Ride my Wave

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Well, lots of interesting things to talk about, but for tonight I'm just going to mention one thing, "I GOT AN INVITE TO GOOGLE WAVE!!!" 

"What's that?" you say. 

Only the coolest thing since . . . uh, ever. 

Actually, it's way more complicated than that, but that's a nice overview. So, as one of the chosen, I've been given 20 invites to pass along so that I actually have people to wave with. Of course I have to give some of those out to family and close friends who know where I live and will hurt me if I don't send an invite to them first, but I think that there are going to be a few left over. 

So I got to thinking, "who would even use Wave?" and "Who do I WANT to use Wave with?" The answer is those that I can talk with about writing. I also got to thinking that a lot of the people who comment on this blog have gmail accounts. (Do you see where I'm going with this?)

What better way to thank you awesome people than by sharing the Wave love (especially when I have no money)? 

So, if you're interested in riding the Wave, get in touch with me so that I can send you an invite. I'll add as many as I can (which isn't many) but I'll do my best.

Critiquing Using Word and Open Office

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Part One of the Critique Series

Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

Critiquing in the digital age. Gone are the days of sorting through stacks of line edits in your double spaced manuscript, bloodied with red pen in indiscernible handwriting, returned to you by critique partners that you met down at the local coffee shop. Actually, if you can find people to critique with at a coffee shop, wow. I applaud you. I for one haven't been so lucky. Okay, actually I was, but then she moved away. Sniffle sniffle.

But even if you do have local crit partners and don't have to collaborate via the internet, you can still find something useful in today's post. Meeting in person does not change the fact that you can save a lot of trees and make life a bit easier on yourself by using the built in functionality of word processing programs to help streamline some of the work for you. So let's get to it.

I've gone through and taken snapshots of both Open Office and Word 2007 in action in order to help guide you through the process. There are subtle differences in the two programs, so pay attention, but by and large you can get the same things accomplished in both.

Track Changes:

One of the first things you're going to want to do with any critique is turn on 'Track Changes'. This feature allows the recipient of the critique to go through and see exactly what you've changed and then choose whether or not they will keep the changes. In both Word and Open Office a black, vertical line will appear net to any line with a correction. Right clicking on the change will bring up an option menu that will let you choose to accept or decline the change.

MSW: Select the 'Review' tab and click 'Track Changes.' Yup, it's that simple.  

OOo: Once you're used to the Word tabs that are so annoying when you first upgrade to 2007, finding things in menus becomes annoying. For OOo you have to Edit>Changes and then choose 'Record' and 'Show' if you want to see it recording the changes.

Line Numbering:

Each time I get a document to critique I start by numbering the lines. I've found it to be helpful when going over any questions that the recipient might have. They can refer me directly to which line they are talking about as opposed to going through the headache of “third page, second paragraph, about halfway through the third line.” Just say, “Line 93,” and we're all set. No confusion there.

MSW: Go to the 'Page Layout' tab, select 'Line Numbers' and then direct it to number in the way you would like. I usually just go with continuous.

OOo: Tools>Line Numbering pretty simple, no?

Comments/Notes:

Gone are the days of trying to squeeze your comments between double-spaced lines of text. By using the comments feature you can be as wordy as you'd like. Normally, wordiness is a bad thing, but when you consider that you're trying to be delicate with your criticism, that you want it to come across as “you're going in the right direction, I'd just like to see you expand this,” rather than, “you suck,” then the extra words end up counting for a lot.

Both Word and Open Office expand your screen when you start using comments (they're called 'notes' in OOo, but I'll just call them 'comments' for both programs) and tuck them off to the right. Comments is one of the areas where Word outdoes OOo. Word will number the comments for you so that they are easier to refer to. It also allows you to highlight a section of text and comment on the highlighted section. OOo will only place an arrow marker at the beginning of your highlighted area, so it makes it harder to cue a person in to a line or a series of lines that you want to comment on. The person being critiqued with OOo has to guess at where your reference begins and ends unless otherwise specified.

As I mentioned in the Word vs. Open Office post, one way OOo one ups Word is through having an option to comment on a comment. Although, honestly, I don't see much point to the feature unless you're collaborating. If anything, this feature makes it easier to commit one of the deadly critique sins that we'll talk about tomorrow, responding to criticism.

Another nice feature of Word is that when you hover the cursor over a section of highlighted text, it will pop a dialogue box that shows you the comment. You know, just in case you can't trace that dotted line back to it's origin.

MSW: Each time you want to make a comment in Word, just go up to the 'Review' tab and hit 'New Comment'. Wherever your cursor is in the text is where your comment will be attached. Or, if you have a section of text highlighted (click and drag with the mouse) and then hit 'New Comment', the comment feature will highlight that text and attach the comment to all of it.

OOo: While OOo doesn't highlight, it is a bit easier to add your comment. Just hold down Ctrl+Alt+N and it will give you a new comment where your cursor is. Otherwise it's under the 'Insert' menu. I haven't been able to find such and easy keyboard shortcut for Word, so if you know of one, please share. With as much commenting as I do on crits it would save lots of time.

Merge:

After I've gone through all of the comments, deleting those that I don't, hanging on to the ones that I need to give more thought to, and accepting the changes I feel should be made in all of my returned critiques, I start the merger process. This collects the remaining feedback and all the changes into a single document. Word call's this process “combine,” and it might take a little while for the process to complete, but hang in there. To be safe, I set my merges to take place in a new document. I haven't tried to do more than two documents at a time, and I really don't think that it's possible. I reduce by twos until I can get it all down into one document.

(Note: I haven't used this process of combining in a long time. Last time I used it was in the 2003 version of Word. I'm trying it right now in 2007 as an experiment, an experiment that is not going so well. I started the combination process about 30 minutes ago with two crits of the same chapter and I'm still waiting for Word to show me something.)

(Note to the Note: Crash! Word apparently could not handle all of the comments left by my crit partners.)

Highlighting:

As I noted in my crit guide. I use the simple highlight feature to draw attention to things like repetitive words. If I find that someone is using an odd word rather often, I'll simply conduct a search for that word and highlight it each time it appears. Explaining this in a crit guide helps cut down on explaining it each time you do it.

Whew!

And there you have it. Those are all the features that I use when critiquing. Of course I'm no word-processor guru or anything, so I'm sure that there are probably more features that need to be added to this. I'm also sure that as smart as all you folks are, you know of some of them. So please add them to the comments so that I can update this article. And don't worry, I'll be sure to give credit where credit is due.

A Writer’s Review of Open Office 3.1

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We are a culture that grades value based on hype as opposed to actual substance. As such, we tend to place our trust with whatever costs the most. After all, you get what you pay for, right? 

Well, I want to say that my wife and I dropped two-hundred plus dollars on a Home edition of Office 2007 back in 2007. Currently they’re running a special $99 sale, down from $149, for back to school (must be getting ready to unveil a new edition). New Office Vista to the XYZ Cubed 2100 Edition!!!

As I noted in my post, The Word Crash, apparently all that money doesn’t buy you a stable system. I’ve now had to delete that registry file twice and there appears to be no fix for it. It also appears to be a rather big problem because that post is this blog’s biggest search term hit. More people make it to this blog because they’re trying to figure out how to get Word to work than they do for anything else.

My second bout with Word being crap and the annoyance of having to back save files to 97-2000 format led me to downloading the latest version of Open Office. Why was I back saving? Well it seems that Microsoft, in their profound wisdom, decided to tack on some extra code to their files in 2007. That extra code makes it so that you can only read a Word 2007 file in . . . Word 2007. That’s right, you can’t read it in Word 2000, or 97, or anything else that Microsoft has sold to you over the years. Apparently you can download some kind of patch to make it so that your older version of Word will read the new docx file, but how many people actually do that? Heck, how many even know about it? Not many. That’s why any time I send out a file to others (read: my crit partner using Word 2000 or anyone on a forum) I have to back save so that they can read it.

Obviously the added ‘x’ means super fantastic awesomeness, right? Well, from what I’ve read, it really doesn’t give you any kind of added functionality. It was just a way for Microsoft to try and squeeze out competition.

GASP! Noooooo, Microsoft would NEVER. *rolls eyes*

After using Open Office for the past month, I can honestly say that I’ve got a pretty gOpen Officed idea who that competition is.

ADRIAN!

Mind you, I don’t use all of the features in Word. I write. Writing doesn’t consist of a whole lot of added features. So this review is geared towards folks like me (hence the title). While I’m sure that Word is a much more robust program, I’m grading it solely on my needs.

Let’s look at some cons and pros.

Felons

Office Crash, Go BOpen Officem: Office is just as buggy as Word, just in different ways. I’ve had it crash on me about four times over the past month, more than Word, for sure, but it’s always recovered my documents for me just as they were before the crash. That is, until today.

“Error Saving the Document.” Seems Open Office just up and decided it wasn’t going to save all of the work that I’d just slaved over. I could still work on what was open, I could select text and do everything that I could think of, what I could not do was save the damn file. What I ended up doing was opening a Word document and pasting my work from Open Office into Word. (How embarrassing). I then restarted the program and everything was fine save for the fact that it did not recover my documents. Two timing was a good idea after all.

Double Clicking: I’ve gotten used to double clicking a word, hitting the delete button and watching not only that word but also the extra space that went along with it, vanish. In Open Office, the extra space is left for you to clean up. I know, it’s petty, but it bugs me.

Squigglies: There are those out there who totally ignore those little squiggly lines when they write, especially the green and blue ones that refer to grammar. I don’t because I’m not that great at grammar. In cross checking documents from one program to the other, I notice that Word catches more questionable content than does Open Office. And it would make sense that Microsoft can afford to employ more specialists to fine tune that feature for them.

Hyperlink: Open Office does hyperlink, but they don’t have it as an option in the right click menu.

Point That Thing At Me: Another small gripe. When you hover your mouse to the left of a sentence in Word, you get an arrow that allows you to select the entire sentence. You can then drag up or down and highlight huge sections. You don’t bet that arrow in Open Office and I want it.  

One Man’s Junk: I’ve heard a few people complain about the new setup in Word 2007. Granted, it was confusing at first, but I’ve grown to like it. I like the little pop-out menus and the scrolling tabs, I even like that stupid little circle in the left hand corner. Open Office has none of that. It’s much more like an older version of Word. So for some of you this is going to be a plus, not a negative.

 

Specialists

FREE! That one never gets old.

Compatability: Just about everything you want to open, it can. Even that damned Word 2007 format. You know, the docx file that only 2007 users can open unless they download some patch to their older version of Word. Trouble is, it can’t save it in a docx format, but it can save it as a doc and that’s good enough for me. And yes, it can open them with comments and all. I also just read that you can change the settings for your preferred saving format in Open Office so that removes some of the irritation.

Paragraph Breaks: I don’t know why this is, but when I copy a document from Word and drop it into Blogger, my paragraphs get all screwed up. With Open Office I can drop it in there and have it show up just like I laid it out in the processor.

Reviewing Features: While not as robust as Word’s reviewing features, Open Office definitely has more than enough to get the job done. You can still number lines (although you can’t control how that numbering happens), leave notes (ctrl+alt+N), and track changes.

One Upping the Competition: One of the reviewing features, ‘Comments’ which I use when doing critiques, is both better and worse than Word. It’s worse because Open Office doesn’t number them, and it doesn’t highlight what your commenting on; however, it does allow you to comment on the comments, opening a dialog between you and your reviewer, which I find intriguing.

Sticking it to the Man: I like to be contrary from time to time so that I don’t feel like a total sellout. If everyone else is listening to an Ipod, I buy a Zune (gotta love that comparison for this particular post). When I get a chance to tell the man, “thanks, but no thanks,” I take it.

You did it Rocky, you did it.

Okay, so Rocky loses the fight in the first film. He lost it on the score card, but he won it in the hearts of the spectators. He went round for round with Apollo and finished the fight. He proved what he needed to and so too has Open Office 3.1 proved what it needed to in the eyes of this spectator. As I mentioned in the Browser Wars 2009 series, we use different tools for different tasks. I’m not abandoning Word 2007 outright (I did pay good money for it), but I won’t be relying on it exclusively anymore. I’ll likely continue to write my stories in it because of all of the formatting options, but my blogging and notes will be done in Open Office. I’m also looking forward to trying out the comment on comments feature with others who use the program.

Should you try it? Of course you should. It’s free! Download Open Office 3.1 here. Take it for a spin and see what you think. I can honestly say that unless the next version of Word comes with “Auto Breakout Novel” and “Sexy Secretary Making Coffee” buttons, I’ll likely skip paying for a new version and make do with what I’ve got. At this point I can’t see any other features that would be worth $150.

Obviously, I’m not as intimate with these programs as some of you. What did I miss? Any more strengths or weaknesses that need to be noted? Please share them in the comments. And as always, thanks for reading.

Today’s Artists: Values by BlackLillian, Greed by liol, and Rocky by ing1.

The Word Crash: When your mouse won't select text

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My critique partner is busting my chops again about letting the blog distract from writing. Humph! (She's a good crit partner). Because she's probably right, (but only a little) I'm abandoning philosophical musings for another techy tip. Why? Because I just spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out why Word 2007 would not allow me to select text, and why it crashed every time I tried to close it. (Ah Microsoft, how I despise thee).

My Symptoms: Word 2007 has been crashing on me when I go to shut down. I try closing the program and I get that wonderful “Word has stopped working” dialog box. It usually solves the issue by restarting Word again, which happens to be exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do. Sigh.

But even for all of that nonsense, it was still letting me write normally so I ignored the shut down issue . . . until today.

Today I was trying to get the post written when I suddenly noticed that I could not use my right mouse button inside of Word, and only inside of word. Word also would not let me select text with the mouse. So, back to researching.

Solution: After a good long time of wading through posts on this issue dating back to the time this program was released a couple of YEARS ago, I finally found a link that solved the problem. I won’t go through the steps here because it would be redundant, just know that you have to edit your registry which is always a tricky and potentially life threatening when it comes to your computer.

Solution of Word 2007 crashing on close and mouse not working.

Good luck. Although I will say this, it was fairly straightforward and easy to do, so don’t worry too much about it. And it seems to have worked.

Right then, off to the blazing heat of the noontime sun to work on the new garage. 

 

Browser Wars 2009: Or who I left Google Chrome for

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Writers are like web browsers, we are portals to information. Being as such, some of us do it better than others just like with browsers. Recently, I’ve been having problems with my web browser of choice, Google Chrome, or as I now affectionately call it, Google Crash (bet you can’t guess why). 

My main PC is a 700GR Gateway that has a unique feature built into is hardware. At the time of purchase it was one of the few desktops that could handle a 3.4 Ghz processor because of an induction cowl over the processor and pushing and pulling, variable speed, 4” fans. That variable speed note means that when the computer is not doing much, the fan runs slow and quietly, when you’ve got a bunch of processor using work going, they spin like crazy and you can hear it. And that’s all it’s been doing lately is whirring like crazy . . . at least until Crash chromes- er, I mean, Chrome crashes.

That led me to staring at my task manager for the past few days as I tried to figure out what to do about web browsing. I ran layman tests with various browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and even Safari. I say “layman tests” because I don’t know how to code things to do real benchmark tests. What I can do is watch the CPU and Mem Usage columns on the task manager window and see what they do. Basically, I wasn’t impressed.

Then I took to doing what all writers need to learn to do well and started researching. There are a lot of articles pointing to FireFox as the great end-all-be-all for browsing. Those who know anything about browsers know that FF has had a big problem with being a black hole for system resources. It sucks memory like a Hoover, or at least it did. 

As it turns out, the Mozilla team has fixed this with their latest version and now FF uses the least amount of RAM in the group. Good news, but I don’t really like the feel of FF. It bores me. Maybe it’s because I used it for so long before getting fed up with the memory issues and converting to Chrome.

But, here are the facts: Firefox comes out on top in more than one review. It’s not the fastest, but it’s safer than IE (Internet Explorer) and provides a lot of customization. It’s that customization that makes it unstable later on and what leads to RAM leaking down the road. 

Rusty Chrome

Opera came in second place in one of the reviews I read. I had not heard of it before so I installed it and took it for a spin. The latest stable version seemed to move a bit sluggishly for me. I’m used to Chrome that zips about the net like an old hotrod. Therein lies the trouble with Chrome: like an old hotrod, it’s bare bones muscle car features leave you with no A/C, power anything, and no real chance for those of us who don’t know programming to do any modifications. It’s also unstable. All that power tends to throw rods. 

This graph from an article by Sam Allen on Firefox memory usage shows just how unstable it really is. Other than the crashes that I and others have experienced, memory tests put this browser all over the board. It can be deceiving when looking at your task manager because Chrome opens up a new instance for each tab you open. So when you look at the TM you have to add up the memory being used by each instance. Supposedly this is to keep the entire browser from crashing, but it hasn’t worked that way for me. Each time it crashes, the whole thing goes down. Most times it remembers what pages I was on when it crashed and reloads them for me when I start it back up, but man is it frustrating. 

Getting Some Culture

Looking into Opera more, I decided that there had to be some way to speed it up, especially since there are so many options for tweaking it. This ability to change settings puts it on the opposite end of the spectrum from Chrome. And as the above article notes, Opera’s bad scores are based on standard settings. With a few simple adjustments (which I have aggregated for you from across the web at the end of this article) you can breeze through the net just as fast as if you were using Chrome. 

And Opera not only has the same favorites start page as Chrome, but it actually let’s you choose your own favorites instead of having Chrome show you where you go most often- they call it “Speed Dialing” in Opera. Opera also has gestures, a feature that Google has incorporated into their Gmail service but has not included in Chrome.

Basically, gestures allow you to hold your right mouse button and move your mouse in specific directions to cause actions to occur. For instance, Right mouse while moving the mouse up and then down will reload your page. Right mouse and left will take you back. Right mouse and right takes you forward. Opera even guesses at what you’re intending on doing. So, if you do a search or start in on an album of pictures, rather than finding the “next picture” button, you can gesture for Opera to take you forward and it will take you to the next page in the series even if you haven’t been there yet.

Opera also has that cool hover preview thing like the Vista OS where it will show you a thumbnail of what that tab is. And for anyone who sits and stares at their browser while waiting for a page to load and thinks, “What the hell is taking so long?” Opera has a status bar that actually answers the question for you. You can set it up to pop up over the address bar. This way you know whether or not that blank spot on the page is there because it’s done or because something got left out.

For all of these reasons, I put Opera at the top of my list. I started to get worried about its memory consumption because it appeared to not be able to free up RAM even after having tabs closed. I got to a point one night where I was using over 500 Mbs for just a couple tabs. After restarting Opera, it climbed up to 270, which is right around where most browsers seem to run. (Somehow it read my mind and knew that I was going to complain about that, and now, with no fewer tabs than before, I’m down to 107. Go figure.)

While Opera passes every standard imaginable, unlike all of the other browsers available, it does have an issue with displaying some sites because those site makers don’t code to standards, the number one offender: Facebook.

Supposedly, Opera get’s its speed through maximizing the efficiency in standards; because FB doesn’t follow them, and instead builds to FF and IE, it causes Opera to choke a little. But just a little. For instance, I can’t get the “see more comments” button to work on FB. (Apparently this issue has vanished since I wrote that a few days ago. Did I mention that Opera also has the best complaint-to-resolution times for web browsers? That’s why its security is so high. Techy guys find the issue, report on it, and BAM, the Opera wizards fix it.)

As I started to do a little more research for this post I happened upon an article rating something called Flock as the number two browser behind FF. At first I wasn’t going to bother with it, already entranced by the European beauty of Opera, but then they mentioned something about posting an update to one place and having it show up everywhere.

Flocking Around

Flock is based on the FF browser, so it has all of the same functionality and safety as the latest version of FF. It seems to lack a little in the security area, putting it in the same league as IE but ahead of Safari. It doesn’t have gestures or speed-dialing and it doesn’t get around as quickly either, but what it does do is link all of your social networking sites into your browser. And as those of you who looked at the posts from the weekend already know, it lets you blog via your browser, uploading to your blog account whether it be in LiveJournal, Blogger, or any other of a number of blog hosts. It will even go into your Facebook account and post an update letting everyone know that you just updated your blog. 

I tend to dislike sidebars and cluttered screens; that’s why I gravitate to Chrome, but Flock actually fills up their sidebar with something useful (and if you don’t want it there you can make it go away). Flock organizes all of your social networks together so that you can see all those important mood updates without going to FB, Twitter, MySpace and more. It also allows you to post updates to your own mood without going to those sites. If you chat via FB, the chat bar is linked into the browser so that you don’t have to be on FB to use it. 

There is also an easy way to set up a del.icio.us web-based favorites account that links right into your favorites sidebar. I’ve heard about del.icio.us before but have never had the inclination to set up an account since I’ve not wanted to go to a special website to get my links. These days I work on my laptop, desktop, and wife’s computer and save links on all of them. Links are scattered everywhere. With flock, I have them all at my disposal no matter where I am at. 

 

So what’s the verdict?

In the end Flock was just too distracting for me. You’ve always got that sidebar staring at you, saying, “Look, look at what so and so just said.” Sure you can close it, but oh the temptation. Besides, it doesn’t show you EVERYTHING. You can only see people’s updated mood settings. You don’t see the new pictures they post, the back and forth messages, or posts that they make via applications (like when I use Networked Blogs to pull my feed from my blog and post it on FB). It has also missed a few updates of friend’s moods during my test drive. 

The one time posting I was all excited about turned out to be less than expected. You can post to Twitter or MySpace and have it update Facebook with the same message, but you can’t do all three at once. There is also no way to separate users, so unless you’re using the browser solely on your own machine that no one else touches, you run the risk of leaving yourself open to snooping. Not that I have anything to hide mind you . . . .

I’ve been searching and searching for ways to make Flock be the perfect fit, but it’s not.

I’ve decided to go with the sexy European model, Opera, for the majority of my web browsing. While their del.icio.us plug-in doesn’t work for the beta version 10 just yet, I’m sure they’ll get around to fixing it. I’ve uninstalled Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Because Flock is built on the FF code, I’ll keep it around as my Mozilla-based browser. IE is going to hang around for watching Netflix on demand and anything that Opera might choke on.

That being said

If you’ve waded through all of this and are thinking, “I might give that Opera thing a shot,” I have to warn you: you have to do a few tweaks. They’re easy, but if you don’t change these settings you’re going to be looking at a slow download, thinking, “That Dave guy is full of crap.”

First: Download the Opera 10 beta. Each version of Opera is faster than its predecessor and this is the fastest yet.

Second: Start tweaking.

Disable Auto Completion

Opera’s address bar can be used like Chrome’s, as a search field. I can’t remember all of the special engines you can use (found it, look under the ‘Search’ tab on the ‘Preferences’ window) but for example if you type [g dogs] it will search Google for dogs. Typing other letters in place of ‘g’ will give you other search engines, so in a way it’s more powerful than Chrome. But it will also try to auto complete what you’re typing by searching your computer for the answer and that sucks up the processor speed.

Click Tools>Preferences>Advanced (from the tabs)>Network (from the left hand menu)>Server Name Completion (button) and uncheck “Look for local network machine” and “Try name completion, using.”  

Reload Banners?

So, you know that ‘cache’ thing techy people are always talking about? I guess what it does is basically save parts of web pages to your computer. This allows your browser to load elements of the page without having to wait for it to be downloaded. It seems that some sites don’t like that because they want you to have to look at new ads and the like every time you visit their page. Opera allows you to ignore that.

Type “opera:config” in the address bar and hit enter. This brings up the Preferences Editor (it’s a different one from before, trust me). Rather than having to try and find certain settings by reading through all the things in Opera that you can adjust, they provide you with a search bar. Type “expiry” into that search bar and hit enter. Change both “Check Expiry History” and “Check Expiry Load” to (1).

While You’re in “opera:config” Adjust Connection Settings

Not really sure what this does, but I read it in a forum and it immediately sped up the browser when I did it.

Click the “Show All” button so that you can get back to seeing all of the categories again. Scroll down until you get to “Performance” and click on that option. This brings up connection settings and the like. Change yours to look like those in the picture:

Max Connections Server: 16
Max Connections Total: 64
Network Buffer Size: 32
Uncheck: Reduce Max Persistent HTTP Connections

Instant Redraw

Not sure what this does either, but it works.

Tools> Prefrences> Advanced> Browsing> Try Redraw Instantly

 

And there you have it. Those are all the tweaks that I’ve found that I think deserve noting. If you save many pictures, one of the articles noted how you can use ‘control’ and a left mouse click on a picture to automatically bring up the ‘save as’ window as opposed to finding it in the right mouse click menu.  

What the Flock?

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In the earlier post I uploaded via flock, I did so without having first entered in all of my other account information. I linked to my Facebook account in Flock, and when I posted the blog it gave me the option of notifying Facebook, which it did and that was AWESOME. But I was like, "hey, what about MySpace and Twitter and . . ." Then I realized that Flock didn't know that I had those accounts. So I've since added Digg, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube. I'm interested in seeing what it does when I try to post this little note.

Quick update: So far flock seems to be running well. It's based on FireFox open source, and the new version of FF is supposedly the best thing out there. It did freeze up during a media search via it's special media bar, and it also eats that processor speed like mad when you're doing all the crazy stuff that it lets you do, but I think that when you look at it side by side, on similar features with other browsers, it ranks right up there with the best of them. I'll have my final verdict soon.

aaaaaaand no. I can only post a feed to FaceBook. Interesting how that seems to be the developer's choice in sociel networking. But, what I have discovered is that I can quickly click through my social sidebar and post updates to the three sites without ever going to the actual site. That's a good thing. Now if only there were a way to merge Opera and Flock. Hmmmm.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Testing the Flock out of this Browser

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So, I got to work on the latest blog has a little to do with writing. Let's face it, everything we do has something to do with writing. It's just that with some things the connection is a bit more tenuous than with others. This one's going to be about how we navigate the web and my quest for the ideal web browser.

As it happened, I was typing away on the blog and running internet searches to pull up facts and statistics when I happened upon yet another web browser. Normally, because I had not heard of it before I would have ignored it, buuuuut this particular browser demanded a little looking into.

Flock is supposedly designed with social networking in mind. You can link Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, your blog, and like seventeen other social sites. Now, I know what you're thinking, "uh, David, aren't we supposed to be trying to get some writing done? How is being continuously plugged into every time suck hole ever created supposed to help us achieve that goal?"

You're right. And that's what I thought at first too. But then I thought about the possibility of uploading content on Flock, and then have it post that same info to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and anything else I signed up for. Whereas before I'd have to actually go to each of those sites individually and perform the task over and over, now I'd be able to do it with one click.

Ah, now you're coming around, aren't you?

This is my test post using Flock's blogging feature. Let's see how it does.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Adding A Word Count Status Bar

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My thoughts get a bit fragmented at times. Has something to do with being a creative type of person. So, one minute I’ll be thinking “gotta get the dream blog finished up,” and the next I’ll be thinking, “oh man, that’s a really cool word count status bar, I’ve got to figure out how they did that.” And so we have today’s blog about a status bar rather than finishing up dreams. I’ll post that tomorrow. Really. No, I promise. I really, really promise.  

 

Now, I could do a bunch of research on all sorts of status bars, and in fact, at one time I did. I looked at a bunch of fancy graphics and the like but in the end decided on nothing at all. They all required me to fiddle around with html coding and updating manually on the blog, so I scrapped the idea. There was also the added risk of the site vanishing and your word counts vanishing with it.

 

Well, in my blog meandering, I came across a blog post [here] at nixyvalentine.com on this very subject. She used to use something called Zokutou until they vanished. Then she happened upon honorless.net. This progress bar is completely code generated; therefore, it does not vanish when the site vanishes. And because the webpage is also completely code generated, you can save it to your computer and run it without being online.

 

Simply type in your parameters, click the “Refresh Code” button and voila! Now copy that updated html in the box below and you’ve got your code. Drop it into an html box (in blogger or wherever you can use straight code in on the site of your choice) and you’ve got a status bar.

 

Want to title your status bar? Just type the title in before the coding and then add a break (a < followed by br followed by >) to get the status bar to appear below your title. After that string of code is done, add a couple more breaks and start over again with your next project. You can see mine in the crowded sidebar to the right.

 

By clicking on the “Appearance” button you can change fonts, colors and all sorts of other stuff. For mine, I changed the height to 4 pixels, the colors, and the font. I also changed the width to 100%. The percentage on the width will be how much of the column your status bar takes up. Because mine is appearing in a rather thin column, I had it take up the entire space whereas if it were appearing on a webpage (like it does when you are generating your code) it would need to be scaled down, like to 30% the way they have it on the site.

And there you have it. Now interested parties can keep up with your progress. You’ve also got a nice reminder that you’re actually getting things done, or conversely, you have a reminder of how much you’re NOT getting done. J  If any of this doesn’t make sense, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to clarify things. When it comes to coding and the like, I’m like a two year French student trying to travel France without the aid of a translator. 

Save Yourself!!!

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Today’s post has to do with a bit of techy stuff. I’m sure many of you already do these sorts of things, but it’s always worth reminding folks just in case.

First order of business! All you Live Journalers click on the picture and go read that article. Seems the evil hackers are hacking LJ accounts and spreading their evilness everywhere. 

It used to be that one of the most dreaded things about a fire (aside from the potential loss of life) was the chance of losing all those memories. Picture albums gone up in a blaze, old keepsakes melted down to slag. And so we all take precautions from fire alarms to fire safes. Even if we didn’t go so far as to lock things away in safes, we still had the odds on our side. I mean, how many people do you know who have had their house burn down?

 

But then one day technology snuck into our lives and it now seems that we can’t live them without it. Financial data, digital photos, music collections, movies, and most important of all with respects to writers, our stories, are all stored on our trusty computers in a lovely digital format that will stand the test of time. The trouble is, hell has loosed its minions in the form of angry little computer demons who write viruses and trojans and worms “oh my.” And in the blink of an eye all that work, all of those hours, days, weeks, months and years of tireless writing and hair pulling are all gone without even a few charred remains to cry over.

 

Unfortunately, this is not one of those things that we can assume “will never happen to me.” As one of my writing group partners can attest, we can all get struck by a virus, and the odds are that eventually we will. When it hit her it wiped out everything. That’s right, imagine your ‘Documents’ folder gone. Imagine it all being gone. It was enough to scare the begezus out of me. So I set about beefing up security and the like and thought of a few things to share.

 

Immune System: Make sure you have a good anti-virus software on your computer. I used to mess around with trying to find good free alternatives until one day I realized that losing what was on my hard-drive was far more expensive than saving a few bucks on a software subscription.

 

First, I got McCaffee and for a year I was very happy with it until they upgraded to another version, a version that I was able to track back to my system slowing to a crawl because of it’s resource demands. And I really did track it back to McCaffee because I found two other people that had the same problems occur after the new version went up. They also both saw them go away after they shut McCaffee off at my request. I got my money back and did some research for a new program that ended up being Kaspersky.

 

Kaspersky, too, I had for a year. It came highly recommended by the reviews I had read, and I was quite happy with it until I got my new laptop which came with a trial version of Symantec. On a whim I scanned my computer with Symantec and found that Kaspersky had been missing a couple of viruses, so out went Kaspersky and in came Symantec. So far, so good.

 

Covering All Fronts: There are all sorts of disgusting little things waiting to creep onto your computer and do something naughty. Not all of them are malicious, some just want to use your resources or track what you’re doing. They’ll not delete your life’s work, but they can be an annoyance. This too is something that I would leave up to other free programs to fix for me, like Spybot. This latest time around I decided to let Symantec take care of it all, and again, so far so good. When getting anti-virus software, remember that you’ve also got to defend against Malware and Spyware.

 

Ah the Memories: The version of Symantec that I got comes with a backup feature. It will take your hard-drive, or portions of it, and back it up just in case it can’t prevent the almost inevitable. That’s a beautiful thing, but in a way the backup feature is a bit lacking. That sent me out looking for backup software.

 

What I found was a free application called Cobian Backup 9. According to CNet, it has all the bells and whistles of the big boy programs with none of their cost. (Reminds me, I need to make a donation to the maker of the program.) What I do with this program is run another backup, nightly, of my documents folder only. Cobian will allow you to create as many different backup plans as you would like, unlike Symantec.

 

Finding the Space: Right now, at Best Buy, you can pick up a 500 gigabyte external hard-drive for less than $100. You can’t beat that. Just plug it in via the USB port and save away. Or, perhaps you had a computer that went on the fritz, or maybe you upgraded. In that case you’ve likely got an old hard-drive lying around (like I do) that has plenty of room on it. If that’s the case, head to your local electronics store and pic up a hard-drive enclosure. They’re like $35. Can’t beat that either. Be sure to get the right one though. There are different pin sets for hard-drives (as I found out upon an incorrect purchase). Just take out your old hard-drive, slip it in the enclosure (this is really simple, so don’t fret). It too connects to your computer via a USB port, and Bingo, you’ve got yourself an external hard-drive.

 

Layering: As for me, I like to have more than one copy of everything in more than one place. For the most part, even though I have a desktop and a laptop, I like to do most of my writing on my laptop. True, the keyboard is not as fun to type with, but when I’m at home I just unplug my wireless keyboard from the desktop and plug it into the laptop. Problem solved. But being as my current work is on my laptop, I needed Cobian to help me keep things up to date.

 

As a part of my backup process, I have Cobian backup all of my document files to an external drive. I set Cobian to keep 5 complete backups of the documents folder before it starts updating changed files. This might require a little explanation.

 

Cobian gives you the ability to update only those files that have been modified since the last backup. This saves on system resources and time when it comes to the backup. But what happens when you make a change to a file, save it, then realize that, oops, you didn’t want to do that and you’ve already backed up? Well, if you set Cobian to have more than one complete version of the backup, you can go back to an older backup and recall the correct version of what you are working on. In my case, I have it set up for five versions. This means that for the first five days it will make a completely new and separate backup. On day six it goes back to the day one section and rewrites it with the current information. This gives me a five day cushion to figure out that I’ve goofed something up and that I need an older version. Sorta like those restore points that Microsoft creates, only these ones actually work.

 

Oh, but it doesn’t end there. After my friend lost her work, I got really paranoid about losing mine, so I added yet another layer of defense. At this point we have the original on my laptop, the Symantec backup of the entire computer to the external hard-drive, then a series of five copies on the external hard-drive through Cobian (document files being what they are, you can back up the entirety of your docs folder without much drain on the memory status, whereas pictures and the like would be a totally different story). My laptop is also hooked up to my desktop via the network. During the backup I ask Cobian to create yet another instance of five backups on the shared documents portion of my desktop computer. This creates a total of 12 possible duplicates of the same information in three different locations.

 

I take that back, make it lucky number 13, because the desktop also has Symantec on it and therefore has its own backup on a separate external hard-drive that is dedicated to that computer. I could, (and still might) have Cobian work on my desktop as well and do another series of document backups on the other external drive, but maybe that’s taking it a bit far.

 

If All Else Fails: There is also the option of paying for online storage. Remember that fire scare we talked about earlier? Well, let’s say that does happen. None of your computer equipment is fireproof, you can still send all that information up in smoke. With an online backup, supposing you have the bandwidth to support it and the money to pay for the storage space, you can backup information to some remote place on the web.

 

Poor Man’s Backup: There is also the burning of disks. Of course that’s something you have to remember to do, whereas dedicated hard-drives do it all for you automatically. And if you’ve been writing for a while, you’ve likely heard of the poor man’s copyright, where you print out your story and mail it to yourself so that you can use the sealed envelope with its postmarked date as evidence that you wrote your story when you said you did. (I’ve been told this doesn’t work anymore, so don’t bother). You can do the same for backing up your stories via more high tech means. In this case you email your story to yourself as an attachment. With email providers like Gmail offering over seven gigs of free space, you can likely back up all of your documents this way, keeping them secure on someone else’s server. And I don’t think that even the government’s servers are as safe as Google’s.

 

In closing, set aside one of your writing sessions for setting up at least one external hard-drive and backup program. If you ever get a virus you’ll be glad that you did. And trust me, it’s well worth the $100 dollars.

 

So does anyone else have any suggestions for backing things up or protecting one’s work that I have not talked about here?