Ken Sheppardson

June 28, 2008

Summize is your Imaginary Friend

If anybody’s keeping score, I’m one of those folks who thinks that IM, SMS, email, Twitter, FriendFeed, and perhaps another two or three other services we haven’t seen yet each have their place and that no one service is likely to crush another, let alone all the others. I do find myself spending more and more time on FriendFeed, however, and for information flow that’s not time sensitive, FriendFeed and Feedly make up my dashboard.

One very handy but somewhat hidden feature of FriendFeed is the "Imaginary Friend".

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June 27, 2008

FriendFeed Target Window Script

Here’s a quick little Greasemonkey script that addresses one of the little quirks in my FriendFeed workflow. I’ve set FriendFeed as my home page and always have it open in a Firefox window. It updates automatically, with new items appearing at the top of the page. About 95% of the time I right-click on the links in items and open them in a new window so I still have the FriendFeed home page open.

After installing several of the FriendFeed Greasemonkey scripts over at Internet Duct Tape, I finally broke down and wrote my own. This script updates all the links in the body of the page so that they open in a “content” window, rather than window where the FriendFeed page appears.

Rather than duplicate a full tutorial on Greasemonkey and FriendFeed, I’d suggest you check out the tutorial on Internet Duct Tape. Once you’ve done that, you should be able to follow the link below to install the “Target Window” script.

[ FriendFeed Target Window Script ]

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November 4, 2007

OpenSocial First Impressions

This weekend I spent some time experimenting with OpenSocial a bit and watching the flow of comments in Google’s opensocial developer forum. First of all, it’s not really of much use to me at the moment as they haven’t yet launched the “Data” part of their API, which will eventually allow RESTful access to profile data on OpenSocial containers. That means I’m left to watch from the sidelines as folks muddle through writing widgets. Bottom line: it seems like an early Beta at best, and there are lots of unanswered questions ranging from security concerns to how “open” the API revision process will be to how exactly new members can join the OpenSocial “club”. Unless you want to deal with early-adopter/beta tester issues, give it a month or so before you jump onboard.

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August 20, 2007

Enough Gear Already

It seems that in addition to collecting guitars, computer hardware, digital cameras, unused calendars, planning systems and black Cordura bags I’ve also gotten stuck collecting blogging and social networking accounts. Plaxo, Linkedin, Flickr, Flixster, Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter, etc, etc. plus all the little plug-ins for cross-posting and integration.

It appears it’s about time for a “code freeze” of sorts: That’s it. No more new systems. No more changes. It’s time to actually make music, take pictures, and write.

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February 21, 2007

Making a Hipster PDA Case

Like many folks I fell onto the GTD bandwagon about a year ago after stumbling upon 43folders.com. One thing led to another, and pretty quickly I found myself carrying a Hipster PDA, better know to anybody over thirty as “a stack of index cards.” A traditional hPDA is held together with a binder clip, but that just didn’t work for me. The clip would catch on things, the card edges would fray, and it just didn’t seem like an elegant solution to me. I’d look for something better whenever I was in an office supply store, but never did find anything that seemed quite right. Finally, I decided I’d just try to make something, and after 5 minutes in Office Depot and 10 minutes with a paper cutter I had what I wanted: a clear plastic holder that didn’t add any substantial thickness or bulk but protected the cards and provided easy access. After a few months, the holder was looking a bit ragged, so I thought it was time to make a new one. Here’s the process Read the rest of this entry »