Okay, this week I have a lot to write about!

My plan was to first write a entry about why I am now using Google Reader even though I had previously decided not to. But then, during last week, I saw this: Google Reader has been optimised for the Wii!

Google Reader on the Wii is pretty nice. (I’ll write about why I like Google Reader another time). The layout is done well, so it easier to read feeds on the TV. The “2″ button pulls up the list of your subscriptions, which is very handy, except occasionally the Wii gets confused and thinks the 2 button is the shortcut to go to “column view” and it gets hard to switch back. The other bugbear is that if you visit a site outside of Google Reader and you go back, then when you bring up your subscriptions with the 2 button, it’s blank! It’s not substitute for a PC based browser but for a quick fix during a TV ad break, it’s nice.

In general, I’m not a big fan of the Internet Wii Channel. I have the Internet Browser for the DS and for a handheld that little browser is great. The Internet Channel on the Wii is built using the same technology and concepts it appears. On the Wii, all Internet pages have a fixed width so you can move around the screen, much like the DS Internet Browser where you can view webpages in full as well as in a handheld mode. But I find it annoying on the Wii. The Wii remote is not as precise as the DS styles. It’s all very awkward and makes reading webpages, designed for a PC browser, painful. Imagine a blog with posts to the right of the page. You have to move the screen over to read them, but you might end up moving a little too far and missing the first few letters of each line. It makes reading anything but a plain webpage with large font and big margins, uncomfortable.

But the Internet Wii Channel has one really useful feature. Video. Go to YouTube, watch the clip in full screen! But there is a catch here. The Flash version installed is an old version. I’ve tried other video sites and they don’t work and you can’t install the latest version of Flash. However there is still a very powerful use of this feature.

This weekend, I discovered Orb, which has been optimised for the Wii! You just install an app on your PC, create an account and then on the Wii, using the Internet Channel, open your Orb account and then you can watch any videos on your PC and listen to your MP3 collection! Surprisingly simple to set up if your using Windows XP.

I did have to do one change to get good video quality though. The Orb webpage performs a “speed test” before streaming video and for some reason it was getting dismal speeds. The video stream then was very low quality (because it thought it was a low speed connection). I set a fixed speed of 1meg and the video stream became very watchable. Occasionally blocks and artifacts when too much was happening on screen but otherwise very good. BTW you can stream your DivX videos and they’ll play on the Wii.

As far as I understand how Orb works, it’s just a web interface that give you a list of the media on your PC. You can configure where Orb looks for content on your PC. When you open Orb webpage and open some media, it actually creates a connection between your PC and where your streaming the content, not via the Orb servers. Which means when I use my Wii to listen to my MP3s, they are streamed only across my wireless LAN, not the Internet.

I don’t understand how Orb makes money. It’s a free service. I haven’t seen any ads yet or mentions of paid subscription. It simply works. So now I can stream music and video to my TV from my PC. Bloody great. My fandom for the Wii continues…

Related Posts:

• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS
• Orb, its been great, but I’ve met someone else… its name is TVersity!
• Why I’m not ready to move to Google Reader yet…
• Damage Report So Far: Another Family, Another Wii
• I want a Wii!

What RSS reader do you use?

I’ve been using Bloglines for quite a while, long before Google Reader hit the scene. I have approximately over 80 RSS feeds I read daily. Not a big number I grant you. I know Bloglines is not perfect (it uses frames FFS!) but it does nearly everything I need, except for one thing that has been bugging me for a while.

I have a number of feeds that fill up quite regularly but when I open them in Bloglines, it marks them all as read, before I’ve even seen the headlines of all the items and if it takes me 10 minutes to read through all the items, it’s kind of annoying if I don’t read through all the items at that time. I have to look at all items in the last “hour” and try to remember which ones I hadn’t read. But Google Reader, using all that Web2.0-ajax-funky-shit, will only mark an item in a feed read as you scroll past it! With Google Reader, I could just pop into one of these big feeds and read as much as I want and not miss anything!

Google Reader is much smoother and nice-looking. No frames for a start. But when I first tried Google Reader, it didn’t work in Opera so therefore it was an instant no-no. But now it does. So I went and imported my latest subscriptions. Easy peasy. But then I thought, if I’m going to start using a new tool I might as well organise my feeds, put them in the right folders, delete the ones I never read etc. Removing feeds easy. But I couldn’t rename a folder! I had to delete it and recreate it. Arg! Also, in one place tags were called folders and you can browse around your feeds using them, in another they are purely tags you have to add tags to feeds instead of adding feeds to tag/folders.

Bloglines has a nice drag and drop interface where you can drop feeds in the folders you want. Okay, so it’s not any more efficient than Google Reader or using a text editor, but it’s visual and augments the organisation process. With Google Reader, you have to select the feeds from a list of all the feeds. Yes tags are more powerful, but there seems to be a bit of drawback on the user-interface for managing them. You can filter but it just didn’t feel easy. I found it would be easier and quicker to modify the exported opml file from Bloglines with a text editor than try and use this interface. It was disappointing. Yes, I’m lazy. I could do all these modifications. But Bloglines works fine for me right now. I know the guys at Google will improve the Google Reader interface in time so I’ll just wait and see.

Related Posts:

• The Wii Internet Channel: Google Reader and your MP3s!
• Roleplaying Design versus Facebook versus Twitter versus Buzz, eh?
• The answer to my question: WordPress “Press It” feature
• Suggestions for how to share stuff from Google Reader in a WordPress blog?
• Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming

I’ve just finished tagging my website. It’s taken me quite a bit of time, a few weeks of trawling my posts going back to 1994 (no I wasn’t online then but I did post timestamp it the time I wrote them). The most important thing I learned was I hadn’t realised how much utter crap I’ve written. It’s true. It’s not even just bad… it’s boring.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure a way to organise my website using categories and tags for a while. The problem with my website is that it’s not very focused. (Apparently you need a tightly focused blog to be good). I write about anything that comes to mind, from roleplaying to my family.

Categories just don’t cut it for this I can’t just keep adding new categories with every post. They are very static and inflexible. So, what I had hoped was that I’d use categories to distinguish between “types” of posts. My short stories would go under one category and software downloads in another, for example. I’d dump anything else in a catch-all blog category. I’d then use tags to create a more organic categorisation structure with a limited number of tags that were easy to expand, easy for readers to navigation and mix-n-match.

After about ten posts, my tag list had utterly exploded. So much for ease of navigation. Tags aren’t really that useful. They don’t add any value to readers of your blog or website. The only nice thing is that you can use them to create “sets” of posts that cross many categories. For example the TDOMF tag cross software and my blog and covers any news related to one of the plugins I’m working on. Tags are useful to the author, not the reader. I can point people to the tdomf tag, and the rss feed for that tag, so that they can get the latest news for the plugin. I don’t have create a new category for it. Which is the main point for me to use tags.

The really cool thing, well I thinks so anyway, is the “tag cloud”. A tag cloud is just a list of the tags on a website but tags with more posts are bigger. You can see the full tag cloud for thedeadone.net here. It’s such an interesting way to present information about your website, what interests you the most, in a single visual snapshot. Sort of like a memory-map of your posts.

On a small sidenote, I see a lot of LJ blogs list all their tags in a sidebar, even the tags with only one or two posts. So you get this really ugly long list that scrolls right off the bottom of the page. Can’t you just specify to list only the top 40 or so tags? It really looks awful, I think. I prefer them listed alphabetically myself as well, so that there is a certain random feel to the size of the keywords. You can see a copy of my current tag cloud afer the cut/more link below.

[Of course if your reading this in a reader that is anti-html, well you're only going to see a list of words. Tough shit.]

I’m surprised that “Alice in Wonderland” is one of the biggest followed by tags such as “roleplaying” and “Redbrick”. “Family” is up there too and it’s certainly larger than “Irish Gaming” (thankfully!)

(Credit Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin powers the tags).

Update #1: Seems the html required to render the tag-cloud gets sucked out of the RSS feed. So here’s a screenshot of the tag cloud.

Related Posts:

• Organising my website/blog… need some feedback?
• Arg, how I hate Internet Explorer!
• A new look for thedeadone.net
• Check Item #2 and 4… about 6 more to go…
• Use WordPress as a Forum (powered by TDOMF)!

I originally posted this on the Redbrick babble newsgroup. If you don’t know what Redbrick is, this entry will have little interest to you. However, I’m posting it here because I think it’s interesting and also I’m hoping that it might filter out to some of the other Redbrick users who don’t use the newsgroups.

I’ve recently setup Pligg for Redbrick. It’s only available to Redbrick users and you can only login with your Redbrick user name and password, thanks to the power of PubCookie. I only did this as a demo. I wanted Pligg for something else, but a few people have started using it.

Anyway, because of that some users had suggested Redbrick’s services are not very well integrated. There all little distinct bits and bobs, not really connected or talking to each other. i.e. There not “Web 2.0″. Now I think “Web 2.0″ is one of those bullshit phrases, however, the idea of integrated services much like MySpace is an interesting idea and I started thinking, a thought-exercise if you will. Here is how I would see Redbrick becoming “Web 2.0″…

BTW Any software I suggest is only because I’m familiar and have in some capacity setup, hacked or modified. I’m not saying they are the best in class, only that I know what can and can’t be done with them.

Backwards Compatibility

Forget it. The first thing to do is, get rid of the newsgroups. Why? Well any new service setup has to integrate with the newsgroups or worse… synchronise in some fashion. This is never well done and discourages use of the new service as people revert back to what works. Also, because it’s a set of newsgroups, readable via only an archaic text browser, it’s impossible to take advantage of the many new web-based applications (like Pligg) and integrate them to give a complete feel. You can’t extend newsgroups with new features!

Also our newsgroups do not archive and do allow us to reference a post in other software. A big pain if you want to integrate with something like Pligg and allow people to submit their “posts” for voting, for example. (On the flip-side it means there is nothing to save making it easier to ditch).

Then there are the inevitable comparisons. “This software sucks because it doesn’t do XYZ feature in SLRN”. I’ve heard arguments in the past in a different community on a mailing list from people who stubbornly didn’t want to have a web forum, cries of “splitting the community!” and that email is so much better than using a web interface. Do you see me shedding any tears? And there is also the social aspect to consider, people use it because they know it and everyone else is using it. Until the majority stop using it, the majority won’t move.

I’ll come to “hey” in a minute…

I’d like to point out that I’m not advocating that Redbrick does this, only that this is probably what is needed to “move forward” into Web2.0. I don’t think Redbrick would need to get rid of all its technical
services like shell access, user webspace, vhosting, etc. to do this either. Both can easily live side by side.

Now that we can start with a clean slate, what should Redbrick 2.0 do?

Now What?

The boards formed the social centre point for the users of Redbrick software. So to replace the newsgroups, we need a web forum. One that’s extendable, hackable and just plain cool. My personal preference is for Vanilla (http://getvanilla.com) which is a very nice looking piece of software and is certainly not like phpBB. We need to be able to easily extend the software and I’ve played with Vanilla and it’s quite easy to extend. It’s built on adding “extensions” and has extensions for RSS feeds, permalinks, signatures, bookmarked discussions, blocking categories, threads and users, etc. I haven’t tried integrating it with Vanilla but I’m pretty confident it can be done.

BTW It does have a spell checker plugin. This uses GoogleSpell, however it won’t work on Redbrick because it won’t work through the proxy with https. We’ll need to get curl installed on PHP to do it.

Now we can start integrating the other services. Let’s start with Pligg. To integrate with the Vanilla forum, we need to make a “virtual” category that actually submits a story to Pligg. A simple approach would be to create a theme for Pligg that matches the forum and then create an extension for Vanilla that shows Pligg has a category. Submission and voting would be still via Pligg.

With the Wiki, it depends on the level of integration we want. MediaWiki is a monster of a piece of software. Modifying the look and feel is a headache. The most basic integration would be that the “Talk Pages” actually go to discussions on the forum. This could be just redirection or something more integrated. I don’t particularly like the idea of importing Wiki entries from discussions posts or threads (or vice versa) but you could easily write an extension to autolink to Redbrick Wiki entries and there is a Wiki markup plugin available for Vanilla.

As for Planet… well Planet is good for the combined Redbrick Blogs feed. The best thing to do is have entries in Planet submitted as new stories to Pligg. The interesting ones get voted up and become “published”. It is questionable though if you want to provide users with web services like blogs, if they should be automatically submitted to Planet and Pligg or should it be an opt-in/out like service.

Chatting

“Hey”: the other corner stone of Redbrick. It’s great now that Redbrick has a Jabber server. Why do we need Hey? For the same reasons as the newsgroups, why do we need to have a Jabber to Hey service?

I think people would need to start using Jabber more, in fact exclusively. Jabber and some magic web coding could be the greatest replacement for Hey. Like Gmail, when you’re browsing the new Web2.0 Redbrick forum, signed in to Pligg or the Wiki, you could have a “chat” window popup when someone tries to talk to you. It would be nice that you can also use Jabber to “hey” someone who happens to be logged in using a shell.

As for IRC and chat services… well, em, I don’t really use them too much. I leave that up to someone else.

Tagging

“Tagging” stuff on Redbrick would be the big thing or the most challenging. Tags can be just superficial and give a nice visualisation/”tag cloud” of Redbrick or they can be useful like in Flickr where people use tags to group stuff.

You need some sort of API or service that would allow Redbrick users to freely add and remove tags from any forum thread, wiki page, pligg entry and possible from user’s webpages and blogs. I’m sure it can be done but it’d need some thought.

Making it look the same

I think this is a pretty major and important thing. If the services are integrated, they need to look the same. However this isn’t challenging. It’s just a lump of work that someone would have to do.

Frontpage or rather, bringing it all together

Yea. Redbrick Frontpage. If we’re going to have all these services really tightly integrated, the frontpage is the place to bring it together. This isn’t just “links” but rather a summary of the latest Wiki pages, new forum threads, published pliggs, etc. But that’s not all though, I mean if you’re like me, you’ll pick and choose the RSS feeds you want and never have to visit the Redbrick frontpage.

The frontpage has to encourage discussion, commentary, etc. In a sense, it should be more “blog” like. News should have comments and trackbacks so we know Redbrick bloggers are interested. It should have an RSS feed as basic! Podcasts and guest blog entries from Redbrick users. Rants from Associates, etc. Moderated by the current committee/admins. A sort of “best of Redbrick”, kind of place.

Conclusion

Why bother? Everything works well enough for us now.

Related Posts:

• Who reads this blog anyway?
• Add a “pligg it” button to your webpage!
• Frustrating!
• Integrating Pligg beta 8.1.0 with PubCookie
• Dubliners and “Blow-ins”

Since my foray into LiveJournal, I’ve started writing more for my website (which is more and more becoming like some sort of blog). However the way entries are organised on my webpage (I’m talking about thedeadone.net and not livejournal) means that most of my writing gets filed under the general category: “News, rants, opinions and general thoughts”. Not a clever way of doing it. So I need a little feedback on it…

I was using categories to highlight particular entries, ones that I felt formed a more complete article or are, in themselves, for presentation. For example, software I wrote and made available is filed under software but when I write about software, I don’t put it under there. This is probably not a clear-cut example as it makes sense to have a separate category for downloadable software. I better example is roleplaying. This is in the subcategory of writing. Here I put mostly complete articles that I would like to have people find easily. However I’ve written much more about roleplaying that I haven’t put in there because it’s either throw-away or I’m still thinking about it.

What I was thinking of doing, was to be more free with my category usage, breaking up my general category into numerous others but then having a category called “Gallery” which contains a subset of categories. I can assign an entry to multiple categories so I assign under the correct category and if I want to highlight it on my website, I stick it also under the gallery one. Then, from the main links on my webpage you can browse the gallery category for my showy articles and from there then explore the more general categories. In a sense using categories like “tags” and then using the special Gallery subset of categories as the way I have been using categories all along. Is this a good way of doing it? What do other people think?

One of the problems with reorganising my categories is that it changes the url’s of my articles. Which can mean they get picked up as “new” articles by the various feeds such as redbrick planet. I’d like to get this right in one step, so I have to make sure that it’s a good layout. If I do re-orgainse, it’s probaly a good idea to trim back and delete some of my entries, perhaps archiving really old ones that, to be honest, are utter rubbish, mental note to self.

Aside: mental doodle (which is described here somewhere) for this week: “I walk the moonlight path, the stars dancing on infinity. The Devil sings a lullaby while the Angels die on stakes. Far below is Earth, far above is darkness; the dead void of fear and hate, full of the light of madness. Seek the voidless untruth and find the greatest truth of all.”

Update #1: Did a little surf’in and found this and this articles from a wordpress blogger called Lorelle. Seems she’s done much more thinking on the subject of using categories and tags. More food for thought. In a sense, my “gallery” idea could be done using WordPress categories and then I just “tag” all my other posts. However I’m not completely happy with that. It would provide an immediate solution… but that still leaves the majority of my entries sitting in “news” or (worse) I could stick them all in uncategorized. I’d like to be able to categorize my existing entries, just for my own sense of order.

Update #2: No comments yet, so I figure it’s okay to add my thoughts directly to the article. So I did a brief scan of all my previous posts. I’m quite happy to leave them all, oddly, though I may update links and such that have gone dead.

Categories to leave alone

I’m happy enough with these categories. I see no reason to change them. These would have formed the bulk of what I was calling “Galleries”.

Computer Games > Quake; Quake 2; Vampire the Masquerade Redemption;
Drawings > 3D; Alice in Wonderland; Black and White; Character; Chargey Studies; Renegade Art; Sketchs
LJ
Software
Writing > Roleplaying; Short Stories

Categories to remove

There is really only one problematic category. Even from the title, it is obvious the category needs to be split.

News, rants, opinions and general thoughts

Categories to add

This is how I’d imagine breaking down the all-consuming news category

News > Webpage; Personal

I would split actual “news” into two. “Personal” (which is kind of like a blog) and “Webpage” which is about the webpage; new features, changes, updates, etc.

Thoughts

Thoughts, “off-topic” posts and rants. At some point I should review them of course and see if a new category is needed.

Projects

News, rabblings, thoughts, etc. about any personal projects such as RPGs, writing and software.

Tech

Writings about programming, technology, software etc.

Weird

Weird stuff I found. I do try to avoid posting links I find via digg.com and boingboing.net but occasionally stuff passes my way that I find interesting.

Writing > Musings

Thoughts, articles, rabblings and other tit-bits to do with writing in general.

I’d also expand my usage of Writing > Roleplaying. Right now it’s a mix of full articles and adventures. It will now also contain my thoughts on roleplaying too.

Is this a good layout?

Related Posts:

• Backwards tagging thedeadone.net
• A new look for thedeadone.net
• Who reads this blog anyway?
• New Look and Feel for my Website
• Arg, how I hate Internet Explorer!