Bye bye Blogger?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Recently, I’ve written a couple of posts which hinted at the problems I’ve been having since I was involuntarily upgraded to Blogger‘s new platform and tonight was the final straw. For a while now, I’ve wanted to implement a category system for posts and a couple of months back I did actually start to tag my posts at del.icio.us in preparation for following Peter Chen’s advice for creating Blogger categories.

Unfortunately, the delicious2Blogger (D2B) method does not work with the new Blogger and to implement Blogger’s label system (in order to put a tag cloud on the site using phydeaux3’s label cloud code) I’ll need to upgrade my “classic template” to a “layout”. The problem is, that layouts are not supported for externally hosted sites that are published using FTP (like mine), so I’ll be stuck with my existing template, which has been broken since the upgrade.

Seeing as Blogger seems to be so full of limitations and I’m in the middle of a site redesign anyway, I’m seriously considering a move to a WordPress-based site – as long as I can preserve all the links and comments. I’ve also been having some issues with my hosting provider (and the fact that they have recently been bought by BT doesn’t fill me with joy either) so I’m probably going to move away from them too.

I’ll be trying to minimise the impact on blog readers and hope to maintain the domain name and all the links, but please bear with me if there are a couple of hiccups along the way.

Text me outta here

Posted on By Mark Wilson

When I was about 15, I remember using a telephone engineering number to get the phone to ring, then pretending that it was my friend’s Dad on the phone, that we were in trouble, and that we had to go to his house right away – just to get my girlfriend to leave so I could hang out with my mates!

Fast forward 20 or so years and teenage girlfriends are definitely a thing of the past (I’m happily married, with two lovely kids). The engineering code that I used to know is also long since confined to a distant memory (but you can do something similar in the UK with 17070); however there is a new service for those who need to escape from dodgy dates, or other potentially sticky situations. For £1, text me outta here will send an SMS message at a pre-defined time and you can either ignore it (if things are going well) or use the excuse you dreamed up previously to get you out of a situation. It’s only been running for a few weeks but sounds like an interesting service to me!

Portable applications – an alternative approach to mobile computing

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve been playing around with the idea of running operating systems from USB flash drives for a while now but the main problem is USB boot support in the hardware I use (most notably the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7010D that I use for work doesn’t support it).

A while back I wrote about my experiences of booting Windows PE from a USB flash drive (and I believe that new versions of PE make this easier) but the reality is that I haven’t needed this – it not really anything more than a challenge that I set myself to see if it could be done and for those (up to now, theoretical) “system down” occasions there are CD-based solutions that I can use (e.g. Knoppix STD, Trinity Rescue Kit or Winternals Administrators Pak).

For other occasions (like working on someone else’s PC), there is the option of a portable application. I tried out two such packages tonight (my favourite Windows FTP program – FileZilla – and Mozilla Firefox) and was very impressed. Neither of these applications is installed on my wife’s Windows XP PC and yet I was able to run the portable versions of the them both from my USB flash drive without leaving any files behind. It’s the ultimate in mobile computing – literally anytime, anyplace, anywhere – as long as you can borrow a (Windows) PC!

There are alternative solutions such as U3 and MojoPac but, as far as I can tell, these rely on kernel hacks to implement technology such as roaming desktops and the beauty of the Portable Applications solution is that, even though there is an application “suite” available, I can just run the individual applications that I need, on any Windows PC, without any specialist hardware – and it’s free.