Techhawking

Found this cool site today called msig.info which allows you to create logos for your own site in a jiffy. Checkout the new Techhawking logo.

Microsoft came out with Microsoft Live Writer today. What surprised me was that it is one of the first tools which I can think of in recent years which has support for non-Microsoft products.

Remember the good old days of Novell servers when Microsoft came with a file server which could talk to Novell servers and what about the services for Unix or Microsoft Java VM?

I know everyone is excited about Microsoft doing this, but I being me, am skeptical about the true intentions behind this. Infact, most of the times microsoft releases a product supporting other non-microsoft products, is because when its afraid of loosing market share to a competitor. So the real question is, who is microsoft really afraid of other blogging software or services out there ? Blogspot, MySpace and services like wordpress, typepad are significant competitors to MSN spaces. Microsoft Live Writer is not very different from any other Free Microsoft products in the sense that it is designed to do one thing. Convert.

That being said, I’m glad it has jumped into the market. I can see a lot of improvement in overall blogging experience across the board. Oh and BTW I posted this entry using Microsoft Live Writer.

If you run a blog or a website, chances are that you want to make it easier for people to bookmark you website. Here is a nice little page with list of APIs to help you generate those links for your website.

Flock has a great News Engine, but over the last few months I realized that unless someone comes out with a something equivalent of Google Sync, I don’t think its going to work for me. I have 2 laptops and a desktop to work with and find it difficult to manage and read the daily news items. I did try using the google sync firefox plugin hack to sync flock, but I couldn’t get news to sync up. I hope someone comes out with that plugin.

So after giving up on flock I turned to online news readers. The one I’ve heard a lot about was bloglines. To begin with I think there is a lot of improvements they can do with the UI. It was a serious turn off for me. Then there was the non-Ajax refresh which was another big usability bottleneck. Its hard to understand why they haven’t switched to Ajax for most of the server interactions.
May be I am dumb, or may be I got used to flock, but I couldn’t figure out how to create folders and subfolders for by blogs which I want to read. Managing 200 blogs without subfolders gets a little tough. Bloglines has a few interesting features like creating your own blogs, creating blogrolls, etc… which are nice but they are not for me.

While I did find bloglines to have solved my problem, I didn’t stop looking until I found Rojo. Rojo was easy to use, Ajax based, with support for subfolders. One feature which I still miss from Flock is the ability to mark individual items are “read” or “unread”. Again, I might be dumb, but I can’t find this feature in Rojo. But they have a way to flag a news which is very close to what I want.

BTW there were two other news readers I did think about but didn’t investigate deep enough. I didn’t like Google Reader for its complicated interface, and didn’t want to start using MyYahoo after being burnt by their Mail service sometime back.

We all have bookmarks and have grown over time to love and hate it. The problem is that after some time it get just too big and gets difficult to handle it. I’ve been working on a tool called flagthis which will make an attempt to remove the problem. Tradionally I used a notepad to jot down my browsed links so that I can pick and choose whats important later before adding it to my bookmarks list. Unfortuantely notepads are not very easy to maintain across multiple computers… and neither are bookmarks.

Flagthis allows you to create an account without any username, password or email address which can then be used to help you manage your collection of browsed links. I don’t want to say much about it yet, but do feel free to check it out here… http://www.flagthis.com/