Feb 26, 2010

Hate reading long posts online? Use Instapaper.com with your Kindle

When I’m reading on my computer, I tend to avoid blog posts or news articles more than five-hundred words. No matter how good the content, all the scrolling and eye-strain limits my attention span. On the other hand, I love reading on my Kindle. The Kindle’s E Ink® display is like reading on paper. Now, imagine combining your favorite online content with your favorite electronic reader. This is what Instapaper.com lets you do.

Instapaper Lets You “Read Later”
Signing up for an account at Instapaper lets you add a “Read Later” bookmarklet to your browser. Now, any time you come across something you want to read later, simply click “Read Later” in your browser bookmarks, and the article is added to your queue at Instapaper. You can choose to have Instapaper send your unread articles to your Kindle daily or weekly.

Some of My Favorite Instapaper Reads
As an example of some of the content that reads great on a Kindle, here’s a rundown of some of my favorite recent reads on Instapaper (In addition to queuing articles I come across, I also recommend checking out the Instapaper homepage as I found many of these links there):

  • The Essential ManEsquire – “It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. Now television’s most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, but his words have never stopped.”
  • How a New Jobless Era Will Transform AmericaThe Atlantic Online – “The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults.”
  • The Comedy Circuit: When Your Brain Gets the JokeNew Scientist – The neuroscience behind humor.
  • The InterpreterThe New Yorker – “Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar.”
  • One Woman’s AbortionThe Atlantic Online – “Each year for hundreds of thousands of American women there is a wide gulf between what the law forbids and what they feel they must do. The author of this article, whose credentials are trusted by the Atlantic, is a college graduate in her forty-sixth year, the mother of three children, living with her husband and family in one of the many commuter communities in the East”

Stop the World: Interesting Times : The New Yorker

The New Yorker’s George Packer ruminates on Twitter:

Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “The Night of the Gun”). Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

See the full piece for more. (HT Justin Taylor)

via Stop the World: Interesting Times : The New Yorker.

Google No Longer Supporting IE6 – Yea!

I just received this email from Google as I administer several Google Apps accounts. In it, Google relates their reasons for discontinuing support for IE6. As a web developer, this is music to my ears because IE6 is a notoriously irritating browser to design for, often requiring custom code in order to make it render sites that work in most typical browsers.

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar. Continue Reading

Imagine a Digital Magazine

Imagine what a magazine might look like in a digital format. The concept presented in this video comes close to replicating all the features I might want and adds a few more:

Nov 20, 2009

Enterprise File Sharing

Today I’m spending time researching some enterprise file sharing solutions. I frequently have clients who want to share all sorts of files (large and small, audio, video, documents, etc) with their customers, and they want a solution which is more robust and secure than email. Continue Reading

Live Streaming Video in Two Minutes with LiveStream.com

As a proof of concept, today I signed up for an account at LiveStream.com. Their service makes it super easy to setup your own live streaming video using your computer, a web cam and an Internet connection.

Have trouble with your Gmail yesterday?

If you had trouble accessing your Gmail or Google Apps email account yesterday, this post over at the Gmail blog explains the outage. For more coverage about the extensive nature of this outage and how it affected the web, see:

Fortunately, Gmail is back up this morning. So, for some of us that means we can get some work done, and for others I imagine that means you won’t get any work done. It all depends on whether you’re on a Maker’s Schedule or a Manager’s Schedule.

Apr 24, 2009

ProfileExpert.com: Custom Twitter Profiles

ProfileExpert.comLast week was a big week for Twitter in the national news. Ashton Kutcher and CNN competed against one another to see who would reach 1 million followers first. Then Oprah plugged the micro-blogging service on her Friday show. All told, comScore’s global numbers for March 2009 show visitors to Twitter increased from 9.8 million to 19.1 million.

Given the growing popularity of Twitter, a lot of my clients have been jumping on board. Furthermore, they’ve been coming to me to design custom backgrounds and color palettes for their Twitter profiles. To service them and new clients better, I’ve setup ProfileExpert.com as a one-stop shop for getting your own custom Twitter background and color palette.

Although creating your own custom Twitter profile is a moderately simple process. I’ve found that my clients prefer to hire me for the job, knowing that I’ll be able to customize their profile quicker and with professional results. If you’re in the market for a customized Twitter profile, let me invite you to order yours today over at ProfileExpert.com.

Apr 10, 2009

1000 Tweets Later

Follow me on Twitter!This week I passed one-thousand updates on my Twitter stream. In celebration of the occassion, I thought I would take another stab at explaining Twitter to the lay person.

Explaining what Twitter is is easy (i.e. it’s Facebook status updates without the rest of Facebook getting in the way); however, explaining why anyone would want to share their life in 140 character “tweets” is another story.

So, rather than philophosizing about why one would want to “Twitter,” I’m going to take a different angle in this post and introduce you to some of the great people I’ve met during my first year on Twitter. These are all people I suspect I wouldn’t have met otherwise; however, Twitter has been our natural bridge for starting relationships, many of which have spilled over into real-world connections. Continue Reading

Dec 19, 2008

Proactive Tech Support

Through the years I’ve gotten used to working with technical support on shared hosting accounts. The process involves submitting a support ticket and hashing out the details through a subsequent string of emails. If you have a good shared host, the support staff will “think along with you” rather than assuming that you have zero understanding of what you’re doing.

With luck, you can usually get your problem or request ironed out with a minimal amount of emails. Other times, trying to communicate via email can be a serious time waster when a simple phone call would clear things up in thirty seconds or less. However, that’s the price you pay with low cost shared web hosting: Limited technical support options help shared hosts keep their costs down. Continue Reading