It's News to Me

In what I suppose will come as a shock to some who think of me as a »SuperFan» of Flock, I'm announcing that during the last week I have decided to change my default browser to Firefox 2.0, just as Tish is getting on the Flock bandwagon.  The primary reason for the change, in my case, is speed or the relative lack of it in Flock.  It may be just my system or it may be that because Flock aspires to do so much, it will always be slower than FF, but whatever the reason, there is enough of a speed difference that the extra effort required to make this change seems justified.

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Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 are out and available.  I've installed Firefox 2.0 on my own computer and yesterday, I helped my friend Paul install IE7 on his.  He described IE7 as the Rolls-Royce of browsers, but I countered that it is more like getting a new car of the same brand.  There are a number of new bells and whistles, but it is the same kind of car.  I like it much better than IE6, but it is a matter of preference as to whether it is that much better than FF 2.0.  I do like the way it does RSS feeds, however.

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For some time now, I've been disturbed by the fact that the theme for this blog didn't display the same way in Internet Explorer as it did in Firefox (or Flock).  This morning, I've used widgets to display the items in the sidebar and in the process, that has seemed to clear up the problem of how it displays in IE.  I may continue to tinker with other themes, because though I like the clean look of the Barthelme theme, there are many, many more options out there and I may be able to find one I like better. 

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I notice that Barry has responded to Tish's request to make the full text of his RSS feed available rather than just the first 255 characters.  Thank you, sir.  I think it makes the aggregated feed at KnoxBloggers.com more readable and symmetrical, given that the rest of us send the full text in our RSS feeds.

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Since Mike has reported on the content of what we covered at last night's KnoxBloggers meeting and Tish has shared her impressions of it, all that remains for me is to upload the pictures.

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The monthly meeting of the KnoxBloggers group takes place tonight at 7:00 PM at Mike Neel's house. Because a number of Mike's coworkers have told him that, though they aren't yet bloggers, they thought they might like to give it a whirl, we decided to spend this meeting talking about how to get started blogging. So Mike will lead tonight's discussion, and he has asked me to contribute anything I can to his presentation. I certainly don't want to preemptively steal Mike's thunder with this post, however I'd like to get a few ideas down here so that we can refer to them tonight.

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Tonight at 7:00 p.m. the KnoxBloggers group will meet for the second time at Mike Neel's home (directions available upon request), and we'll have the pleasure of meeting John Fields, who will speak to us on the subject of Podcasting.  John does a regular podcast on the subject of College Football.  In preparation for attending tonight, I listened to his most recent podcast and was impressed.  John does a nice job of giving one man's opinion of the big games of the upcoming weekend, gives his prediction about the likely winners of some important games, and discusses the implications of all those games on the national standings.  Like anyone else who makes predictions about the future, he is fallible, but he has a reasoned basis for his predictions, so he can be forgiven for not being perfect about predicting the future.  I appreciated hearing a show like this that isn't just another call-in show for fans.

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The social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, turned three years old yesterday.

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About a month ago, Microsoft released the beta version of their Windows Live Writer, a blogging editor that can be used with existing blogs as well as with Microsoft's own blogging service, Windows Live Spaces.  I have downloaded a copy of it, installed it, and this post is being written with it.  Because I have written a part of only one paragraph with it that means I am just at the starting point of playing with the program, so any significant evaluation will have to wait until I've used it more extensively.  However, I can say the installation and setup of my blog with it went smoothly and without incident.

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As you can tell from the couple of updates I made to yesterday's post, there were some glitches initially.  I found that using the tracking component of the podPress plugin caused a glitch with the player and resulted in people's getting an «error loading file» message.  In fact, I got that myself after having turned on that tracking.  So I've abandoned using that feature and will for any future podcasts I post (which I hope won't take another year).  I also think this glitch with the tracking may be related to the fact that both yesterday and today I was unable to reach the podPress site, even though the link I posted to it is correct.  Since the tracking relies on that site, that's probably why that wasn't working (though I admit that is just a guess).

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