I updated my blog to WordPress 3.0 RTM over the weekend. Time to give this place a little more attention. I debated moving away from WordPress all together and going to someplace like Posterous which is a little more automated. However everyone I know who considers themselves a serious blogger continues to use WordPress for their blogs. Many do, however, have Posterous accounts they treat as “secondary” to their blogs where they post images and other social updates to. I have done the same here – you can go to here to check out my Posterous account which I have configured on a subdomain. It is curious to me to see so many people using a service like Posterous as a secondary service to their main blogs. I’ve yet to see a good integration of both into a single site. If you’ve seen a site that integrates the two, let me know as I would like to see what that looks like.
When I was investigating using Posterous for my blog, Posterous’s CEO Sachin Agarwal had tweeted about taking in bug feedback. I jokingly replied to him that I thought not supporting Windows Live Writer was a bug (although I was being serious in that they should support Writer). His response to me on what I considered some valid and honest feedback was that he considers using Windows “a bug”. That kind of put me off a bit. Granted, I’m a bit biased. I know Sachin worked at Apple, supports their products 100% (just like I do with Microsoft), and is “inspired” by Apple and has never owned a PC according to his Twitter profile. But seriously… what kind of response was that? So Posterous is going to ignore the huge customer base that uses Windows today (it looks like Posterous doesn’t support IE8 either)? On Windows – Windows Live Writer is simply the best blogging tool available. It would be a huge benefit to Posterous to support it in my opinion and create additional value to people looking to move to Posterous. Perhaps he misunderstood my initial reply as being a bit snarky and if that’s the case – I do apologize. But if Sachin considers using Windows a bug – I take that as a heavy sign Posterous will likely not be doing anything special like supporting Windows Live Writer for Posterous – at least officially. Scott Lovegrove has made a plugin for Windows Live Writer that enables using Writer to post to Posterous blogs. Scott’s plugin works well. But I was looking for official support. It looks like Posterous is also focused on competing with the likes of Twitpic anyway. I wish them luck.
So in short – I’m sticking to WordPress as the blog platform of choice for my personal blog.
Twitter tonight announced they have come to a agreement to acquire Atebits and it’s iPhone Twitter app called Tweetie. In the next few weeks, Tweetie will be rebranded as Twitter for iPhone and be made as a free app in the App Store for iPhone users.
For me, I have a hard time not believing that this acquisition is only just the beginning for Twitter in terms of developing and or owning their own official Twitter clients on multiple platforms. I predict that in the coming months, we’ll hear more about Twitter doing official clients for the PC, Mac, Android, Windows Phone 7, etc. Twitter previously announced Twitter for Blackberry. Will Twitter look to acquire someone like TweetDeck next?
So what does this mean for third party developers and their apps?
Will Twitter use their official client apps to take advantage of exclusive features they develop that no third party app can utilize?
It will be interesting to see what happens in this space in the next few months.
Just installed WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 this evening. WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 was announced last week. Usually its unwise to use beta software to power your blog but I figured I’d live a little dangerously.
In WordPress 3.0, they are introducing a brand new default theme called “Twenty Ten” which offers several customization features. I’m trying the new theme out right now. So far I really like it. I’m going to test out the theme’s new customization features over the weekend. I think investing less time in trying to develop my own theme from scratch and perhaps doing some actual blogging might be beneficial.
Those that know me know that I love Dr. Pepper. If I ever needed a blood transfusion, you could literally pump me up full of Dr. Pepper and that would keep me alive. So while at Albertson’s tonight with my dad, I saw a bunch of vintage looking Pepsi products. Apparently they’ve released Pepsi, Mt. Dew, and Dr. Pepper products made with real sugar in some sort of “heritage” series with vintage designs on the packaging. Edit: I believe they are calling this “Throwback” or something along those lines.
I’m not an expert at soda but a lot of it today is made with high fructose corn syrup. But “back in the day”, soda was made with real sugar. Not sure which is worse for you, they might be equally as bad for you. But after a sip of Dr. Pepper with *real sugar* I could feel a slight kick – my mouth tingled. It was like a blast from the past although I never experienced growing up on soda with real sugar. I thought this was neat that Pepsi and Dr. Pepper are doing this and I am a huge fan of their vintage designs they are using with this heritage “series” of soda.
By the – Dr. Pepper is celebrating 125 years of awesomeness. Note to Dr. Pepper – PLEASE make your downloadable wallpapers in much higher desktop resolutions. 1024×768 just doesn’t cut it anymore.
My dad is pissed – he’s a Coke fan and has been writing to Coke telling them to use real sugar (and glass bottles) officially in the U.S. (instead of relying on imports) and he even received a response to one of his emails that is along the lines of “thanks for your idea but we get too many ideas”. He emailed them back tonight asking why they let Pepsi beat them to doing something cool in the soda market.
I took the above shot of the Heritage Dr. Pepper 12-pack packaging with my HTC HD2 and uploaded it to Flickr. Having a 5 megapixel camera in a mobile phone is absolutely awesome!
Yesterday night, I posted a photo of my new HTC HD2 Windows Phone to Flickr. You’ll notice from the shot, I’ve turned off HTC Sense and gone back to the default UI seen in Windows Mobile 6.5 (Professional).
Nothing against HTC’s hard work at providing a fantastic looking UI to run in Windows Mobile but I find that the Sense UI is overly complicated and too “busy” for me. I feel like its information overload. I would much rather have a much simpler UI. I hate to use this as an example but if you look at the hottest phone on the market today in the eyes of consumers – the iPhone – it’s UI is very simple and easy to use. I bet if you gave a consumer a phone running HTC Sense, they might find it complicated too. But again, I applaud the hard work HTC has done in this space and look forward to seeing where they take it. They have done a lot of great work here.
There is an interesting discussion taking place within the comments of my Flickr photo about running with HTC Sense on versus not.
Posted in Opinion
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Tagged HD2, HTC, HTC HD2, HTC Sense, Mobile Phone, Mobility, UI, User Experience, User Interface, UX, Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Phone
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Just testing something out. Sorry for pointless post.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Testing
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Peter Rojas and Ryan Block (of Engadget fame) created a website called gdgt which is literally a social networking website around gadgets you own.
Through gdgt, you can share lists of gadgets you currently have, gadgets you want, and gadgets you used to have. You can also contribute by adding reviews of gadgets or even adding new gadgets to the gdgt “network”. For you gadget geeks out there (such as myself), this site is a fantastic site to belong to. I encourage you to sign-up and give it a go and starting your own gdgt list.
You can check out my gdgt list here.
So Rackspace had troubles at one of its datacenters today. It took down a few major websites including TechCrunch. This got me thinking about how I would run a cloud service.
What I would do is have super high-end Internet pipes that would connect all my datacenters together. Each datacenter would have the exact same data. That means if one datacenter gets taken out, the others will be able to keep everything up. Kind of like server clustering. I would refer to this network of Internet pipes pumping huge amounts of bandwidth between all the datacenters as “SkyNet”. The service would be called “Brandon’s SkyNet”.
Who could resist a hot new cloud service called that? Eventually, “SkyNet” would be self-sustaining. Eventually, it could think and do whatever it wanted. I could then take lots of vacations while “SkyNet” did it’s thing. And no one’s blog hosted on “SkyNet” would ever go down!
Oh, wait…
Ok sarcasm aside, there has got to be a better way to do redundancy for a cloud service spanning multiple datacenters in different geological locations. Redundancy is key. If one datacenter goes down, something should kick in that keeps the services and websites up and running. While I was being funny about the whole “SkyNet” thing, I do think operating a service with datacenters as “nodes” isn’t such a bad idea. And when a note goes down, another one picks up the slack.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Blogs, Cloud, Cloud Services, Datacenter, Hosted Services, Humor, Node, Rackspace, Sarcasm, SkyNet, TechCrunch
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I seriously can’t wait for Iron Man 2. Marvel.com is running an exclusive t-shirt where on the front it shows Tony Stark’s “glowing repulsor” (in the first movie this was a mini “arc reactor” designed by Tony to keep shrapnel from his heart) and on the back it says “Iron Man 2”. You can order the shirt here.
