So, Focus Shift - the comic loved and hated by OSNews readers - is going to return. Rejoice.

However, it’s going to be completely different from what you’re used to. It’s no longer about wanting to make people chuckle or laugh using cheap jokes in a tech-related context. I want something a little more… Experimental. Something closer to who I am. Something more fitting for a personal weblog.

So, Focus Shift will be more a sort of crudely drawn graphical form of blogging. While the occasional OSNews-style comic might still pop up, the new Focus Shift comic will focus on my personal life, things I experience every day. However, the focus is not making people laugh - it’s more a form of expressing certain things in an extremely vague manner, letting the readers fill in the blanks in whatever way they deem fit.

This is going to be highly experimental, and it’s very likely this won’t amuse a very large audience. That’s fine with me. I’m not doing my blog for other people, so why should its comic be about other people?

Stay tuned.

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Focus Shift will return. Right here, on Cogs Can Think.

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I ditched Bloglines the other day for Google Reader. I'm not a huge fan of Bloglines' new beta interface, most because I find it clunkier than the current interface. Sure, the current one feels a little dated, but it works. Plus, the iPhone interface is nice.

Google has a lot going for it. For one, it seems everyone who uses it raves about it. Also, the iPhone interface is integrated with all the other Google services I use, Picasa Web, Gmail, etc.

This all came about because I wanted to use a desktop RSS reader at home and sync it with my web interface for work and iPhone, but that doesn't exist unless I use Newsgator. Bloglines and Google both appear to have a sync API, but neither Vienna nor NetNewsWire (nor any other client I could find) actually syncs back to them.

But it appears Vienna is working on one for Google's reader, and with the Bloglines beta looming, it seemed like a good enough time to make the jump. So I did.

Google's Reader is awfully attractive, but it's really keyboard driven. Not only that, but there's no way to have it mark all items as read as you click a feed. You must begin the tedious task of scrolling through every single item, or hitting "j", "j", "j". And YouTube embeds don't go away - at least in Opera 9.22 - they just wait at the top of the reading pane, obstructing text, until I click a new feed.

Did I mention that Google Reader is slow slow slow? I can click a link and watch it "Loading..." for several seconds. Opera is a second class citizen in Google-land, which is why all new Gmail features don't work (v2, label colors, AIM) and Picasa support is flaky, but I think Reader fits in that boat too. It's painful.

So, after 4 full days, I bailed. I'm back to Bloglines classic. I'd love to tweak the stylesheet a little, but it works and it's so much faster. I'm pretty pleased with Bloglines, especially now that I've had a chance to experience something else.

Tags: Bloglines, Google, Google Reader, RSS, Gmail, Switch, Web 2.0
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It’s finally here, Dooce’s redesign. It looks distinctive, and luckily, she didn’t go all pattern and colour happy. I only see few colours, and barely a pattern. Great stuff. The buttons are a bit… Nineties, but hey, as long as she keeps on writing the way she does I don’t really give a rat’s ass about her blog’s looks. Congratulations to Heather and her coding slave husband Jon.

As I said before, for all I care, she just dumps a text file on the net.

My own redesign is on an indefinite hold. I am way too busy with real life and Grow, and I simply don’t have the time left to dive into Cogs Can Think. v4. It will happen one of these months, but for now, you’ll have to do with v3. I mean, it still looks pretty goddamn nice if you ask me.

Arrogance is a virtue.

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I’ve been pondering some massive changes on my blog. I’m not sure each of these will make it through.

• First and foremost, I want to move to a dedicated, real domain. I can use OSNews’ servers for this, so all I’d need to do is buy the actual domain name.
• I want a dedicated page for a daily photo. The reason the daily photo in my sidebar never took off as I hoped it would is because my current digital camera is a, well, piece of shit. As soon as the SLR David and his wife Beth will be sending me arrives, I promise to make the daily photo, well, daily. There’s enough crazy shit to photograph in this country.
• I want a proper navigation bar atop my blog. I’ve already done some mockup work on how it should look, and preliminary beta mockup tester Eugenia was enthusiastic about it.
• Having a navigation bar will allow me to expand my blog further by moving the Cogs to their own, dedicated page, where they will be kept forever and ever, instead of that local text file I use as a backup now.

Now, these changes may seem contradictory to my vision on what a blog should be (simplicity, elegance, cleanliness), but it actually isn’t; adding a navigation bar will make separate pages easier to navigate to (of course, the active page’s link should stand out). Of course, I will make sure it all looks clean, fits in, and is consistent.

Oh, and as you may have noticed, I’ve modified my blog’s header image yesterday. I took the same header, and applied a transparent pattern on top of it, from Squidfingers. Just so you know.

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In light of yesterday’s post, I did some, for my standards, heavy tweaking on Cogs Can Think. tonight.

Firstly, I cleaned out the sidebar, and removed any unnecessary fluff. The contact information image is now linked to in the “About…” section. I removed the logo of and link to Pix’d, as that project is not yet finished at all - the page remains up, though. Overall, this gives the sidebar a much cleaner appearance.

In addition, you’ll notice a new feature. Yes, Cogs Can Think. has gotten a feature. Blatantly copied from Adam and Dooce, I’ve added a little ‘link blog’ to the sidebar (imaginatively called ‘Cogs…’). I played with the idea of creating a special page for it, but decided against it as I want my blog to fit on one, single page; it’s a nice way of keeping CCT. focused and organised (no, the FAQ doesn’t count, as you only have to read that once - supposedly, that is).

The structure of each Cog will be the same: “date: link - text blurb (via).” Please note that I’ll be doing this all by manually adding the code to the front page - I do it this way because I) I’m a total idiot when it comes to html and II) this way I am sure it all looks exactly the way I want it to. I’ll max it out at four or five entries (I’ll have to see what looks best); older items will be lost forever (yeah, I’m cold and harsh). I will be keeping a personal back up in a .txt file though, for personal reference.

That’s about it. Suggestions always welcome. Sort of.

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As you all know, I’m quite the fan of Dooce and her weblog. There are only a few weblogs I read consistently, but hers is definitely one of them. Interesting sense of humour, coupled with a good sense of relativity, leads to a really interesting weblog to read. But enough with the ass kissing - I want to kiss my own ass today.

Heather also has a small link section in her left column, and yesterday she led me to this website, design*sponge. Dooce is quite positive on this website’s new design, but I really beg to differ. It surely looks good and impressive - lots of interesting colours and tidbits. However - try using it. Then I get stuck. There’s just so much “stuff” in there, it makes my head spin. Backgrounds, labels, patterns, contrasting colours, transparency; you name it, it’s there. But because of all that, I simply lose oversight. I lose focus.

Now, back to the ass kissing - my own ass, this time. When I set out to work on Cogs Can Think. v3 (you’re looking at it) I only had a faint goal in the back of my head on how I wanted it to turn out: clean, elegant, and content-focused. Starting with the classic Kubrick design, I slowly but surely added more of my own elements to this site. What I’m left with now is round and about exactly the way I want my blog to look like.

I don’t like backgrounds, patterns, overly enthousiastic use of ten billion million different colours, transparency, and so on. I want cleanliness. So, the only way the elements here are distinguished, is by abusing fonts. More specifically, by abusing one font, as all text on Cogs Can Think. is Trebuchet MS. I play with point sizes to distinguish the items’ importance - the side column is a small font, the content of the blog is a normal font, while the headers are slightly bigger. I don’t use separating lines, different backgrounds and patterns, or more of that stuff.

Colourwise, I’m easy too. I don’t bombard my users with colours - I give them white, grey, black, and a brownish-orange. This last colour, what I refer to as ‘the link colour’, is always derived from my blog’s header image (masthead in Dooce terms). When the header image changes, my link colour will adapt. Consistency über alles.

I did not build Cogs Can Think. in one day - it’s an ever continuing process of small changes, minor colour changes, font size tweaks, and so on, with or without the help of other people (Eugenia or Adam). I’m actually quite proud of the outcome, and at least a small group of people seem to agree with me (I actually have a hand full of dedicated readers, for whatever reason).

Heather’s weblog appears to be very similar to mine in design (the other way around, actually); simplicity, elegance, cleanliness. The focus is on the content, there’s no avalanche of colours, patterns, or backgrounds. I really, really like the design. I have no idea if all this is on purpose, or that it’s a sort of accidental outcome of her own tweaking process.

Anyway, Heather has been dropping hints lately that she’s working on adding features to her weblog, and of course it makes sense to couple that with a redesign. I’m just really hoping she keeps that same simplicity/elegance/cleanliness combination, and that she isn’t enticed, because of design*sponge, to go all wild with colours and fluff that only serve as distractors from the actual stuff that matters - the content.

And let’s face it, Dooce.com doesn’t need all that fluff. Her content doesn’t need it. For all I care, she just dumps a .txt file on the net.

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The other day, I griped about the new Bloglines beta. To my surprise and enjoyment, one of the Bloglines developers left a comment, and we exchanged a few short emails. Today, Bloglines releases beta 1.0.2, and guess what? My issues were specifically addressed! Let's examine:



So what do we see? The font that made it impossible to distinguish bold from normal weight text? Gone. Now we have a beautiful font that makes it very clear which are read and which aren't. How about the visual indicator of which item you are hovering over? It's there!

My biggest gripe was that items were only marked read on hover and by a keystroke, just like Google Reader. But what do I see in the teaser for 1.0.3?



Hey-o! Score one for the Bloglines team! Way to utilize reader feedback! Nice work.

Tags: Bloglines, Web 2.0, Review
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"Robert Scoble is media. I am media as well."

Robert Scoble, you may know, is a very prominent blogger with a whole hell of a lot of readers. Scoble is someone who I've kept up with over the last few years. He worked for Microsoft doing blogging and videos for Channel 9 then recently moved to Podtech to do video blogging. Scoble is a nice guy, he writes fairly well, and has a lot to say. But lately, reading his stuff has been putting me to sleep.

Scoble has zeroed in on a few keys things and has not been able to stop talking about them. So, while his blog has always been a reflection of his life, it was much more interesting when he did Channel 9 and visited the Live Mail team or the Windows Mail team and we learned about new things.

Lately, Scoble's passions have centered around just a few things. First, and most notably (or most annoyingly), Facebook. Having friended Scoble on Facebook early on, it was interesting to be connected to so many people. Now it's lame: Scoble's headlines fill my "mini feed" page, even after I set it to specifically limit Scoble news. He boasts about how linking to him is like being linked to everyone of value in the tech world. But frankly, I find Facebook to be worthless to link to someone I don't know who doesn't use it as anything but a friend collector and an app demonstration ground. Facebook is for keeping up with people you know, not just a worthless MySpace clone where the goal is to amass the highest number of friends. Scoble treats Facebook like a contest and then tells us every detail of his experience. He's made a few worthwhile observations (such as the question of whether Facebook is a viable advertising platform given it's demographic) and lots and lots and lots of really boring ones.

Scoble is very proud of his iPhone, and hasn't stopped talking about it. Seriously... like... at all.

Also, Scoble is a social network sucker junkie, and has carried on about Pownce, Jaiku, and Twitter for weeks. We get it. I tried Pownce. I don't see what the hell I'm supposed to do with it that I can't do elsewhere or in an easier manner. But reading scobleizer.com, you'd think it makes you breakfast or shines your shoes for you.

--

So, how does one blog like Scoble? All you need to do is go to Digg, find a cool buzzword or website likely to interest the bleeding edge technology people, and blog about it 5-7 times a day. Do not relent, just keep your stream coming. Join endless social networks and add as many friends as possible, whether you know them or not. Make provocative statements and then link to prominent people's blogs; try to get them to blog about you, good or bad. Make sure you mention people like Dave Winer and Matt Cutts. Lastly, be certain to pimp targetted buzz apps like Google Reader and Adobe AIR at least twice a week.

In all seriousness, I really do enjoy Scoble's blog. If you don't already read it, you should really check out his feed, once he moves past his love affair with Facebook and the iPhone.

Tags: Blog, Scoble
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As you can see in the sidebar, I have registered at Flickr today, in order to post daily photos on my blog here. I ain’t promising anything, though. I will try my best to post daily photos, but there ain’t no guarantee.

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I actually made a FAQ a few days ago. Enjoy.

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Weblogs generally are mediocre (at best) and almost exclusively very uninteresting and uninspiring (like this one).

For the first time, I have found a weblog which is worth my precious time to follow on a daily basis. I stumbled upon Dooce.com, a weblog which seems to be like any other; however, upon closer inspection you’ll learn to appreciate the gentle but direct humour Heather B. Armstrong has. Even though prozac humour is pretty much, like, not funny anymore, she still manages to get away with it because, well, I don’t know, she just does.

The FAQ is a good starting point. Be sure to read #6.

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I’ll be internet-less basically for two to four weeks. I’m moving today, but my cable company/ISP said that the installation package (modem, cables, etc.) takes THAT long to ship. Lazy cunts.

In other words, ‘ttyl’.

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