digsby

With all the fancy (and sometimes useless) online social applications and tools, it is becoming more and more cumbersome to just even quickly check up on things. Check your friends’ photo’s in Flickr, see their Facebook updates, see if you got mail, etc…

How many of us that are proficient on the web only have one (1) e-mail address? Congratulations, you’re a minority! You’re usually on Hotmail, because you need the MSN network for all your friends, you of course have a Gmail account coz that’s the best webmail service, you have a Yahoo account for Flickr, etc…

On top of that, you like to chat, and very often via several protocols: MSN, Google Talk or Jabber for the more professional environment, specialized groups on IRC, …

Surely you have experienced first-hand that keeping track of all these things takes a lot of time, and is not very exciting to do (visit the site, log in, check status, log out, NEXT, …). Wouldn’t it be great to just have one application (preferably installed on your local machine, so it’s fast), where you can do all of that? OF COURSE IT WOULD ! Unless you get payed to check all your private stuff at work; in that case, surf along.

I recently came across a small application called digsby, which is still being developed (currently in private beta) and tries to deliver all of the above. I tried it out already, and it does look very promising.
If you’re still reading, you’re probably interested. In that case, I suggest you click the link down below, and send them an e-mail to get an invite code, so you can try for yourself. They go more into detail on their homepage, so do like clickety clickety right away…

digsby [ digsby.com ]

Oh, by the way: I’m writing this post from within the latest installation of the Flock web browser. Never heard of it? Congratulations, you’re not (yet) a minority. But it does look like the combination Flock + digsby could work wonders for one’s busy online social life.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: digsby, im, e-mail, notify, chat, client, social, flock

Lisbon album online & Google Picasa

I just uploaded the web album version of the collection of photos we took during our 3-nights citytrip to Lisbon (from 29th of March ’till the 1st of April). You can find it on my albums page (look at my blog’s header for clues!).

This time I used yet another hosting solution (as opposed to stuff like my webspaces at Telenet or Skynet, or my Live Space): Google’s Picasaweb [ picasaweb.google.com ]. I tried Picasa v1 some months ago, and liked it, but nothing more. But then I came across some blog post mentioning that you can now have 1GB of storage on Picasaweb. Well, that sure sounded interesting, especially since I didn’t know of online albums hosted by Google So redownloaded the latest version of Picasa, and I have to say it. It really is all I was looking for:

• free hosting
• large space (1GB – and counting)
• some social interaction (comments, etc…)
• downloading of whole album at once, or file per file

Picasa 2 is what you use to upload your pictures, which is a big plus compared to all those online tools. And it comes with a bucketload of extra inventive, user-friendly features such as GeoCoding via Google Earth (again, all nicely integrated), generating collages, limited editing, printing to online services, posting to your blog, etc….

One word: bigupyagoogle !

Update: I uploaded some other albums I had scattered over the web to the Picasweb site. Since I have so much spare web space available, I’m likely to upload other pictures as well, which I wouldn’t have uploaded otherwise. I’ll mention it on my blog here when I do so.

Reminder: My Live Space

Oh, by the way: you can find more photos on my Windows Live Space. I have most of the pictures of our trip to Istanbul uploaded there, along with several other pics, so go take a quick look !

I added the link to my blogroll (totally forgot ). Go over there, or simply click here [ muziksouldjah.spaces.live.com ].

Mancini

A very good friend of mine started his own blog on WordPress.
He’s a DJ (formerly known as DJ Guillaume), and did some cool projects together with yours truly (hint: “The Loft”). In contrast to myself, this guy actually knows how to beatmix He has -of course- two turntables and a mixboard at home, and loads of quality records. His main genre is (deep)house. Not the commercial dull shit, but quality tracks, also good for listening to.

Check his stuff out @ Mancini [ wordpress.com ]

Technorati Tags: mancini, dj mancini, house, deephouse

Shadows, the del.icio.us alternative

The latest public Flock version, 0.5.11, hinted me to Shadows, which is a social bookmarking tool.
It is in every way much alike del.icio.us, but with Shadows, I can make certain favorites private, which is exactly what I needed (I don’t know if it is possible in del.icio.us, but I don’t think so). Now I don’t have two favorites lists anymore (on my work laptop and my home desktop), and I can access them from anywhere Like I said, del.icio.us does this as well, but can’t just throw all my favorites online publicly.

I just hope they invest in more servers when they get bigger, because the site feels a lot slower than del.icio.us. I’ll be using Shadows for the moment, and I’ll evaluate eventually which of the services is better. I know that there are even more services like this available, but I’ll check them maybe later…

Shadows [ shadows.com ]

Here are the buttons:

• shadows
• my shadows
• shadow me

Technorati Tags: shadows, del.icio.us

Flock 0.5.11 Released

Wow! Just wow.

It’s only a tiny improvement version number-wise, but a huge improvement in features/functionality/completeness. If you’re a regular blogger, like I have become lately, this is just wonderful. You really need to check this out. I can use a lot of words, like so: “blogging with ease: with the topbar, you can browse your Flickr account with literally two mouse clicks. Or browse Technorati tags in it. Or even better: use it as a shelf, copying pieces of text from other sites, and then pasting them into your blog post”.

But I’d rather you check the ‘demos’ out on this blog. Click on the pictures, they will open a GIF and show you how easy it is to blog in Flock, and manage your Flickr account.

Bear in mind that this is still a developer release, meaning that it is not a finished product. It may crash and it may simply not work. It is meant to give an impression of what will be possible with Flock.

I wish Flock 1.0 was already here

Technorati Tags: flock, topbar

Where Have My Pages Gone To ?!

WTF ! Suddenly the pages on my blog all disappeared ! Even in the admin screens I can’t see a single page, but I had five ! Is WordPress updating their software or are there server maintenances? I don’t get it. I’m sure I did nothing wrong (I’m a web dev, how can I ).

Very weird…

Update: hm… they’re upgrading the service apparently, so I guess I’ll have to wait a bit, but still: why just my pages? I’ll keep an eye out on it…

Update 2: nah.. this is too weird. I’ll recreate my pages, cause I can still find them clicking on search (pages in WP are actually posts, so…). I wonder what happened exactly, though.

Update 3: God damn it ! There’s something seriously wrong here, man ! I created a new page; it actually shows up in my dashboard-manage pages, but when I go to the page, it just links it wrong ! It jumps to fluppe.wordpress.com//, and inputting fluppe.wordpress.com/agenda/ also jumps to the main page. You guys at WordPress better be working on it

Update 4: Oh, now I get it. My pages turned into posts (see update 2). I’m pretty sure it’s due to the update over at WordPress. Let’s sit this one out for a couple of days. On the support forum there are several other users that also have weird behaving blogs…

Final update: Hm, they’re slowly getting there. I noticed today that when I recreate my old pages (which were converted to posts, apparently) and set their status to published, that they appear alright on the frontpage. I’ll leave it at that. I’m content.

Some more blog buttons

… for the sites I have linked, but couldn’t find a button for it.

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These are a few I found on Steal These Buttons [ gtmcknight.com ]

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Update 1: new links, new buttons:

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Update 2:

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Update 3:

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Update 4:

• D’oh ! Still hadn’t added my CoComments button. Shame on me.

Update 5:

• Button for my Live Space:

Update 6:

• Button for new blog linked:

Update 7:

• Button for my LinkedIn profile:

Update 8:

• Button for the Pidgin IM Client:

Update 9:

• Button for the Digsby IM Client:

My Own Blog Button

I just created my own button for linking to my blog :

I used Adam Kalsey’s Button Maker. You can very easily create your own button on the fly, online, defining colors, text and borders. I use a handy little Firefox plugin called ColorZilla, to extract the exact colors my blog theme uses.
For now, this is the only design… If I find a little more time, I’ll add a few others as well.

Blog Buttons

This site has a huge collection of those typical small rectangled buttons.
Free to use, but please do not hotlink the images. Instead save them to your own server.

Steal These Buttons [ gtmcknight.com ]