Tag Archives: change

Thoughts

Some variety

I’m too tired to write a long, coherent post tonight. I worked late today and got home pretty much exhausted.

I’ve started using Adobe’s new Lightroom yesterday to postprocess my photos, and I like it more than Bridge/Camera Raw. It has a ton more options, not only for developing RAW files, but also features that I’d normally only find in Photoshop, like red eye removal and a really good healing brush. And the crop tool is much easier to use than the one in Camera Raw. Another benefit is that it can also work with JPG files, so I don’t have to open those in Photoshop for editing. That’s a huge plus, because I can do it all in a single application. So this means I get to open Photoshop a lot less these days, which is great, given how slowly it opens on my machine. Say, Lightroom opens up lightning fast compared to Bridge! And oh yeah, it does automatic conversion to DNG, whereas this was a manual operation in Camera Raw. That’s cool for me, since DNG’s turn out to be about 50-60% of the size of my regular RAW files. That means I need about half the storage. I’ll that that any day and run with it. I’ve got enough gizmos and wires on and under my desk.

I’m annoyed with Costco for changing their return policy. It basically does away with any serious differentiation between them and other retail chains. I wrote them an email to complain, and they responded that they have a new concierge service that offers tech support for the higher-priced items, and they also extend the manufacturer’s warranty to 2 years, but still, I miss their wonderful (and now defunct) return policy. Yes, I can understand that cheesy people would return used items and eat away at their profit margins, but I don’t do that stuff, and I really liked the extra peace of mind that their old return policy provided me for items like cameras, electronics and appliances.

You may notice (or not) that the Technorati buttons and links are gone from my site, except for one little unobtrusive link in the sidebar. I took them off today. Technorati’s pretty much been useless to me. It’s driven no traffic to my site according to my stats, and they’ve also managed to decrease my site rank with their latest “tweaks”. I don’t like that. And on top of it all, my site has been loading slower lately because it had to wait for their graphics and JavaScript to load. My browser would sit there for seconds on end, with “waiting for technorati…” in the status bar.

Talking about slow load times, I also took off the Twitter status box from the sidebar. Twitter’s been up and down more times than an elevator lately, and they’ve been another reason my site has been slow to load. It would take forever to bring up the little Twitter status message at times, and I had enough of that. So if you want to see what I’ve been twittering about lately, just bookmark my Twitter page or subscribe to my uni-feed. Or you could also create an account at Twitter and add me to your friends…

Say, this post is pretty long after all!

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Thoughts

A bit of site maintenance

I made time tonight to do a few things that I’ve wanted to get done for some time:

  • Introduce a new section called Faves, which displays my shared items from Google Reader. This is where I’ll showcase the posts I find really interesting and worthwhile to read from the various blogs and feeds that I’m subscribed to. I’ve been sharing blog items in Google Reader for months, and until now, they only showed up in a little box in my sidebar, but I wanted to present them a little better by dedicating an entire site section to them. They will all have links right back to the original items, and I’ve also included Feed Flares (through FeedBurner) that will allow you to subscribe to their particular feeds, Digg them and save them to del.icio.us right from the site. Yes, you’ll be digg-ing and bookmarking the original items, not my site/feed, not to worry about that. The intent is to promote these stories and their authors.
  • I did away with the Mobile and News sections. Judging by the stats, very few people were using them.

While I’m on the subject of site updates, I also wanted to let you know that I put together a unified/single feed for all of my content. I used the My Networks feature of my FeedBurner account (gotta love them!) and put together a single feed that gathers my ComeAcross, Zooomr, YouTube, del.icio.us, and Twitter content and packages it in nice little, eatable nibblets — well, they’re XML nibblets anyway. Rick, thank you so much for telling me how to do this! And, just in case you were wondering, I didn’t include my three Dignoscentia feeds. Since this will be a commercialized feed, it just didn’t feel right to include content I didn’t want to commercialize at all.

And yes, you can still subscribe to individual feeds for all of this stuff. Just navigate to the various site sections using the menu at the top of this page, and choose whatever feed you want. Not sure yet if I’ll feature this single feed anywhere on the site (other than this post), because I don’t want to confuse people. Many still don’t know what feeds are (sad, but true), so I’ll just wait a little longer and give it some more thought. Want to know the fun part? The URL for this unified feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Raoul. Beautiful, isn’t it? 🙂

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Reviews

Giving thanks for innovative technology

This year, there were a handful of technology/software products that truly changed my life, and I wanted to take a little time to thank their makers publicly.

WordPressThe first, and most important, is WordPress. Without it, this site wouldn’t exist, because I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to combine the content from my various other sites into a single, easy to use collection. The WordPress motto — “a state of the art semantic personal publishing platform” — couldn’t be truer, and I’m here to attest to that. It was easy to combine content from my previous Blogger blog and two of my personal sites into what I now call ComeAcross, and it is easy, every day, to publish more content that may benefit others. That’s really the purpose of ComeAcross — sharing what I think is useful information with others — and WordPress made it possible.

Updated 1/1/08: I’ve since merged ComeAcross into Raoul Pop, which is the site you’re on right now.

GmailGmail has been another wonderful product. Although I started using it in 2005, it was this year that I really started to appreciate its features, ease of use, open standards and fantastic spam filter. The account size is more than generous, the ads are not intrusive, I love being able to label my messages, and the search feature is right on. On top of that, I can retrieve copies of my messages through the POP protocol (that’s Pop, as in my last name :-)), and make them searchable on my iMac through Spotlight.

LoudblogFinally, I’m grateful for Loudblog. It’s an open-source podcasting platform that’s fast, easy to install, and easy to use. I use it to publish my three podcasts: ComeAcross and Dignoscentia (in English and Romanian). I have to apologize because I haven’t had time to publish any podcasts recently, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate how easy Loudblog made the publishing of podcasts for me.

So there you have it, three products that have made it incredibly easier for me to publish content and communicate this year. I’m truly thankful for them, and who knows, maybe they’ll help you as well!

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Thoughts

Consolidation lurks in the wings for web development industry

I’m struck by the amount of consolidation that’s taking place these days. Companies are gobbling up other companies in order to scale up, expand horizontally or simply eliminate competition. We in the web development industry have so far been spared this fate, simply because of the amount of incredible innovation and changes that always take place in what we do. Let’s face it, a company needs a solid product that can be sold, and so far, it’s really hard to pin down “products” in web development. Plus, the very nature of our work, which can be done anytime, anywhere, rewards individuals, especially those willing to stretch the boundaries of what’s thought possible and come out with something cleaner, something nicer, something slicker, something cooler.

But, even with all of these road bumps in the way of web development consolidation, it’ll still happen. Don’t think I’m enjoying myself as I write this. I don’t want it to happen! You know what’s going to act as the catalyst? The same thing that’s driven manufacturing companies out of the States: price. Look at some of the free products that are out there, that let you create websites with no cost at all: Google Pages, MSN Spaces, Yahoo (whatever it’s called), etc. They’re not full-featured, but they work to get people started. And they’re really easy to use, to the extent that even a “moron in a hurry” (aka the Apple courtroom test) would know how to use them. I’m not implying that most people are morons, but most people don’t need fancy sites that do lots of cool things and manipulate databases, etc.

If you don’t believe me, look at MySpace. It’s there that you’ll see the tastes of most people: that site is full of tasteless decoration, crowded, nasty-looking things that can’t even be called web pages. And that’s only the content. I’m not even talking about the MySpace-imposed page layout and horribly big, screaming ads. The whole site is gross. But, that’s the idea of a “nice” web page to most people. They don’t understand what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to web development. They don’t understand how to design a site. They have no idea about the stress and hard work that goes on when coding/designing a real site. And they shouldn’t be expected to know this. After all, that’s what web designers and developers are paid to do. But the point is, the masses don’t crave and don’t care about good design, they want the free stuff, and most don’t care if that free stuff is ugly.

As free products like the ones I mentioned get more full-featured, and more complicated systems like WordPress or Drupal get even easier to use and customize (not that WordPress isn’t easy to install and use, it is, but you still need to know how to code and design when customizing it) the needs of more and more people will be met. And as that happens, the market for web developers shrinks more and more. And here we get back to my opening comments: solidification of product offerings leads to consolidation. Once a market develops for a clear-cut product, competition will increase, the main differentiating factor will become the price, and the biggest company will be able to offer the lowest price — hence the catalyst for consolidation. Besides, who can beat FREE stuff? How do you beat that? Who can beat offshore web development, where people can live on dollars a day and can afford to develop a complicated site for a few hundred dollars? It’s really, really sad to see web designers and web developers who aren’t able to make a living in the States anymore. I can understand why it happens, but it’s still very troublesome.

What recourse is left to us, as web developers? I would hope we can find some solution that would allow us to keep our independence while also allowing us to make a living without competing purely on price with Ivan in Russia or Mihai in Romania or Jose in Argentina, because living in the States, we’d lose the price battle very quickly.

I realize the outlook as portrayed in this post is a bit depressing, but I plan to write a counter-post to this in the next few days. I do think there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and there’s hope for those of us willing and able to seize certain opportunities.

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Google Reader changes for the better

I used Google Reader several times yesterday, as I’ve been doing for the past several months, keeping track of the feeds I like to read. Then I read this entry on the Google Blog, telling us that they’ve just launched a new version of the Reader. When did that happen? Wow, that was quick! They launched a brand new version in just a few hours, propagating the change across all their servers.

The new version is much better than the previous one — which worked great, don’t get me wrong — but was not as polished and easy to use. The major changes in this version are obvious: all of the feeds are listed nicely in the left column, and if new items are available, the feed title is bolded and the new items are counted in parentheses. The text formatting for the feed items is also much nicer.

Another cool feature is the Share option, which lets you mark feed items for sharing, and puts them onto a separate page, all your own, with a feed that people can subcribe to. That’s cool! So I don’t have to Star the items that I use, then copy and paste the OPML onto my blog. Now I can just manipulate the feed and display it as I want, wherever I want. But I see that the option to share my starred or tagged items has disappeared. Where did it go? Is it gone for good? (If it has, that’s a bummer, and I’d like it back.)

Finally, I see that the Email feature has been placed next to the Add star and Share options, and the “Blog This!” option has been taken away. If you’re not familiar with it, it would let you blog about a feed item right in your Blogger account. But people didn’t bother to edit the entries, instead choosing the leave the form fields pre-filled with a quote from the post. They’d hit the Publish button, instantly turning their blog into a splog. I can see why Google did away with this.

All in all, a good, solid upgrade. I’m looking forward to using the new Google Reader on a daily basis from now on.

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