Some blogs can be updated via cellphone. They hold audio-blogs. Example: http://www.jish.nu/vox/ Very interesting piece despite its wide range. Using a WikiLog might make it easier to connect small ideas together over time and grow them into bigger ideas... --BillSeitz "I also wonder if, in addition to an RSS feed, some people might find it more helpful to just add their names to a list and get an email containing each new idea (and a link back to the associated wiki page if they want to make comments). Most of the people I know haven't acquired RSS readers, and the few readers that I've tried have been remarkably awkward so I'm still in wait-and- see mode on that (if Mozilla incorporated a slick RSS reader into their browser it could become a must-have that Microsoft would have to catch up with)." Forget integrating it into the browser, what I've never understood is why there isn't an RSS reader integrated with an email program. That's exactly what I want. You even hit on it in the quote above saying some people would just want an email when the page is updated. The way I look at it is, I already have one program constantly running that goes out to the internet and retrieves stuff for me periodically, that's my email program. Why do I want to have _another_ program running that does essentially the same thing? It would be so much better to just have it integrated into my email program (Thunderbird) so I just have one program running, and one interface. Any Thunderbird/Mozilla mail developers out there reading this? You've already got newsgroups integrated, why not RSS feeds? Has nobody thought of this before? Is there something I'm missing? oops, didn't do a very good job of setting that off from the pervious comment, sorry. -Adam Endicott http://www.newsgator.com integrates with Outlook. I use NewsGator from Outlook at work, but bloglines.com via a browser at home, for my rss feeds. Surprisingly, I prefer the latter, as I can quickly scroll each post within one web page rather than open each post as a separate email message. I now subscribe to maybe 150 feeds via bloglines and maybe 50 via newsgator. Oddpost (http://www.oddpost.com/) is a web email client with an RSS client built in. I didn't get along with RSS at all until I started using this: now it seems obvious that the email client is where it should be. -- Ben Butler-Cole As an alternative to Flash for capturing streaming presentations, you might take a look at John Udell's 'Moving pictures' post at http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/01/13.html#a885 Terry Cox Zope looks clumsy. This page is not wiki, just Zwiki comments functionality. How will you organize this mass of zopedocuments later? Your page looks individual and there is contents in the text. That's what matters and that's why I'm comming back. (Let's test unicode support) --Ìirts Kalniòð <hr><b>2004/01/14 10:06 EST (via web):</b><br> Multiple encoding support failed :( NewMonster (http://www.newsmonster.org/) does provide a 'integrated' RSS Reader for Mozilla. Since its the only RSS reader I've ever used, I cant really comment on how good or bad it is other than to say that 'it works for me' <blockquote>The subtlety is that it's possible to use that tool, but beyond a certain vague point it's just a little bit too hard to put down and then easily pick up again later, and for me, that's the crux – not whether it's usable at all, but how easy is it to put down and pick up?</blockquote> Sums up perfectly how I feel about XSLT at the moment after returning to it after a 3 year hiatus. It needs to be said that some tools (like XSLT) require too much mental-modelling for casual use. Eric Raymond calls it 'Discoverability' (that property of a tool/technology which means it is easy to pick up) Feedback. This is the exact thing I had wanted when reading your "Browser as a GUI" article. I couldn't find a place to put my comments on your site. Frustrated, I ended up posting the comment at a site that linked to your article. Now I don't even remember which site I posted the long comment to. Hoang Do http://jotsite.com FeedDemon http://www.feeddemon.com is a nice friendly polished Windows solution for aggregating RSS feeds. There are serveral Mozilla Sidebar RSS aggregators listed here http://www.ourpla.net/cgi/pikie?RssReaders Typepad http://www.typepad.com is an easy way to setup a blog with all the features you need as they host it for you. Macromedia Breeze http://www.macromedia.com might work for flash type training. For RSS reading, I use http://www.bloglines.com , a free web site that handles RSS feeds for you. It works great. You might also looking into setting up Movable Type. It's a really useful web blogging tool, that allows comments and such. I use it for my FreeBSD blog: http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/ Just a small comment. Don't these weblogs and other formats seem prehistoric? They seem too one-dimensional and do not correlate well the subject with related subjects. Information with relations gives knowledge. Wikis do better of course. However, they, afaik, do not allow the dynamic restructuring of entries to create new "understandings", more like having to continually trace thru a physical dictionary over and over again tryin to find what a word really means (or in weblog dimension, what really is an 'exception handler' intent). A good paper on the forms of information is: "Organizing Thoughts into Sequences, Hierarchies, and Networks", http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/structurekinds/paper052499.html See chapter 7: TO VISUALIZE IS TO RESTRUCTURE. In this paper a table that shows how mapping of a structure to another, leads to new forms of understanding or information communication. Now if a system could be created that could do this, that would be cool. Till then all we have is newspaper style columnar text with embedded hypetext links. --- Josef Betancourt <hr><b>2004/01/19 13:35 EST (via web):</b><br> The best program I've seen for RSS is "nntp//rss". It basically runs a simple newsserver on your machine, and you can use any news/Usenet program like Outlook Express, Agent, Pan, Gnus etc. It's Java, and the installation can't be easier. Just run the jar-file :-) It's configured using a simple web interface. You can even use it to post to certain blogs by posting a message in the "newsgroup". http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/ regarding existing systems that help create FAQs : jGuru has many FAQs and they have built a community around the FAQs and Forums. I'm not aware if that is open source but you could try checking it out. <br>--- ANJAN BACCHU <hr><b>2004/01/23 08:13 EST (via web):</b><br> aa wtf? friends have gone back to C++ as a first language cos hello world in java is so complex?! what are you on? public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello World"); } } Whats the difficulty here? If the students accept that everything (ok ok everything bar primitives) in Java is an object, is it really such a leap to say that 'out' is a static member var of 'System', and it has a method 'println'? Other than that, a fine article. Great Article. Not sure if you could use http://roundup.sourceforge.net/doc-0.6/features.html in your mail --> blog search. Also may address Josef Betancourt comments about digesting the submissions in different ways. Thanks Paul "Ideas, articles and books. These 3 things need differenct ways." This is a good idea. I want to hear more about your "consulting" career. Selected blog aggregator http://bortaloo.aplpi.com/personal I would also like to hear more about your "consulting" career. Turloch OTierney SharpReader is a good RSS reader for Win32 client machines. <hr><b>2004/03/15 11:59 EST (via web):</b><br> This is a great article to get the thinking juices flowing. I am currently setting up some training seminars for local companies and I'm thinking that there must be a market for a training/consulting scenario since I go to a different company every 2 or 3 months and end up offering advice on their system/contract programming (based on my ideas)/training their staff. It seems that if there was another form of package that could be offered, that we could escape the rigamarole of going into a client, discovering that they need help, finding a good way to let them know they need help, and having them discover that I can offer the help, so that I could use my time and energy more effectively (and help the client save time and money, too!). I went to the Bruce/Bill Prague OOD/DP seminar back in 02 and I agree that the format of interaction with the class, or at least giving the students something to do besides listen, was a huge boon over say a Don Box seminar where he just (brilliantly) rants for hours. My favorite part was the code reviews that each team gave, since it gave me insight into how other people program and design ... and by doing so, giving me great insight into how they think. Which leads me to my last thought: break the 4th wall early and often. When someone hires an instructor to teach, they are really hoping that a little bit of the instructor's knowledge and experience brushes off on the attendees. That being said, opportunities for input from the instructor should be offered and this might mean a walk around as the students program a solution or personal interviews, or team building games where there is no differentiation between the instructor and the attendees. Whatever the tactic, the goal is to get the guru to earth, so to speak, and let the relationships evolve from there. While this is no fault of Bruce, during the whole conference I was thinking "Crap, this is the guy that taught me about constructors." For some reason, that was a very daunting concept and it made it difficult for me to approach him with questions or comments. Conversely, I got a chance to play Bill Venners at foosball (and won). I just want to point that out. Harry Brumleve Harry@JEConsulting.biz <hr><b>2004/03/19 09:23 EST (via web):</b><br> Great blog entry. I agree with the idea that lecturing can be a poor way to teach. However, while serving as the Principal Trainer for Borland, it occurred to me that one way to teach better is for us to construct more real-world examples for our students (apologies if you examples are already real world... I have not read your books.) Indeed, for better supporting the on-site, company paid training experience, examples could even address plausible <i>company</i> problem domains. I have found that doing this keeps students much more interested, and can turn a "listener" into a more inquisitive <i>learner</i>. (SQ3R is still the way to go, even though it dates back 25 years.) While constructing more client-centric examples takes a bit more time, it should also allow us to charge a <i>lot</> more for our on-site training. You should definitely consider adding the option to your training services, especially if you can get paid to tackle a "custom" solution that you can re-use between <i>many</i> clients (themes like web services come to mind). I have also recently been reminded that there are plenty of open sources out there... Sources that (depending upon their copyright implications) might more rapidly be used for "educational purposes". My own STDNOJ library on sourceforge.net is an example that anyone could use to accompany a good beginner or intermediate course on portable C++ programming. About the consultant thing: I frequently have to resort to contract programming to earn a living. I also do a fair amount of training and consulting in the more traditional sense. Personally, I find that not only does one often lead to the other, but that a fair mixture of both of them is required to help keep me "real". Such complementary engagements help me personally witness how well the state of the art is being <i>actually applied</i> (and where it is "missing something") in the hands of the paying customer. Such experiences have helped me put together such self-published methodologies as "The TAO of the Wolf Pack". http://www.soft9000.com/best_practices.html I am definitely going to check your blog more often. Lots of great ideas! (emailing blogs... hummmmm...) Keep up the good work! Randall Nagy President, Soft9000.com rnagy@soft9000.com <hr><b>2004/03/30 04:47 EST (via web):</b><br> Hi Bruce, thanks for your writings. <br>><i> I think I'd like it to be email-based, so I can just email entries to my weblog </i> Zwiki has done "this":http://zwiki.org/WikiMail for a long time. Have you looked at it closely ? Did something turn you off ? (I notice you're using 0.11, the latest is 0.29 - changes summarized "here":http://zwiki.org/ReleaseNotes ). --"Simon Michael":http://zwiki.org/SimonMichael In weighing the alternatives of "do it right, slowly" vs "just do it, now" it is important to consider how success is defined. V. Nabokov, unhappy with a translator of one of his works was critisized by his publisher: "it seems like you don't care when the French edition comes out". He basically said, yeah, that's right because I expect my stuff to be around a very long time so such delays are irrelvant to me...all that matters is getting it right. The publisher and Nabokov had different measures of success. RSS in Mozilla: http://sage.mozdev.org/screenshots.html I didn't like blogs at all until I got Sage. Now- I see something I like, I bookmark it (into Sage Feeds folder) and it automagically shows up. Uses mo-zilla (actually FireFox for me) to do rendering. yay. :^)
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