Reader Rant

Today, Google Reader is the bane of my existence.  Usually, I rely on it every day, to sort through my news articles, blogs I read, LOLcats stuff, yep I’ve even ported Facebook posts into my Reader.  It’s been hinky the past few weeks though, and today I absolutely want to take a shotgun to it and put it out of my misery.  Everything I’ve marked as read for the past month has mysteriously, and stubbornly, showed up back in my Reader, as though I never read it, or marked it as read.  I keep marking things, and poof, there it is again, like some sort of foul magic.  How many times can I delete a thing?! 

I’ve been exploring other feed readers – right now I’m checking out one called RSS Owl.  So far it’s not bad.  I’m trying to figure things out, and of course, when IT imported my rss feeds, it brought everything in for the last 6 months, oy vey!   Still, it’s a cleaner interface, and it’s a desktop application, not something that sits in a browser like Google Reader does.  We’ll see how that goes.  *sigh*

Otherwise, the weekend was good.  Darc was feeling spendy, so we picked up a few things.  I now have under-cabinet lighting.  I’ve wanted under-cabinet lights for maybe 25 or 30 years, and thanks to my beloved, and Menard’s having such low prices, I now have lighting under my cabinets.  I can SEE! 

And how was your weekend?

Our sort of sunrise this morning.  It tried real hard!  Eventually it gave up though and succumbed to the cloud cover.

A Drive in the Clouds

The editing on my husband’s latest book began a week or so ago, as some of you know.  I do a little bit here and there to help out with proofreading and whatnot, when he asks.  The biggest fear though is losing the work in a computer crash.  If you’ve known us any length of time, you know this has happened to us more than once.  Yeah, yeah, back up, we know!  And we try!  But sometimes crap happens, like when we lost both our computers in 2009-10. 

I happened to come across a couple of articles recently while reading the news and I thought they had some great information – good enough to share.  Apparently Google and Microsoft are competing in a veritable Drive Derby with each other and the storage service DropBox, and are offering some pretty nice packages for users to save stuff in the Cloud.  For free!

Seriously sweet. 

Of course, being Google and Microsoft, they are more than willing to sell you extra space if you need more, too.  But their prices are pretty reasonable, so that’s a good thing. 

For anyone who’s ever lost stuff in a computer crash (and who hasn’t, really?) then the Cloud is for you.  It’s just a matter of choosing which service you want to go with.  Me being the greedy girl I am, I’ll use both, on all my email accounts!  Having lost a few years worth of pictures in the past, I’m going to grab as much Cloud storage as I can get. 

Now my husband has options too.  No more losing 75% of a book’s edits to a drive crash.  (Gosh that one hurt!)

So here are the links to the articles so you can check it out yourself.  I’ll see you in the Cloud!

Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive — What does moving to the cloud mean? | Fox News

You get 5GB of storage for free on Google Drive, which is a pretty good deal, and when you log into Google Documents you’ll notice that all your documents, photos, and attachments have become a part of Google Drive.

The first 2GB of space is free on DropBox.

5 Reasons Microsoft SkyDrive is Better Than Google Drive | PCWorld

SkyDrive offers 7GB of free storage to its users

Also, if you were a SkyDrive user before the recent switch to 7GB of free storage, you can reclaim your free 25GB of storage by visiting SkyDrive’s Manage Storage page.

Socializing

Infographic: Google+ vs. Facebook | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Soooo, Google+ is a social network?  That’s what that little +1 graphic thingy is about?  Interesting.  The linked article above has a nice graphic showing the differences between Google+ and Facebook. 

I guess this means the marriage between Google and Facebook is off? 

I have come to realize that I don’t want to get in on the ground floor of anything anymore.  I can’t even decide if I want to upgrade my beloved Firefox to the new V5.  Version 4 was really buggy and hinky so I didn’t assimilate, and now 5 is out and I’m thinking I just got 3.6 how I like it, I don’t want to go through the hassle of relearning everything.  Yet.  I’ll wait to make sure the bugs are worked out.  Heh, by that time V6 will probably be out!  I love technology but man, sometimes companies seem in such a rush to get things out that they don’t make sure everything works properly first.  Frankly, I don’t want to be an unpaid beta tester just because some place is in a rush.  One tech giant comes to mind – who shall remain nameless – seems to do this on a rather frequent basis.  It’s annoying, but I think they might have learned a very valuable lesson last time they did that.  The backlash was almost fun to watch.    And in the end, we got a better product for it.  That’s what the free market is all about.  Score!

Have you seen the new Google search thing? 

It’s pretty cool – brings up search results in a magazine format.  Click it and see!  Type in something you love!   

Will you be joining Google+?  Have you already?  Thoughts?

Get your copy of my husband’s books!

Buy J Dane Tyler’s Fiction now!

Madness

Heh, so I do a post on browsers, and how FireFox is still my favorite despite Chrome having some cool new features, and my hits from Google Search Engine Terms drops by 95%.  That’s how you can tell when you’ve irritated the kiddies. 

 

One of my most popular posts for over 2 years now isn’t even showing up in my Views stats since I did the browser post.  Interesting, no?  Each day, one of my top 5 posts drops off the map.  And the rest of my stats are rolling ‘round the basement floor. 

***

WordPress decided to play a stats joke on me.  Maybe they got you too?

This is what I saw on my dashboard on Friday.

Wow, right?  WOW!  Wait a minute!

A mouse-over showed this:

Stinkers! 

***

So  I did a little more research on my stats thing.  Could be WordPress, right?  I mean, my hits took a hit – no pun intended – after they put me on the front page a couple of years ago.

This is what I found:

I had some things in my referrer list from a strange URL.  I looked up the URL.  It looked like this:

The source URL?

It looked like this:

So instead of people coming to my page when they click a link, they get a re-direct message. 

Tell me again that Google doesn’t muck around with its search algorithms. 

Things that make you go, “Hmmm.”

©DarcsFalcon All rights reserved

MOPAR

(Miscellaneous Oddball Posts Assembled Recklessly)

This is what it’s like watching a show with my husband.

The scene is a lawyer talking to a home healthcare worker who’s charge is an elderly lady.

Old lady says to lawyer: Your husband is doing a fine job.
Lawyer (whose husband is in jail) nods, smiles, and says: Thank you.
Nurse to lawyer: Don’t mind her, she only remembers the past.
My husband: Unlike the rest of us who only remember the future.  (complete with eyerolls)

**********

A while back we watched some show on Nostradamus.  One of the commentators was a Nostradamus expert of some sort.

He said something to the effect of: The quatrains of Nostradamus were designed to keep the idiots occupied.
My husband: And we can see that strategy’s been working really well, Mr. “Expert.”  (wink wink nudge nudge)

**********

142  That’s how many comments popped into my Google Reader.  See, there are a few blogs I read that aren’t on WordPress.  They’re on Blogger, or are their own URL, so I subscribe to the comments as well as the posts.  I’ve noticed that on one of the comments lists I follow, it sometimes takes up to 4 days for the comments to show up.  And last night while I was reading through a few that had come through, all of a sudden 142 comments showed up, some at least a month old.  Things that make you go, “WTF?”  Stupid Google Reader.

**********

Speaking of Reader, I’m in love with that little “Send to” button.  I can – at just a click on that tiny little arrow – send all my Reader wisdom and humor to someplace else.  It’s my way of spreading the wealth.  *cough*  (Knowledge is the ONLY wealth that should be spread, btw)  Now, instead of watching my favorite things fall off Reader after the 30 day mark, I can send them to the Blogger blogs I’ve set up to catch the gold. 

I can also send things to Twitter and Stumble, and lots of other places.  Check out your Reader settings to find out more. 

And I have determined that Google is like crack.  ‘Nuff said.

**********

Twitterpated

I love Twitter, I really do.  For me, finding Twitter was like finally finding friends who believed like I believed about most things political.  Joy. 

But, sharing a computer – and my beloved is extremely generous with me – still, my comp time is more limited now, so that means less time to do the things I like to do, which is read a bunch of blogs, and tweet.

So I’ve been trying to figure out a way to streamline my time a little bit and I think I found one.  Did you know that Google Reader has this “Send To” tab under Settings?  Do you know what this means?  Right from my Reader, with only 2 little clicks, I can send something I’m reading on my Reader right to the Twitoshpere.  How awesome is that?    No opening a separate tab and linking from there.  Easier than Shareaholic, I think, but that’s also an awesome little program, too. 

Following folks on Twitter when you have limited time is kind of hard, especially when you follow a lot of people.  See, when I sign on, TwitterFox will show me a list of like 200 tweets.  How in the world can I catch up on 200 tweets?  Well, I can’t.  And unless someone has @ replied me directly or sent me a DM, I’m not likely to see their tweets, unless they tweet while I happen to be online.  I sort of think of Twitter as a party, where I can come and go.  I only get what’s going on while I’m there, but whatever happened while I was away, I missed it.  So I was trying to figure out a way to see the tweets of that handful of people who are personal friends, and guess what?  I figured it out!  Did you know that Twitter puts an RSS feed on your tweets?  That’s right, you can subscribe to anyone’s tweets (from their Twitter page) and get them right on your Reader – as long as their tweets aren’t locked.  Locking blocks the feed.  There are a couple of you who do that, but the rest of you, I got you on Twitter AND my Reader too – how cool is that?  Now I won’t miss the tweets of my favorite people.     

I’ve also been using a FireFox add-on called Integrated GMail.  The neat thing about this little program is that it puts GMail and your Reader all on a single page, along with other Google applications if you want, so you don’t have to hop back and forth from tab to tab, or window to window.  I absolutely love it.  Darc didn’t care for it, he said it was too slow for him.  Me, I don’t mind waiting an extra 30 seconds or so for everything to finish loading.  It’s worth the later convenience to me. 

Another add-on I’ve been utilizing is called GTDInbox.  That little powerhouse really streamlines your GMail and helps you manage and organize it, which translates to better managed and organized time.  I cleared out maybe 75% of the stuff in my inbox.  Now that’s woo worthy!  And Google Labs, under GMail Settings, lets me put Google Docs right on my sidebar.  Everything all in one place.

Better GReader also adds some cool features to Reader, namely allowing previews of the entire posts so you don’t have to open them in a separate tab either.   

I’m so techno-streamlined now.    And the best part is that I’ve also found a little add-on called Siphon that syncs all your FireFox add-ons across multiple computers, so when I get my own computer back up and running, I won’t lose any of my add-ons.  And because Google is online and not local to any computer, I won’t lose the changes I’ve made there either.  I’m so good to go!  How’s that for thinking positive and planning ahead?