone - well, as long as they’ve got some kind of blogging pedigree - can write about anything Birmingham-related.

It’s a simple, modest project and not necessary to everyone’s taste (some people have very comprehensive blogs whilst others may come across stories that they have a vested interest in but are not suited for their own site), but I think worthwhile nonetheless.

There are some well-made aggregators of Brummie content - not least Jon Bounds’ creation UpYerBrum - but I wanted to collect original content that had been written specifically for this site.

I’m a big believer in the power of the collective, especially when like-minded people are pushing towards the same goals, so I’m hoping that from these humble beginnings we can build something really exciting.

So Birmingham, you find my gauntlet lying on the floor. Won’t you pick it up?