Lifestyle and Emerging Technology In Plain English

Category Archives: Blogging

So. Google’s shutting down Google Reader

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

Frankly I’d not thought about my RSS read­ing pro­cess in a while. I use NetVibes (pic­tured above) as my main reader, and it’s been pretty stable up until today; they pos­ted a note say­ing they’re deal­ing with an influx of new mem­bers — likely emig­rants from Google Reader.

I like NetVibes because it gives me a simple headline-in-a-tile view that makes it easy to quickly scan my news, and NetVibes man­ages my feed sub­scrip­tions.

This is where the pain will be felt by those using Google Reader when the big G shuts it down. Many 3rd party apps for mobile devices use Google Reader as the ‘sub­scrip­tion man­age­ment’ fea­ture of their app. When Google Reader closes on July 1, these apps will have to have in place some sort of replace­ment for sub­scrip­tion man­age­ment, or they’ll break.

Update: If you’re look­ing to migrate your Google Reader sub­scrip­tions to NetVibes, the team at NetVibes have this handy guide. (Thanks Randy!)

For now, this won’t impact me or my news­read­ing habits, but as I men­tioned at the top, I’m rethink­ing my RSS read­ing, and as Dave Weiner states, rethink­ing my use of Free when applied to ser­vices I’m com­ing to depend on.

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Digital Strategy, In the life, Lifestyle Technology, News, On the web, Opinion, Social Media

50 year old infographic shows NASA’s first manned forray into space

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

Loving the way today's NASA image of the day looks on my desktop.

NASA’s Image of the Day Gal­lery provided this cool infographic show­ing Alan Shepard’s brief flight into space — America’s first.

It appeared magic­ally on my desktop cour­tesy of John’s Back­ground Switcher — a cool win­dows desktop wall­pa­per applic­a­tion that man­ages and dis­plays many image sources.

Filed Under: Blogging, Emerging Technology, In the life, Lifestyle Technology, On the web, Photography

WordPress blogging on an iPad just got easier

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

Earlier today, Word­Press released ver­sion 2.7 of their iOS blog­ging cli­ent. And I’m happy to say it works well so far, though I’ve only given it a very simple workout.

Pre­vi­ously I’d tried the Word­Press app but had a num­ber of prob­lems pub­lish­ing from it, ran­dom crash­ing etc. So I nuked it from orbit — the only way to be sure.

And then I replaced it with Blo­g­Press, a paid app.

Blo­g­Press is clean, works well, and has some nice fea­tures such as HTML short­cuts and Tex­tEx­pander integ­ra­tion (a must for any iOS writ­ing plat­form). But Blo­g­Press is really designed to con­nect to more than just Word­Press blogs, including:

- Blog­ger / Blog­Spot
– MSN Live Spaces
– Word­Press
– Mov­able Type
– Type­Pad
– Live­Journal
– Drupal
– Joomla
– Tumblr
– Squarespace
– My Opera

Word­Press for iOS is pretty single-minded — it’s designed to talk to Word­Press blogs (both hos­ted and self-hosted). And the blog­ging func­tion­al­ity is still pretty basic, but the one fea­ture I really appre­ci­ate in the Word­Press app (that’s miss­ing from Blo­g­Press) is the abil­ity mod­er­ate comments.

As well, developers say they’ve killed over 100 bugs and reduced crash con­di­tions, and cleaned up the user inter­face to make it easier to man­age blogs.

So, actu­ally now, I’m using both apps to man­age my Word­Press blog­ging — the free uni­ver­sal Word­Press app, and the paid Blo­g­Press app, mostly for writ­ing and HTML work.

Here’s hop­ing that the Word­Press app con­tin­ues to grow up :)

Full details at the developers blog.

Filed Under: Blogging, Emerging Technology, In the life, Lifestyle Technology, Social Media

I have a new blog! And a contest!

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Brad Grier • 2 Comments

iPad Darkroom Icons Header (480px)

Over the last little while you may have noticed I’ve become a bit iPad cent­ric. To be spe­cific, I’ve been explor­ing using the iPad as a port­able, digital darkroom.

Yes, the iPad doesn’t have a cam­era (for now, maybe in ver­sion 2?), but that shouldn’t stop us from using it to manip­u­late images impor­ted into the iPad.

A few of my Future Shop posts have explored this concept, most recently this series I’ve star­ted on digital dark­room work­flow.

But there’s so much stuff to talk about that I thought it deserved it’s own blog. And now it does:

iPad Darkroom Logo

iPad Dark­room is a place where I’ll start shar­ing inform­a­tion on Apps, Tools and Tech­nique for using your iPad as a core com­pon­ent of digital photography.

I hope you take a look around, it’s still quite new and a little rough in spots — that’ll be fixed up in the com­ing days.

And do feel free to leave your thoughts, here or on the blog itself.

Oh, I almost for­got. To really kick the blog off with a bang, I thought I’d have another blog con­test — with the help from my good friends over at Mac­Phun.

All the details on the con­test are, of course, over at iPad Dark­room. So go! Enter the con­test, and let me know what you think!

Filed Under: Blogging, Contest, In the life, Lifestyle Technology, On the web, Photography

Engine Start

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

Little bit of crop­ping, little bit of col­our pro­cessing, little bit of Tilt Shift. All done on the iPad. I used Cam­era­Bag, Tilt­Shift­Gen, and PhotoPal.

Fun with iOS apps ;)

Filed Under: Blogging, Lifestyle Technology, Photography, Social Media

On the radio…

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

Earlier this week I had great fun! CBC Edmonton’s Peter Brown (who reg­u­larly hosts the after­noon drive-time pro­gram Radio Act­ive) inter­viewed me for a series on Edmon­ton blog­gers and pod­casters called E-Pinion.

We chat­ted about this blog, what got me into blog­ging, life­style tech­no­logy etc. And I men­tioned my Mom a couple of times too.

For your listen­ing pleas­ure, here’s the interview.

Filed Under: Blogging, Doing, In the life, Lifestyle Technology, Social Media, Web

Saving the Internet, one plugin at a time

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

Well, a few posts ago I men­tioned that I’d taken steps to speed up this blog.

Here’s a Ping­dom response time graph show­ing how fast slow this blog was, before I pulled a few plugins.

And here’s what it looks like today.

So, accord­ing to these res­ults, the blog is faster.

And what I’d done wasn’t all that extreme either; just removed a few plu­gins that were request­ing data from external sources — such as the 3rd party font I used to use to lay­out this blog.

Now, the increased speed hasn’t changed my page pos­i­tion in the search engines, nor caused hair to start filling in my bald spot.

But it is nice to know that by mak­ing this minor change, I’m improv­ing the user exper­i­ence for any­one vis­it­ing my blog, and maybe help­ing to save the Inter­net by cut­ting down on the band­width usage, just a bit.

Your thoughts? Did you notice the snappy speed at which this blog loads?

Filed Under: Blogging, Doing, In the life, Lifestyle Technology, Social Media