Posts

backup your blog using Feedburner

I just created an RSS feed for my blog using Feedburner. It was actually quite interesting to see how my blog was presented in different RSS readers (Thunderbird, Google Reader and Bloglines) where the textual content is the same but may be presented in many different ways and styles.

I once lost quite a long, rambling blog entry due to some finger trouble in the blogger editor so subscribing to the RSS feed will be a quick and easy way to backup the blog.

change of scene

Creating this blog was an experiment and, somewhat to my surprise, I quite like the concept. So I have decided to host my blog on my Web space over at blueyonder. This isn’t because I think Telewest’s hosting service is any more reliable than blogger (never had any issues at all with blogger) but so I can peruse the Web server logs and referrer statistics that Blueyonder kindly gather for me. The transfer of the blog went surprisingly smoothly and I created a placeholder blog to grab the old namespace on blogger.

Google Reader

Google have launched an online RSS Reader. Like most developments from Google, this looks very professional and fits in with their rapidly growing suite of software products. Although I currently use Thunderbird for reading (a very limited number of) RSS sources and blogs, the use of a Web based service to manage all my information sources, accessible from anywhere, is appealing.

I experimented by setting up one source (BBC News) and one thing about the interface immediately struck me like a thunderbolt !

social bookmarking with Furl

I used to use Yahoo Bookmarks which maintains a list of Web sites that I could access from any computer. This was a nice idea but I found I didn’t use (or maintain) the bookmarks regularly and the links gradually fell into a state of disrepair. For my most frequently accessed Web sites, I would simply type the start of the address into the browser and simply let auto-complete do its work which was quicker.

developments at Telewest

I use Telewest Broadband and today I received an email informing me that my broadband service had been upgraded to from 1MB to 4Mb free of charge. As I am currently paying 25 GBP per month for the broadband connection, it is really a case of Telewest trying to keep up with the competition to avoid customers switching provider rather than a spontaneous act of goodwill.

And as if that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, I then noticed that ‘Teleport’ (TV and video on demand) had appeared on my digital TV service as well. This promised me the chance to pause/rewind any of my favourite TV programs I had missed on the first showing. However, when I scanned the list, the choice was quite limited and fairly uninspiring

CRM

A lot of people make a lot of money out of customer relationship management (CRM) but here is a real-life example of how customer service affects the relationship with the customer.

A few weeks ago I ordered a wireless USB card and a CD (Antics by Interpol) from Amazon. I received the normal ‘Your order has been dispatched’ email within 24 hours. I waited for 10 days but nothing turned up which was unusual because normally Amazon deliver pretty promptly (even with the SuperSaver option).

a blog is born

According to Technorati, a new Web log is created every second which is an amazing statistic and about 55% remain active which is even more staggering.

The creation of my blog was actually a little experiment to see what all the fuss was about and, secondly, to see how long it would take for someone to wander along and be motivated enough to add a comment to the blog.

I did not publicise the blog in any way (mainly because I haven’t got any friends) apart from adding it to blogger listing and I was curious to see if it would ever generate any traffic or interest.

Early Adopters

Recently, I was watching my daughter doing some homework on the PC and noticed that she was listening to music from a radio stream over the Internet, talking to her friends in real-time using Instant Messenger, uploading photos of her holiday to her Web page, ripping music from a CD ready to copy on to an MP3 player and integrating an chart from Excel spreadsheet into a Word document.

A couple of things struck me:-

Historic Moments

There was an interesting program on ITV last night called The Shot That Shook The World about photographs of historic moments.

9/11

Mesmeric, tragic, horrific and yet somehow those images are always compelling. I guess this was the JFK moment for my generation where everyone can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing.

I was working for a small Internet company and a colleague was idly surfing and memorably announced ‘A plane has just hit the World Trade Centre’. The internet soon ground to a halt and we watched the tragedy unfold on portable TV in disbelief.

Inland Revenue

Just submitted my tax return online which was pretty painless and quick. On the final page, I entered some additional information with a minor query. When I submitted the form, there was a data validation error. When I read the error message more carefully, I realised that the carriage return character is not allowed in the free form text box so I removed all of them. However, the form was still rejected until I realised that the question mark character ‘?’ is also not permitted.