Life is grand

I never really found StumbleUpon to be useful or even entertaining. I get enough new websites through my feed subscriptions everyday not to need random suggestions of where to spend 5 more minutes online.

Google though have hit on something a bit more interesting. The Google Toolbar now includes a dice icon that uses your Google search history to recommend a new site.

It will take more than a few minutes to see if it really works but basing recommendations on queries you have typed into Google in the past rather than votes by other users seems a better strategy.

Got to say the new MyMaps feature of Google Maps is dead simple yet good. Here is a quick map I built of some places in Waterford, Ireland I frequent. The functions are simple but the useful ones have been implemented; push pins, lines and areas.

There are other services like this with many having better features but this is part of my Google account and ten to one the data I enter here is aggregated into the overall Google Maps database.

Now if only Google would get some good maps of Ireland. Microsoft’s Local Live has much better maps of Ireland.

Google Apps For Your Domain has recently added some new features and, like my boss likes to say, opened its kimono. They are definitely gunning for Microsoft’s Exchange market now (they offer a solution to migrate away from Exchange, can’t be clearer than that.)

But what about us little guys, us geeks with our own domains who aren’t multinational environment shaggers? There are a couple of new features which are very welcome.

Firstly you can keep it free and get 2gb per account on your domain or you can pay $50 per year and get 10gb per account. The $50 option also offers some guarantees, migration tools, an email gateway and integration tools. Not much for us small guys so I think the free version will continue to be fine. You can see a comparison chart here.

The interesting bits are:

• URL mapping. So instead of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com you can have http://mail.yourdomain.com. Very, very nice that.
• Google Docs is now available to everyone using Google Apps For Your Domain.
• Domain alias so you can control two or more domains as one.

I see you can also now register a new domain with Google. I haven’t found out yet if you can transfer existing domains.

So a nice update even for us free loaders and some useful features for bigger users.

Something odd just happened with Google. It seems Google Reader is now available for Google Apps for Your Domain though it is not listed.

I’ve been running Google Apps for Your Domain on my paulmwatson.com domain for awhile now. It gave me GMail, Google Calendar etc. Before that I had a normal GMail account which came with a Google Calendar instance as well.

Up until an hour ago though I was using my Google Account (an @gmail.com login) with Google Reader. I then installed the GMail Notifier to see if it could be pointed at my Google run paulmwatson.com GMail account (not the usual @gmail.com account.) This didn’t used to work but now works. It mentioned something about Switching Accounts which I said yes to. Then I went into Google Reader to catch up on some news and had 0 subscriptions. I nearly fell out of my chair but look top right and saw I was logged in with my Google Apps for Your Domain account and not the @gmail.com login.

So it seems Google Reader is unnoficially in the Google Apps for Your Domain list now. Cool.

A simple but essential addition to Google Reader; while reading you can now move subscriptions to different folders.

Previously it was a pain to subscribe to a feed and then have to go into Settings to move it to a folder.

Google Co-op allows you to create your own search engine. You specify a list of sites and are given a home-page which lets you use Google to search just that list or the whole web but with an emphasis on those sites.

This is really useful for specialists or groups of people who have a set of quality sources on a given topic. e.g. Ruby on Rails developers or horticulturalist. Google Co-op lets just one person or a group of invited people to contribute to the list.

I think it is even more useful as a personal search engine. Here I have created a search list that searches just my resources on the web. It includes my Flickr photos, my del.icio.us and Blinklist links and my blog. Other people can use it but it is more useful to me as a way to pull out past things I have written about, photographed or linked to.

Rollyo does much this but I found their interface a bit complicated and it wasn’t using the great Google search engine.

I am not a big fan of the personalised home page systems like Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google’s IG. I simply have not found much use for them and none have integrated into my daily life in any way.

Pageflakes though just turned the concept on its head by allowing users to share home pages. One user can start a page and then share it with others who can view it and customise it further. This doesn’t make it anymore useful as a home page but it makes it interesting as a team collaboration tool. With feed components one could display build status, shared email, shared documents, todo lists, project plans and a host of other info that a team needs to keep each other aware of.

I hope Netvibes includes this feature as I like their system a bit more than Pageflakes.

Google’s feed reader has undergone a radical redesign. So radical it now resembles every other feed reader out there. The previous incarnation was loved by a few and disliked by many. It was an interesting experiment but was not succesful, unlike the GMail interface.

At first glance it is a Bloglines copy; 2 panes showing feeds on one side and items on the other. You click a feed or folder and all the unread items are displayed in a river of news down the right. You can organise by folder, you can star items, email them, share (more on that later) and add tags. Nothing exceptional and certainly not stunning (I am worried when people call a minor step forward as “stunning.”)

There are some good features though and I imagine Google Reader will follow GMail in being an incrementally improving product.

The share feature lets you mark an item as shared and this is then added to a publically available web-page which has its own Atom feed. This is useful as it lets you broadcast to the world any items you find interesting.

It is limited though in that you can’t branch the sharing out to different groups. Thankfully the tagging feature comes into play here. You can add tags to any item and then make that tag public. You can then share the public tag link with other Google Reader users and they can subscribe to it. You could tag items to target specific groups of friends and co-workers. This is a very useful feature though I’d prefer if it displayed as the sharing feature does as currently the public tags require you to be using the Google Reader.

Another novel feature is that, unlike Bloglines where clicking a feed or folder marks all unread items in it as read, Google Reader will track your scrolling and only mark as read the items you have scrolled past. This makes it very easy to start reading a list of unread items, close the reader and then come back to where you last where.

Starring like in GMail works well, useful for coming back to items later to read. The feed management interface is a bit clunky but works well enough for now.

One thing I have noticed is that Bloglines seems to be faster both in using and in noticing updates in feeds. Hopefully Google Reader catches up in those two regards.

All in all it is Bloglines plus some useful features and mechanisms. I like it but feel it is hardly ground breaking and that there is so much more potential in aggregator applications. I will be swapping to Google Reader not because it is stunning but because it is mildly better.

Kevin Clark’s Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing In Rails article is causing some consternation in the Railsosphere. Particulary the pagination comment:

I haven’t used pagination in my last 15 projects. The pagination code is ugly. Ugly ugly.

There are two parts to his comment. The first is that the implementation of pagination that everyone first gets with Rails is poorly done. It is not scalable and is inflexible.

“So what do we use instead?” is being asked by many and there has been no real answer beyond the obvious answer; write your own pagination code that fits your application.

The second part of the pagination comment though is more interesting. Brian Hogan comments:

Pagination of “next / previous” is pretty useless on large data sets anyway. Alphabet bars or searches are much better approaches for filtering data in my opinion and they’re easy to implement.

That is very interesting. Yes, there will be times that pagination is the only logical way of cutting datasets up but they are rare, very rare.

But everyone uses pagination! Google does!

That is because it is easy. Maybe not easy to implement but easy to conceptualise. It is dead easy to say “List the data in chronological order in pages of 20 records.”

Instead you should be thinking hard about the data you are presenting. If your data is timely then page by logical date ranges (hour, day, month, range etc.) and not just chronological + page sets.

If your slicing results in too long a list to display on one page then you need to slice it better, not just stick in page numbers.

Google is a good example. When I search and don’t find the result I want on the first page I don’t go to page 2. I research. I refine my search.

I am not a big voice fan but I must say the new voicemail feature in GTalk is dead handy. Here you can see one that a friend sent to me. It arrives in your gmail inbox as a message with a nice Flash based player.