April 2008 Archives

About Chyrp, WordPress and Early Adopterism

0 comments Filed in Blogging Politics•Commentary•Geekery Tagged with Blogging•Chyrp•Editorial•WordPress April 25th, 2008

Some weeks ago I wrote about the reasons behind my switch from WordPress to Chyrp, but I had forgotten one aspect, I had made a huge error. Chyrp nowhere is in a state ready for prime time and that doesn’t concern the platform, the code behind chyrp.

The error I made was to jump on the bandwagon based on the technical aspect of the platform and even a small, but rather active community. Most important factor though, the main developer behind the platform, was an element I didn’t analyze well enough before making my choice and decision for Chyrp.

As beautiful as Chyrp may be, its problem lays in how Alex Suraci rushes, or not, things.

Alex is a talented coder and has built an awesome platform, but sadly his ambitions are too personal and too little focused on Chyrp for the lightweight blogging platform to become really successful. Alex is ambitious and as a young developer, constantly learning and discovering new coding languages. This sadly to the inconvenience of the Chyrp community and adopters. Some details: a PHP5 is coming… and pending. So is a Ruby port.
The community forums have been changed to a new, non Chyrp related, and unmoderated location at toogeneric. All in all Chyrp is a nice platform, one I will continue to watch, but for now the uncertainties made me switch back to good ol’ WordPress.

I should have known better being a regular early adopter.

Photophlow, Flickr Social Network Redefined

0 comments Filed in Online Tagged with Apps•Invites•photography•photophlow•Social Networks April 22nd, 2008

Photophlow is probably the best third party flickr application, network, I’ve seen so far.

What is Photophlow?
It’s a chatroom. It’s another social network. It’s everything one would expect in 2008. Yes, it’s Beta.

Forget what I just wrote, Photophlow is much more. Photophlow takes the flickr API to a new level.

Small intro: After years of toying round with several Point&Shoot cameras I made the step. I always wanted to play more with photography but somehow never jumped in to it. This time I did and purchased a new Canon Digital Rebel XT. More than looking forward to my new love being delivered, last days I’ve been diving in to learning photography and the networks around.

Did I want your regular photography forum (or blog)? Negative. What I was looking for was a quick way to interact with people who really know their stuff, all while discovering great photography. Flickr is your friend. But so is SmugMug. Sadly those sites are nothing more than a waste of time, waste of time because of all the awesome discoveries.

Add Photophlow.

First remarkable aspect of Photophlow is that there’s no need to sign up. Photophlow uses the flickr user authentication process to login. Single sign on if one wants to. Once you’re logged in to flickr, you also are to Photophlow.

Once ~~logged in~~ online in Photophlow, you can join chatrooms based on the groups you are member of or create chatrooms for the groups you administer. And that’s where the fun starts.

In every chatroom, all flickr searches are public and display a list of results in the sidebar. On hover those pictures enlarge and on click they are posted to the room. You can immediately comment on flickr to every picture, favorite it, view the EXIF data or boil eggs with.

All in all, Photophlow so far is the fastest way to discover high level pictures and at the same time, if needed, share information about the technical factors.
But you can also use Photophlowg as a tumblelogging discovery engine.

Compulsory with the 2007 standards, Photophlow offers an integration with both Twitter and Tumblr API as well.

Compulsory invites for Photophlow available. (3 2).

♣ Running A Public Website

0 comments Filed in Tumbling Tagged with Online•Publishing April 20th, 2008

Other times, it’s not so fun running a visible site. Some people are determined to deliberately misunderstand much of what they encounter in life. Sometimes I have a hard time realizing that that’s their problem, not mine.

Jason Kottke in an interview with Deron Bauman.

Flickr Has Video

0 comments Filed in Online Tagged with Flickr•The Internetz April 11th, 2008

Since several days already, flickr has video. Huge protest waves have been ~~rick~~rolling the net and I must admit that I’m one of those people who still think that the internet is for text. But videos like this make me accept things, even video on flickr. Although I can imagine that there are things one does not want to see on flickr.

Such as 90 seconds of video, taken when sitting on the loo.

Disclaimer: Yes, I had almost uploaded a similar video. But in the end… the internetz iz 4 txt!!!1!!1!1!!!1

How Customer Service Should Be

0 comments Filed in Real Life Tagged with Customer Service•Samsung April 11th, 2008

Dealing with technical support lines or customer services often can be a frickle thing, and when my 10 month old Samsung ML-2010 printer at work decided to start making weird noises, I was close to order a new printer. Colleagues convinced me to go through the tech support hassle and use my warranty rights.

Armed with everything I might eventually need (Model number, serial number, purchase date, invoice number and .pdf invoice), I rang 0870-SAMSUNG, although the printer was purchased at Pixmania, I first was greeted by a loudly laughing woman. Laughing, not greeting. No niceties. When after some seconds I hesitantly said ‘Hello?!‘, I knew from her reply I had dialed the correct number. Yes, I was connected to the Samsung Help Desk. Phew.

Optimist/Pessimist/Cynic I am, I had only given myself 5-8 minutes to sort this out or I would have ordered a new printer. I am in the first month of my new IT budget and honestly am too lazy to walk to the network printer. Network printing, a former pet-peeve of mine. My desk though… has its own printer.

I was really surprised when within less than two minutes I had received both a reference number and the promise that a technical agent would call me in the next two hours. Not once was I asked where or when I did purchase that printer, nor did I have to go into detail about my problem.

That was easy. Let the wait begin now.

But there was no wait. Only few minutes later a Samsung Tech Agent called me and asked me to describe the problem. Not knowing how a printer is engineered, this proved to be a much more difficult problem than expected. What can be that hard about explaining that a printer doesn’t grab the paper anymore, all while making loud, protesting noises, before throwing a ‘Online error’ at you? The agent luckily was whether a bad car driver or had several friends who couldn’t handle the gearbox of a car properly, because the analogy ‘If you can’t find’em, grind’em‘, immediately explained what my problem was.

Within the next 2-3 days Samsung UK will drop off a new unit for me. No need to send mine in, wait for weeks and pay shipping costs.

That’s what I call Customer Service. Service with a capital S. Especially considering the fact that the printer only cost GBP 47.99 (less than $100).
Well done Samsung.

Update 04.15.2008: The new (refurb?) unit arrived today. Hats off, Samsung Customer Care. :-)

I’m A Geek, I Love Numbers

0 comments Filed in Geekery•Music•Online Tagged with last.fm•Nerdery•Numbers•Online Stat Nerds•Stat Nerdism•Stats•Twitter April 10th, 2008

Compulsory to the heart and soul of every ~~nerd~~ geek is the love for numbers. One of the few services I actually do pay for and even regularly check is Last.fm. Every Monday, sometimes even on Sunday night, I check what I listened most to in the preceding week and also check my all time stats. With more than 80.000 tracks scrobbled to my profile, time after time all time stats like these make me grin.

But there is better.

And to continue the number game, even though I still am not sure whether to be proud or not of my Twitter hate/love relationship, here’s some tweetscan stuff. From my active and my inactive twitter account. Before you ask why I have 2 accounts, I’ll explain you the stuff you aren’t interested in anyway: my first account was a residue of the personal blogging area. A twitter account in the category of noise. Loaded with lots of personal ~~internet drama~~ memories. I wanted to and had to move on some day. My actual account still is noise, just much less.
But the important thing about both graphs is that I actually might have to listen to all my friends and try to get a regular life schedule. Not have the period from 0:00 to 04:00AM be my most active period of the day.