Martin Gordon's Blog

As a result of all the things I had going on towards the end of school, I kept accumulating Firefox tabs of things I'd like to write about. I never got around to writing about any of them, and the number of tabs kept growing as I neglected to take action on any of them. I did manage to trim them once in a while, posting ones I'd like to look at sometime in the future on del.icio.us and closing others whose time has passed.

Even when I left Philly to come back home, I emailed myself links to the 22 tabs I had open on my iMac so I could open them again on my MacBook. Of course, I never got around to opening them because I had opened new tabs! Yesterday, Firefox crashed and I didn't get a chance to "Restore Session" and all the tabs I had opened disappeared. I wasn't devastated; I was free. The stasis I was experiencing because of my First In, First Out mentality disappeared. I could read a new post and comment on it without having to worry about the 20+ posts I wasn't commenting on.

Declaring email bankruptcy is a great tip for those paralyzed by an overflowing inbox. Similarly, I found that declaring tab bankruptcy helped me overcome my blogging paralysis and finally get a blog post out there. And that opened the floodgates, since this is my second post in less than 24 hours.

So perhaps it would be a good idea to force yourself to close all tabs at the end of the week. Archive the ones you want on del.icio.us, etc, and kiss the others goodbye. Your audience (what's left of it, anyway) will thank you.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, writing, productivity, bankruptcy, email bankruptcy, tab bankruptcy, Firefox, tabbed browsing, del.icio.us

Facebook released their notes feature today, which is basically a blogging system inside of the Facebook network. The posting and importing features have already been covered, so I wanted to touch on a few things that I find interesting that may have been skipped over.

First off, the blogging system is very well integrated into the network. Facebook has modified the notion of Trackbacks/Pingbacks by allowing users to reference their friends in posts. Similar to the way pictures can be tagged, posts referencing users can be tagged as well. In the "My Notes" section, you can then view notes others have tagged you in, or view your friends' latest notes. There's also a "Read more notes about …" when you view anyone's profile and they have notes tagged with their name. I really like this feature because it adapts the great features about blogs (quick and easy posting interface, trackbacks, and comments) very well into the network. Compare this to MySpace's blogging functionality which is just bolted on to the network and doesn't provide much integration other than authentication for comments. Sadly, no RSS feeds are available for the notes and the developers' API doesn't have notes hooks built-in yet.

Second is the ability to import blogs. This is also a great way to integrate several (well, just one) other network (such as Flickr or del.icio.us) with an RSS feed. The downside is that you can only follow one RSS feed at a time (though previously imported and unlinked posts will remain). So for someone who has two blogs, a Flickr photostream and del.icio.us bookmarks he might want to potentially share, the only solution is to merge all the feeds into one or pick his favorite.

Picking a favorite RSS feed is like picking your favorite child, so I went with the former option. The first few RSS combiners I tried stripped all the HTML, including line breaks, and only showed partial posts, so they were quickly dismissed. This happened with about 3 or 4 combiners, and then I found this list of RSS re-mixers on RSS Compendium. I haven't had a chance to go through the list yet, but when I find one that works, I'll be sure to report back. If you know of one that works for sure, let me know and I can save myself some time.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, social networks, blogs, blogging, notes, RSS, feeds, remix, mashup

Flickr thumbnails now show up on del.icio.us

Originally uploaded by Martin Gordon.

I just stumbled across a thumbnail on the del.icio.us popular list and discovered that bookmarking a photo page on Flickr shows the thumbnail in del.icio.us. I tried it myself with one of my own pictures and it worked just as well. Now all we need is for del.icio.us to read the caption/tags off of Flickr and apply them as del.icio.us tags.

Yay for two of Yahoo!'s acquisitions playing nice with each other!

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, del.icio.us, Flickr, photos, integration, Web 2.0, folksonomies, social bookmarking, tagging, bookmarks, thumbnails