Pirillo’s amazing! He’s so on top of things it almost makes me sick. He writes about a real-time weblog monitoring service called BlogChatter. The weblog maintainer’s gotta send the updates to BlogChatter (called a “ping” in weblog-land) but, still, it’s too cool!

Just got a card in the mail from T-Mobile. Since I’m a customer I can get unlimited T-Mobile Hotspot access at all hotspots (most Starbucks, Borders, etc.) for $20/month on a month-to-month basis. That’s about 50% off their normal rate. See http://www.t-mobile.com/getmorehotspot.

McDonald’s is supposed to be launching their “get an hour for a meal” WiFi access here in San Jose soon. Mercury News said they’d be announcing something next week. See “McDonald’s serves wireless“.

Played with Bloglines and found a couple of problems, the first of which was a real concern to me. You can import OPML channel listings so you can easily bring your existing subscriptions to it. I tried importing an OPML file created by FeedDemon and it failed with a server error. Fired off a comment to their support and got an answer back within an hour that included an update to their server code! Now, that’s what I call service! Course, like I said, they just launched it and, having done stuff like this before myself, I imagine they’re probably shepherding it along, keeping a very close eye on things.

Also sent off a couple of suggestions.

* When subscribing to new channels, there’s a subscribe radio control on the page which is redundant with the subscribe button. I understand the desire to have a confirmation so how about a “subscribe” and a “cancel” button?

* (You have to experience this to really understand it, I think.) It’s difficult to move subscriptions from one folder to another, especially if you have a number of subs you want to move. How about making it a two-step process? Have check boxes next to each subscription and allow the user to select multiple subs. Then, click on a “move” button and select the target folder (only one selection allowed, here). Could do the same with delete and even create (select the folder in which you want the new folder or subscription to go in to).

And here’s an excerpt from their response:

Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 09:24:12 -0700
From: Customer Support
Subject: Re: [#128] Web Form: [Suggestions]

Hello,

Thanks for the suggestions. Both are great ideas. We’re definitely looking
for ways to improve the manage screen and I like your multiple move idea.

Thanks for using Bloglines.

I just signed up for Bloglines — a free web-based service that will monitor the RSS feeds you specify and allow you to read them via the web. That means no more downloading/running/evaluating RSS readers. It’s a brand new service, just recently launched so the UI is still a bit … uhh … utilitarian but I’m gonna give it a try. I’ll let you know what I think. I’m gonna be hard pressed to give up FeedDemon.

See this article in the WinInformant. The article link is to his “Short Takes for the week of June 30” — look for Office 2003.

This is a very interesting development. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the sites. See this weblog about it. Saw it in an article in today’s Lockergnome Bits and Bytes.

I downloaded BottomFeeder, another RSS feed reader, and gave it a try. It’s in Smalltalk (from a company I used to work for, Cincom Systems in Cincinnati, OH (“WKRP in Cincinnati”). It installed fine but the startup directory was set incorrectly in the shortcut that the app installed. Once I corrected that it started up. The UI seems like it came out of Windows 3.1. It IS a multi-platform tool so that’s a real plus but it was just a little more difficult to navigate than FeedDemon and it doesn’t support OPML. Guess I’ll stick with FeedDemon.

Today’s Lockergnome Tech Specialist has a good article on tuning Indexing Service performance. I didn’t realize it was tunable! The article’s supposed to be at http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/techspecialist/20030702.html but it’s not. Maybe tomorrow? Anyway, since I can’t give you a working link I’m gonna quote the article here:

XP Indexing Service Tuning

I see a common recommendation to disable the Indexing Service to improve system performance
of Windows 2000/XP workstations, and I can’t say that I’m a big fan of this practice as a
general rule unless you know for certain that you have no use for the function. True, the
service can sometimes chew up a healthy bit of system resources, but you can control the
impact to some degree, while avoiding the total shutdown of the service.

Right-click My Computer and select Manage, which will bring you to the Computer Management
console. Drill down to Services and Applications, and then right-click Indexing Service,
highlight All Tasks, and click Tune Performance. The default service usage setting is Used
Often, which is typically not the case for workstations. My recommendation to select
Customize, which will take you to a dialog with two sliders. Shove them both to the left,
which will tell the service to delay catalog updates a bit and to utilize fewer system
resources when the updates are initiated.

Another important step is to set the appropriate directories that should be indexed. I see
little purpose in having the system sift through core operating system files and program
binaries because there will rarely be valid documents stored in such places that you’ll want
to search against. Instead, remove the root directory from the default list and confine the
entries to your main document directories and any other folders that you might want to search
on a relatively frequent basis. The result of the changes may or may not have any noticeable
effect on your particular system, and in my estimation, Windows 2000 is harder on system
performance than the indexing processes in Windows XP, so I’ll leave any decision to make
changes in your capable fingers.

Saw this in today’s Lockergnome Tech Specialist. Don’t know how I missed the June 30th press release. Features list is here.

Saw this in today’s Lockergnome Bits and Bytes. The original story is from Jupiter Research and says that Microsoft’s going to release 3 new eBooks per week for 20 weeks in conjunction with the update. The page for the reader on the Microsoft site is here.