The first day when the news came out that Google had decided to make Feedburner Pro Stats and "My Brand" available to free users, I switched for the stats of course, but when I clicked on the My Brand tab to make my feed address on my own domain instead of Feedburner's, it said I had to call into Google and talk to them or email them or something--something that I didn't want to be bothered with.
But credit where credit is due. First, after my complaints a few days ago the recent posts did seem to appear on the feed very quickly. And then, tonight I set up the My Brand feature, so the atom feed links that can be used to subscribe to this blog go to a feed that is on the pacificpelican.us domain. So Feedburner has definitely improved in my estimation, despite the probably well-founded and apparently increasing concerns Dave Winer of scripting.com has with the RSS feed service.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Dude, not many people are getting a Dell!
Dell Computer, one of those "success" case studies repeated to me ad nauseum in business school, is seeing a dive in market share after so many years earlier during this decade spent taking share away from competitors in a stagnant market. Now PC sales are up again, but somehow Dell is losing market share to HP and Acer.
Having a "mass customization" system for largely look-alike and work-alike PCs isn't the magic formula so many believed it was.
But that's not all. One thing people may not have noticed about that "E" logo that Dell often uses for their brand is that it bears an eerie resemblence to the old Enron symbol.
Now this Texas company is being investigated by the SEC, and it still hasn't turned in audited 2006 results.
This accounting scandal may largely blow over--or it may reveal enormous financial shenanigans that prove that even Dell's amazing growth years ago was the product of falsified reports.
Michael Dell was quoted in April as saying that "The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion." Maybe it's not a revolution either but a racket--and about to get busted up.
Having a "mass customization" system for largely look-alike and work-alike PCs isn't the magic formula so many believed it was.
But that's not all. One thing people may not have noticed about that "E" logo that Dell often uses for their brand is that it bears an eerie resemblence to the old Enron symbol.
Now this Texas company is being investigated by the SEC, and it still hasn't turned in audited 2006 results.
This accounting scandal may largely blow over--or it may reveal enormous financial shenanigans that prove that even Dell's amazing growth years ago was the product of falsified reports.
Michael Dell was quoted in April as saying that "The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion." Maybe it's not a revolution either but a racket--and about to get busted up.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Feedburner doesn't seem to check my Blogger page every half hour
Feedburner, an (RSS/atom) subscription feed delivery service, is a very useful tool for web publishers. Not only does it handle the server task of delivering feeds to RSS readers and some other tasks including keeping stats, it also includes features for publicizing your page: like widgets to put on other blogs, javascript code that can publish your blog's stories anywhere you can drop their HTML in a web page, pinging news aggregator pages and sending your blog as an email newsletter to your readers that subscribe to it.
That's a great list of features--and for my Wordpress-powered blog at diary.pacificpelican.us, it all adds up to one thing: I love Feedburner!!
However, for my Blogger-powered page here at weblog.pacificpelican.us, my problem with the Feedburner service is that even though it claims to check your feed every half hour, I have gone half a day without my feed updating. I have just pinged the service now--but that's a bit of a hassle.
Recently Feedburner, after its acquisition by Google, made a few bonus features free to the regular (free) user in a bit of Google-populism.
One of these features is enhanced stats, which is a very good upgrade.
But one is called "Feedbuner integration" for your Blogger blog. So once you install this feature, any time someone clicks on one of the native Blogger feeds [often they look something like "Subscribe to posts (atom)"] they are immediately redirected to the Feedburner feed rather than the Blogger page's native feed. Which would be a great feature--if the Feedburned feed would update more often. As it is, this "integration" (which hardly seems like a full integration in practice) actually blocks any chance at seeing new stories via the feed by making every user look at the often un-updated Feedburner feed.
And another one of these features is a customizable domain for the feed (called "My Brand")--so instead of a URL like http://feeds.feedburner.com/THEfeedname, the user have their feed come from their own domain--so instead the URL will look like http://example.com/TheFeeedsName where example.com is a domain owned by the user. But then again, I can't help but wonder whether the flaky behavior of my feeds has something to do with the fact that I have a Blogger-hosted page on a custom domain, so really my underlying feed generated by Blogger is already a custom domain and, I don't know, Feedburner may not know to look for it as often or something. (As it is this paragraph is mainly speculation as I have not seen it worthwhile to re-brand my Blogger-Feedburner blog feed URL right now.)
It might be good that Google bought Feedburner--they are certainly adding on free features for their service--but the question remains about how well they will integrate their Blogger product while also appealing to the Wordpress and Movable Type user market. For now, they seem to be leaving Blogger users--even borderline power-users of the service--behind. For use with Blogger, I used to love Feedburner.
That's a great list of features--and for my Wordpress-powered blog at diary.pacificpelican.us, it all adds up to one thing: I love Feedburner!!
However, for my Blogger-powered page here at weblog.pacificpelican.us, my problem with the Feedburner service is that even though it claims to check your feed every half hour, I have gone half a day without my feed updating. I have just pinged the service now--but that's a bit of a hassle.
Recently Feedburner, after its acquisition by Google, made a few bonus features free to the regular (free) user in a bit of Google-populism.
One of these features is enhanced stats, which is a very good upgrade.
But one is called "Feedbuner integration" for your Blogger blog. So once you install this feature, any time someone clicks on one of the native Blogger feeds [often they look something like "Subscribe to posts (atom)"] they are immediately redirected to the Feedburner feed rather than the Blogger page's native feed. Which would be a great feature--if the Feedburned feed would update more often. As it is, this "integration" (which hardly seems like a full integration in practice) actually blocks any chance at seeing new stories via the feed by making every user look at the often un-updated Feedburner feed.
And another one of these features is a customizable domain for the feed (called "My Brand")--so instead of a URL like http://feeds.feedburner.com/THEfeedname, the user have their feed come from their own domain--so instead the URL will look like http://example.com/TheFeeedsName where example.com is a domain owned by the user. But then again, I can't help but wonder whether the flaky behavior of my feeds has something to do with the fact that I have a Blogger-hosted page on a custom domain, so really my underlying feed generated by Blogger is already a custom domain and, I don't know, Feedburner may not know to look for it as often or something. (As it is this paragraph is mainly speculation as I have not seen it worthwhile to re-brand my Blogger-Feedburner blog feed URL right now.)
It might be good that Google bought Feedburner--they are certainly adding on free features for their service--but the question remains about how well they will integrate their Blogger product while also appealing to the Wordpress and Movable Type user market. For now, they seem to be leaving Blogger users--even borderline power-users of the service--behind. For use with Blogger, I used to love Feedburner.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
AIDS Walk, annual 10k, San Francisco
Jessica and I attended the SF AIDS walk today in Golden Gate Park--here's a photo from near the end of the walk.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Are you lookin' at me?
Found this awesome pelican for my Pacific Pelican from the Galapagos Islands on Webshots. The entire album is amazing and features a ton of great animal photos, such as these:
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Congratulations to Barry Bonds
Barry Bonds, the 40-something San Francisco Giants leftfielder, hit career home run number 751 recently, moving within striking distance of Hank Aaron's all time record.
While the media has tried to single him out as an illegal steroid user (a charge not proven, as it is) and cheat, most fans know that whatever the details of the Balco case and whatever personal issues the man may have, Bonds is the greatest slugger in the history of baseball.
Leave it to a managing great to sum it up best:
'Jim Leyland couldn't be happier that his old star was elected by fans to start for the National League in next week's All-Star game [to be held in San Francisco].
"People throughout the country obviously must not be as disgusted at Barry Bonds as some people have let on,'' said the AL manager, who was Bonds' first major league manager. "I think it's a great story. I think he belongs there.'''
[photo: Reuters]Friday, June 8, 2007
The Jaguar has landed
Typically, cats chase birds...like pelicans. But this cat likes birds, and she's happy to be invited to bring a cat's perspective to this blog. So for my first entry, a little something that's catastic:
It's Friday, and you want to have a little fun. Feeling artsy? Go here and let the fun begin! Here's what I made:
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