Don’t Believe This: I am a Blog Guru August 26, 2005

A quiz on ChatterBean.com shows that I am a blog guru. The results of the quiz entitled What’s Your Blog IQ? says,” Blogs are nothing new to you, you’ve weathered your share of blogstorms and maybe even started a couple yourself. You may remember reading “weblogs” in 1997, when Jorn Barger started “logging the web” in Robot Wisdom. Since then, the “blogosphere,” the total of blog-related websites, has exploded. As a blog guru, you’ve probably encountered blog novelties out such as the milblog, a soldier’s military chronicle. “Dark blogs” are no mystery to you either, you might even be a member of these hidden, invitation-only websites.”

Don’t belive the result of the quiz. It is a game, right?

Let Hamster Charges Your Mobile Phone August 26, 2005

Hamster which is similar to mouse, is an energetic animal. The activity of the animal playing on the wheel gave an idea for Peter Ash, 16 years old, for charging his mobile phone. He created a device where he gets 30 minutes of talk time for every two minutes that the animal goes for a spin.

This is a great idea coming from children.

Greasemonkey 0.5.1 Final Released August 26, 2005

For those of you who use Firefox and GreaseMonkey script intalled, now you can update the new version of GreaseMonkey 0.5.1 Final. This release includes the major security fixes from 0.5, plus another which plugs a vulnerability concerning malicious user scripts, and adds a couple features like letting users choose their script editor and support for non-English characters.

Download now and happy browsing with GreaseMonkey

SixApart Releases Movable Type 3.2 August 26, 2005

In a stiff competition with WordPress and other blog engines, SixApart, the company behind MovableType has just released a new version of its blog engine called Movable Type 3.2. Earlier this week it was announced that SixApart also changed its license agreement. In the past MovableType only gave unpaid users license for up to 3 weblogs – with MovableType 3.2 comes a new licensing structure allows even unpaid users unlimited sites.

Highlight of new MovableType 3.2 features are:
* Vastly improved installation and upgrade
* Unlimited blogs for all
* Special $30 discount for Personal Edition
* All your blogs in one place
* The best community management
* Find what you need
* Smart new styles
* A new generation of plugins
* The best support In the business
* Professional backing

I do not want to look back from WP to MT

Auto Posting to Del.icio.us and Simpy August 24, 2005

Aleksey Gureev has just udated his Auto Posting to Del.icio.us plugin for WordPress. Now it also supports Simpy, another social bookmarker. If you have installed his previous plugin before, you can now update the plugin by following a simple step by step instruction below:

1. Get the new version of plug-in.
2. Extract the archive to your /wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate “Bookmarker” plug-in on the Plugins administrative page and deactivate previous version — the “Delicious Tagger”.
4. At this point you can safely remove previous plugin as you no longer need it. To do so remove ncg_delicious.php and ncg_delicious directory from your wp-content/plugins directory.
5. Open Options->Bookmarker and place your Simpy account information (note that del.icio.us setup should migrate from previous plugin version automagically).

Google Talk Alive August 24, 2005

From smashworld.com “Google’s new IM service is already live. All you need is a Jabber-compatible Instant Messaging client (such as Apple’s iChat, or gaim), and a GMail address.”

This should answer, at least in part, all of the speculation that has been flying around the net over the last couple of days. Stay tuned to Google on Wednesday for details.

Why Simpy is Better than Del.icio.us August 23, 2005

Most of you probably have known that Simpy is is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc. But, why should we use Simpy over Del.icio.us?

The better features of Simpy over Del.icio.us are the ability to actually find something in Simpy once you tag and save it. That is because Simpy provides full-text search, just like Google or Gmail. You can search any of the fields (titles, tags, nicknames, annotations), but also the indexed full-text content of your bookmarks. With Simpy you can use all Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), +, and – to require and prohibit search terms, you can use phrase and fuzzy queries, etc. When you have a few hundred or few thousand links saved, this is an absolute must if you want to be able to find something you saved month or years ago. Del.icio.us only lets you “search” for tags, and only lets you combine tags (foo+bar), calling it a tag intersection, when in fact it’s just a conjunctive (AND) Boolean query. You cannot exclude tags with del.icio.us, you cannot combine them, you cannot search for phrases, and so on. If my information is out of date, please let me know.

You can read more about the advantages of using Simpy at Why Simpy over del.icio.us

Gmail Conversation Preview Bubbles August 23, 2005

What I like most from Google’s GMail is its feature, conversation. A message, along with all the replies to that message (and replies to the replies). Sometimes these are also called ‘threads.’ By organizing your mailbox in threads, it’s easier to understand the context of a message, so it’s easier to follow the ‘conversation.’ Now I can have a preview of GMail conversation by installing a GreaseMonkey file. Afer installing the file, right click the conversation and you can preview it. Nice, right?

Have a try!