Xobni is an Outlook add-in that basically adds search, conversations and profiles to Outlook. When I first heard about Xobni, I was really excited to try it and was ecstatic when I got an invite a few months ago (I still have a few invites left, if anyone wants one).
That said, I'm about ready to give it up. The search, while better than Outlook's default search, is still no match for anything Google or Apple offer, and almost painful to use since while in "search mode" almost a quarter of the sidebar is covered in a completely out-of-place Yahoo web search. Conversations are also nice, but limited in usefulness due to their being restricted to the sidebar. Further, since I deal with only a limited amount of people via email, the profiles lack utility (though the auto-discovery of phone numbers is nice). To top it all off, Xobni often makes Outlook unresponsive (though responsive enough to tell me that it's not responding).
I still like the product, and despite it's flaws, I'm still using it since it's features (ever so slightly) outweigh its drawbacks, and was glad to hear that Microsoft may buy Xobni. This can only be good since proper integration into Outlook would likely fix any performance issues and enhance Xobni's feature set. As a lukeworm fan, I can only hope that Xobni continues to see improvements and a Microsoft acquisition looks to be one pretty sure way of making that happen.
Technorati Tags: Xobni, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Outlook, email
Robert asked for it, and I was bored, so here's my first attempt at a Greasemonkey script. It basically adds "[Add]" next to your followers list so you can easily add followers as friends. You can find the script here. Let me know of any suggestions/improvements in the comments:
Known issues:
- Doesn't check to see if a follower is already a friend (could be fixed by checking /statuses/friends.xml). Nothing seems to break by adding people multiple times, however.
Doesn't create the link for users with default icons (because user IDs aren't exposed from followers page, but can get them from /statuses/followers.xml). I really hope that the xml returns users in the same order as the page lists them.
I discovered that after putting together this script that those two xml files linked above have the information needed to fix the two issues. I'll get this out there in case people want it ASAP, but I'll work on doing it via the API.
Also, check me out on Twitter.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Greasemonkey, Firefox, Javascript
I've added a weighted categories plugin that formats the categories in the sidebar a bit better than the simple categories list Wordpress comes with by default.
I was a bit skeptical about using tags on this blog because I didn't like that long list of categories, but I'm satisfied with this implementation of tags. The circle is now complete.
I've just installed Jeff Minard's modification of Edmundo Hidalgo's Cat2Tag plugin for WordPress to move away from the antiquated categorical organization system to a more flexible tag-based system. I've already been pseudo-tagging my posts using categories in the sense that I've been putting posts in more than one category, but I've been sticking to existing categories since I couldn't previously create categories on-the-fly while writing posts.
As the description for this plugin says, "It’s time to use folksomonies in our blogs, people."
Now if only there was a way to integrate the Technorati tagging plugin with this plugin…
Technorati Tags: blogs, tags, folksonomies, wordpress, plugins
