Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek, geek and more geek.

Gmail does draft!

Posted on by

I’ve just noticed Gmail now has a save as draft option. It’s appeared in the last couple of hours. It was definitely something I was waiting for. It’s another step in the right direction.
Other new stuff: the contacts have moved into the main browser window rather than being a popup. They now appear more like the mail folder interface, though the division is purely ‘frequently mailed’ or all contacts, I think that is too crude to be useful, I prefered the alphabetic links. There is a search which looks in the notes as well as name and email.
Another change is that the “Invite x friends to Gmail” link has disappeared back below the fold (or at least it is if you have a lot of labels). Which I think is a step backwards.

Update: The contact info can now include a good assortment of extra info like telephone numbers, addresses, IM, copany, etc. And in multpiple ‘sets’ like home, work, etc. Groovy. I wonder if import contacts will populate those new fields if they are present in the import…

Another Update:You can now do forwarding! Under settings you can “Forward a copy of incoming mail to [emailaddress]” and optionally put a copy in your gmail inbox, archive or trash. And you can do it in a filter.

And now extisp.icio.us

Posted on by

This will be the last for for a while, I promise…

Kevan Davis has produced extisp.icio.us. Extispicious is an automatically recombinant memeplex ! Which means it produces a diagramatic representation of the various del.icio.us tags you have used.
Kevan reliably informs us that extispicious is an adverb Relating to the inspection of entrails for prognostication..
He also says:

But what does it all mean?
Aside from the obvious keyword-quantity/font-size ratio, the representation isn’t very meaningful at all – tag positioning is entirely random.

Here’s my my del.icio.us entrails.

del.icio.us and nutr.itio.us

Posted on by

After my rant about how wonderful del.icio.us is, I’ve now found the wonderful nutr.icio.us by Greg Sadetsky.
Nutr.icio.us is an updated version of the del.icio.us pop-up posting form. Greg has added a list of tags including your own to the form. So you can simply click to add tags to your del.icio.us bookmark.
He has cleverly presented the most common tags for that bookmark first, with the other popular ones behind a mouse click. Finally you can click to see your own tags (with your most common ones highlighted). There are other features too.
Recommended.
A note of caution: the pop-up operates through Greg’s server (in order to snag the popular tags for the bookmark) which already seems a little slower than del.icio.us. If it gets popular that may become a problem.

del.icio.us

Posted on by

I finally got around to signing up to del.icio.us! I’ve been watching the progress of the service for quite a while now but not felt motivated enough to sign up and start using it.

For those of you who don’t know

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

But it is much more than that. I’ve used on line bookmark managers before, but my use of them usually tailed off. My del.icio.us bookmarks are already promising to be much more useful than those. My final push to start using the service was motivated by two things. First, the ability to store my bookmarks on line: I have been bookmarking a lot of sites recently. I’m on a new PC at my new job, and whilst I could import all my old bookmarks, I decided not to at this point. It has meant that I have found a lot of more up-to-date resources than I would have perhaps used. Because of this I have found myself emailing lists of links home to myself using Gmail.

This brings me on to the second reason I decided to use del.icio.us: Keywords. I really like Gmail’s labels (keywords) and have been adding lots of labels to my emails, and using Gmails great search capabilities to filter on them. Del.icio.us’ ability to add arbitrary keywords or tags to your bookmarks as well as comments is really great. You can add multiple tags to each bookmark (a simple pop up “add this site to del.icio.us” bookmarklet is available), and then filter your links on those tags. I will be making good use of that feature.

That brings me to the other great things that del.icio.us does. The social side of bookmarking. It’s incredibly simple yet powerful. When you add a bookmark, it appears on the del.icio.us home page along with your login name, your comments, and the tags you assigned to the link. That feature alone is great. You can simply watch the home page (it’s available as an RSS feed) and see what other people are linking to. You will quickly find lots of interesting sites just doing that. On top of that you can click on the login name of the person posting the link and see what else they are linking to. You can also click on a tag and see what else they linked to under that tag.

Now, let’s go back to the link you added yourself with your short list of tags. The display of that list also tells you how many other people have bookmarked the same link. Click on that and you get a list of those people along with their comments on the link. Now if someone else was interested in bookmarking the same site as you, what else might they have bookmarked? Click on their name and you get to see their bookmarks. It’s another great way to find related links to the same stuff your are interested in. On that display of your bookmark you also get each of your tags as a link. Click on that and you get to see all the links to which you assigned that tag or keyword. But you also get a link to “‘your-keyword‘ from all users”. Click on that and you get to see all the links other people have categorised with that same tag. This is really powerful.

John Udell has some great thoughts about using del.icio.us to categorise his own blog posts and research resources as well as incorporate del.icio.us into his category searches/data mining experiments.

Which brings me to some other great features of del.icio.us I want to mention: It implements a simple REST API, RSS and HTML feeds, and subscriptions to tags, searches, and more.

I think if I can harmonize my del.icio.us tags, my Gmail labels, and my WordPress blog and link categories into a comprehensive taxonomy, I have the makings of an incredible data repository.

If everyone did that and if you throw in other systems like Technorati to perhaps add relevance weighting to your filter/search results, a touch of GeoURL to filter on geography if required and soon you could have a significant piece of the semantic web. At least something with huge potential. Layer a natural language query processor on top and the mind boggles at the potential.

A couple of other points. Del.icio.us was written by Joshua Schachter who also wrote GeoURL. I recently discovered REST and was quite intrigued by it only to find that, in essence, it’s what I’ve been doing with my web apps for the last few years!

Firefox Spread

Posted on by

Fabulous to see that the spread Firefox campaign achieved more than double it’s target:

10 days.
2 million downloads of the Firefox Preview Release.
10,000 registered users.
100,000+ referrals by our 100 most active participants.

Well done to all who helped promote it. Keep it up, there’s a long way to go to world domination! 🙂
My link is over there in the top left corner.

Gmail Looking Good

Posted on by

It has been a little over three weeks since I got my account on Gmail, Google’s web mail service. I have been using it daily and have quite a lot of mail directed to my account. Enough that I have about 1200 mails in my ‘All Mail’ label and that doesn’t include the spam and other trivia I have deleted.
Suffice to say, I have given it a ‘good go’. The verdict: I quite like it. I’m very impressed with some of the features, and less impressed with others.
One of the things Iwould change is the fact if you send an email to your self, gmail does not put it in the inbox. I often send myself notes and links to remind me of something when I get home. If I do that with gmail I have to remember to go drag it out of the sent folder and move it to the inbox.
Another wish would be to be able to mark two message as part of the same thread. Today I replied to an email with no subject, edited the subject in my reply and gmail decided my reply was not part of the same conversation.
I do like the search, I am getting used to typing ‘label:lego book’ to find all book mentions on the lego mailing list.
I love the threaded conversation mode (when it works)
I hate the fact that I can no longer just type text to find it on the page (a fabulous Mozilla/Firefox feature).
I don’t understand why it regularly guesses wrongly which parts of an email are quotes. It seems to think signatures are quoted material, and bizarrely, the last of the three links in a ‘comment for moderation’ email from WordPress!

However, it is certainly good enough that I have used up my first three lots of invitations recommending it to people. But now I have some more.
If you are interested in a gmail invitation, contact me and let me know why I should send one to you.

Firefox – Spread The Word

Posted on by

The Firefox team have started a marketing campaign with the initial aim to get a million downloads of Firefox in ten days. They are only two days into the campaign and are over half-way there! That’s perhaps not too surprising given the recent constant security scares about Internet Explorer.
Their cause must also have been bolstered by the recent spate of high profile stories recommending non-IE browsers in such places as USA Today and US-CERT‘s recomendation to “Use a different web browser”.
In the meantime in case you haven’t tried it Get Firefox!
Once you’ve tried it and like it, sign up to become an affiliate. The campaign site is at http://www.spreadfirefox.com.

Update: It looks like the spreadfirefox server can’t take the strain. Mozilla’s Firefox page is fine, you can download direct from there.

Gmail

Posted on by

I got an invitation to join Gmail the other day (thanks Sara). Of course, I decided to take a look. So far I’m quite impressed! In order to test it without too much risk I have set two of my email accounts to forward to my Gmail account. That way I get a decent amount of email to play with.
I’m very impressed with the interface. I like the fact that so much is done on the client side. It makes things very slick without having to round trip to the server all the time. Strangely, I have been thinking about fat web clients recently. I’ve been thinking that quite often you really don’t want to take that round trip to the server to process a single click. I think I really want an opportunity to play with the the wonderful 204 HTTP response code so that the server can still know state changes.
Anyway, back to Gmail. I think that the labels are a great idea. Much better than folders, though I worry about the stuff I don’t label but which I do archive. I can no longer see it, other than in ‘All Mail’. Of course I can search for it, but I can’t really browse it. Unless I’m missing something? I like the ‘conversation’ view. It seems slightly more intuitive than Mozilla Mail’s (and every one else’s) tree structure for threaded emails.
I like the fact that it knows to apply the same labels to all mails in the same thread. That helps to compensate for the paltry 20 filters. I hope they increase that number soon. In Mozilla Mail I have 36 filters set up just for the two mail boxes I am echoing to Gmail. There are more in my other accounts!
Of course, I love the fact that they have so many access keys set up. Far less mousing around allows me to work quicker!
There are lots of things I need it to do before I could consider it a suitable replacemement for a decent fat mail client like Mozilla Mail. For instance, I need to be able to set lots of different from/reply addresses without having to edit preferences each time. I need more rules like ‘BCC to <email address>’ automatically, or request receipt, I need to be able to sort my mails! And backup! I must have backup. And import; the tools knocking about the web at the moment are no good for me as I must preserve dates, and folders. Mind you, one gigabyte wouldn’t be enough if I were to import all my email archives!
I think I like the way it deals with spam. I’ve noticed that it catches a lot and filters it to the spam folder, but I like it less that it’s silent about it. That is, I see no indication that I have spam to check through for false positives. I also noticed that it bounces some spam.

Still, first impressions are favourable so far.