Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

My favorite Firefox extension these days is Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. I love being able to store bookmarks on my computer at work and have them show up on the computer at home and vice versa.

I was excited with the prospect of del.icio.us when I first heard about it, but quit using it because it just felt cumbersome to me. Plus, to get to the bookmarks I had to navigate to their website and then sort through my list.

I like having the bookmarks attached to the browser a little more.

The downside, of course, is when I am stuck on a computer with only IE installed. I feel quite a bit lost then. Anymore, I rarely find myself in that position, though.

Tags: Firefox, Firefox extensions

Online Picture Frames - Living in the data cloud

I bought a digital picture frame for my wife for Christmas. We haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet, but the picture looks nice and it reads easily off of the memory card.

No complaints.

I was thinking today about my desire to move to the data cloud and decided that this would be a good use of the data cloud.

I poked around a little this morning and found this digital picture frame with some online features.

That’s pretty close. You can email photos to it and subscribe to Flickr RSS feeds.

That is pretty nice, but I would prefer something with a little more generic data cloud support. Maybe I want to upload the pictures to Picasa or another competitor. Maybe I want to host the pictures on Amazon’s web hosting service or another competitor.

Since the picture frame is supporting RSS feeds, maybe it is configurable to point somewhere else and they don’t mention it. If not, I’m sure somebody will be bringing it to the marketplace soon.

Tags: data cloud, flickr, digital picture frame

My own social networking site that will never come to be

I have an idea for a social networking site. It is pretty niche oriented and would be fun for me to participate in if it existed. Based on another blog that I write, I can assume that I could get around 20 people to test it without any problem.

Unfortunately, despite working as a programmer in my day job, I don’t do any web development. Most of the actual programming that I do is Unix scripting.

I always mean to get around to learning some of the neat web stuff. I always hear about Ruby on Rails, AJAX, etc, but have never even done a “Hello World” with anything more complex than JavaScript.

I thought about seeing if anybody would be interested in working on it as a portfolio builder type of project. I doubt it would be very difficult for somebody that knows what they are doing.

In the end, I decided that I should force myself to write it. But, with the amount of free time that I have to spend on the project, that means it might be finished by 2010 and by then we will probably all be done with the social networking thing and have moved on to something else.

I’ll have to take the kids to the library someday soon and see if there are any good books on web development there to inspire me.

Moving to the Data Cloud in the Google Sky

I am not 100% committed to moving everything off of my hard drive and into the magic data cloud. I am much closer to making the move, however.

Earlier today, I was thinking about looking at the online todo/calendar options when I realized that all I really need and want is a spreadsheet that I can use wherever I am connected to the internet. I’m perfectly happy organizing it and tweaking it to fit my wants and desires.

Then, I remember that Google has a perfectly fine online spreadsheet. I have even used them for a couple of quick little projects. They also have a nice little word processor that does everything that I currently need a nice little word processor to do.

So, while I am not committing to moving everything to the data cloud, I am going to start spending a lot more time there.

Specifically, I am going to use Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets to work with my previously mentioned todo list that I need to create and any other little spreadsheets that I want. I am also going to use it to write some short stories that I want to play with and other Word type documents.

We’ll call it an experiment. I’ll see how it goes between now and the end of January and then I’ll review what went right and what went wrong.

Tags: Google, word processor, spreadsheet, data cloud

YouTube in a little window

I was planning on complaining that YouTube needs a little detachable player window that you can easily resize down to only show the video itself.

Before doing so, I decided that I should dig again and see if it existed already. It does.

That little button that I highlighted in red will open a new window that is pretty much just a video player.

So, I am pretty much happy now.

I just wish I understood the picture on the button. I don’t see how that would clue me in that it was going to open a new window that was only a video player. Ever a little message that showed up when I moused over the button would have been helpful.

Also, when I click on that little button, why does it open into a giant window taking up the entire screen. I always resize it down to something about 3 inches big since all of the videos on YouTube look like crap when the are any bigger than that.

Also, it appears that the little button just left of the one I circled will change the size of the video you are watching back to the original size, which always seems to be a little smaller than the default size that YouTube shows. It almost always makes the videos look clearer to play them in that smaller, original size.

Tags: YouTube

Website statistics and AdSense

Everybody and their dog has AdSense on their websites. Everybody and their dog also has a website stats program that tracks pageviews.

Why is it that nobody seems to have a reliable way of tracking AdSense clicks? The stats programs do a good job of telling us what page a reader came from and what page they went to, but they are all silent if somebody clicks on an AdSense ad.

All I am really wishing to get is information about how many clicks and which page. All of my sites are blogs with quite a few pages. Each ad location on each blog is a separate AdSense channel. So, I end up with about 3 channels per blog. I have learned from this that nobody clicks on the ads on the main page, but the single page and archive pages convert pretty well. But, I have no idea WHICH pages and archives.

For me it would just be for curiosity sake, but with all the money being made through AdSense, you would think that stats companies would be all over providing this information. With all the money Google makes with AdSense, you would think they would be all over helping us publishers figure out which of our pages result in clicks. Is it the post about the crafts that my kids do or my opinion of the defense used in the last football game?

I have seen some hacks that can be installed on the server but they are not things that can easily be set up or they make you wonder if they are really allowed by Google. I tried using Performancing’s metrics for a while and had horrible accuracy with the AdSense stats.

Who does it benefit to not provide that information?

Tags: AdSense, Google, web stats, web analytics

Multiple Online Personalities

I am getting frustrated with needing to create a new identity for every website I seem to visit these days. Reddit, Digg, Netscape. To participate, you have to create an account including at least a userid, password, and normally an email.

They give the option to include more personal information so that we can all interact on a little more personal of a level with each other.

It would be really nice to have one account that you could use everywhere; kind of like in real life. We do not have to get separate IDs everywhere we go in the real world. If you have a drivers license or ID card, you can use it pretty much everywhere.

This current implementation of the social internet is too much like those stupid cards you need to get the cheaper prices at the grocery stores.

Threadless and the inconvenient shopping cart

I wanted to order a few T-shirts from Threadless for my wife and kids for Christmas and even pick up one or two for me, too. They make some pretty cool shirts and they are a semi-local, relatively small company.

I picked out my first shirt and added it to the shopping cart. Then I tried to find a “continue shopping” type of link. It is not anywhere on the shopping cart page. I even searched through the html source code. Their FAQ page says their is a Continue shopping link, but I can’t find it.
So, I tried going back to the homepage and adding another item to the cart. It didn’t work. I tried using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. No luck. It might be there somewhere, but I can’t figure it out.
Now, it is getting close to Christmas, so I really did not want to wait a few days for customer service to get around to answering my email, so I tried to find their phone number. I figured they could show me how to do it or just take the order over the phone.

They do have a phone number, but they do not want you to use it.

This is from their contact page:

Please note that we do not officially provide phone support. If you have sent a service inquiry and have not heard back from us within 3 business days, it is probably because your spam filter is blocking our emails.

Who doesn’t officially provide phone support? And, I don’t really have 3 business days to wait to hear back about how I can order some of their shirts.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like to be able to call companies that I am ordering from. I don’t really like them telling me they would prefer me not to call.

So, I will be buying something else for Christmas and Threadless loses the sale of 5 T-shirts. All because of a bad shopping cart and an unfriendly contact policy.

Making money online with Squidoo

My stats software reminded my that I set up a couple quick and dirty lenses over at Squidoo a while back. I went over to try and remember what I created over there and found out I had made $1.31 I did not even know about. I’m not planning a retirement party anytime soon, but it is always fun to get a little bit of free cash.

Squidoo does a couple things with how they pay that make me happy.

First, they accept PayPal which is something that I am just starting to get used to. I quickly changed my preferences to have Squidoo pay me this way.

Second, the minimum payout is $1. One little tiny dollar. It took me over a year to get eligible through AdSense and I may never get paid by Amazon at the rate I am going. I’m looking forward to getting my $1.31 next month.

If you are interested in seeing the lenses I created, here they are:

Curse of the 5 Pennies which is promoting a story I am working on writing.

Be A Good Dad which is promoting a parenting blog that I write.

Why I set up a PayPal account

I have made purchases through PayPal in the past without setting up an account. One thing I remember buying for sure was this book. I bought it using my credit card through PayPal without opening an account.

I have a relatively small paying side job where they like to use PayPal, so I finally opened an account. After all these years of knowing about PayPal and how it can be used to buy things on the internet, it took somebody wanting to send me money to convince me to open an account.

I have read some of the negative things about PayPal. It seems like there is a fairly large, vocal crowd that is annoyed by PayPal. You never know if something complaints like that are legitimate or just a factor of a small percentage of a large user base. The bigger the user base, the more people will have a negative view no matter how good or bad the product.

I do plan on using the account to let people send me money, but also plan on transferring that money regularly into a bank account. Banks still seem more reliable and secure no matter what the internet money handling companies try to tell me.