Tech and life

A few weeks back, I wrote of my frustrations with the recent Google Reader update, particularly the ridiculously wide spacing in list view. Many other bloggers also expressed their dissatisfaction with the update and some suggested alternative feed readers. One very popular suggestion was Feedly. I already knew about it from a post on Blogging Tips back in 2009: Feedly: Blog Reading in Style and I had tried it out then… unfortunately not thoroughly enough. I like to read post titles in list or titles view rather than as a magazine or mosaic layout – I can browse through articles more quickly this way. I didn’t look carefully enough for titles view back then and so persevered with Google Reader. But now people were saying that Feedly does have list view, so I had to look at it again. It does have list view as you can see above, and overall I’m pretty impressed.

It’s easy to get started with Feedly, just load up the extension in your browser then link to Google to import your feeds. I don’t want to do a full review of Feedly – there are plenty of posts out there doing that. Having said that, Feedly has just upgraded to version 8 today with some changes including ‘infinite’ scrolling feeds. There’s a nice summary of the changes on ReadWriteWeb. I’ll just focus on a couple of advantages and disadvantages Feedly has in comparison with Google Reader.

Feedly’s Advantages over Google Reader

1. Choose from a number of different themes. But at the moment, they’re a little dark and some of the fonts a little too small.

2. Nice layout and post title spacing.

3. Marking items as read and changing feed folders is blindingly fast in comparison with Reader. Having said that, the new version of Feedly introduced today has ‘infinite scrolling’ rather than paged views and I find it a little slower to load than before to refresh feeds. One way round that is to just show unread feeds rather than all feeds. To do that go to Change layout shown on the image at the top and select ‘Unread Only’.

4. There are a lot of preferences you can set up to customise Feedly and there are many nice touches which you only discover when working with it. For example, you can mark new posts as read just by clicking on the ‘Unread posts’ shown on the image above – if you can see it (discussed in the Disadvantages).

Feedly’s Disadvantages Compared with Google Reader

1. Can’t filter out posts on the basis of keywords in the post title. Using Google Reader Filter this can be done in Google Reader. Keyword filtering would be a nice addition in Feedly and would have let me filter out all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday posts suffocating my feeds last weekend.

2. Here’s an annoying little thing about Feedly. If you haven’t refreshed the list in a while and you mark the list as read, when you refresh the list all the posts you hadn’t seen will also be marked as read. Google Reader doesn’t do this. You have to remember to Refresh before you mark as read, using the buttons on the right side as shown in the image above.

3. It’s not easy to see the number of Unread posts in your categories because the font size is way to small; and the theme colour can make it pretty much invisible – see above image.

I’m going to contact Feedly on these points and see if they’re considering anything. Having said that, for me the advantages of Feedly outweigh the disadvantages and so I’ll be staying with it. If you use Google Reader and haven’t tried Feedly, I strongly recommend you have a look at it.

I live in the country about 3 km from the nearest telephone exchange so I don’t expect great broadband speeds – the best I get is about 5 to 6Mbps during the day when the load on the network at my ISP and the local load is lower. It drops down to 1 to 2Mbps in the evening when everyone is trying to download or stream media further up the line. So I always try to do my downloading during the day when broadband speeds are better. But there’s another important factor involved in download speed and that’s the server supplying the file or files you’re downloading. I came across this problem recently when trying to download a podcast. I had to give up even though broadband speeds were fine at around 5.8Mbps at the time according to Speedtest.net:

As you can see, despite good broadband download speed, the mp3 file was downloading at crawling pace when I took the screenshot but it slowed further and eventually hung after this. I contacted the webmaster and he confirmed intermittent server side problems. If files are hosted on a busy server, this may slow down access speed. He arranged an alternative mirror location for the file on a different server and that solved the problem.

Server location can also be a factor in download speed. Generally, servers closer to you will give faster download speeds. The Ubuntu Software Center is a good example of how downloading should be arranged, allowing you to pick servers close to you. After that it runs a series of ping tests to find the best mirror for your location so you download from the fastest server.

As you probably know, Google Reader was updated earlier this week. The old internal sharing options were removed and sharing with Google+ brought in. The interface was also rejigged. Here are my thoughts on both.

Change to sharing options

I can understand bringing in sharing to Google+ but to remove the old internal sharing and following options within Google Reader is a shame. I see where they’re going with the tighter integration with Google+ but removal of choice bodes poorly for the future. I just think it would be in their best interests to allow us more choice rather than dictate how they want things to be done with ‘automatic upgrades’. We actually don’t all want to use Google+ or to be forced down the road of using it. Thankfully, you can still enable sharing to other networks. Go to the Gear at the top right, click Reader Settings and click the Send To tab. Select the networks you want and you’ll now have a Send To option at the bottom of each entry with the networks you’ve chosen. There is also a Chrome plugin called ReaderSharer to restore the old sharing options and improve the feed spacing.

New interface

It’s hard to fathom how they got the new user interface so badly wrong. We’re all led to believe Google employs the best minds but the redesigned interface just beggars belief. Google, this is supposed to be an interface to, well, read stuff. So why put in so much white space in List View that I spend more time scrolling than reading? And the colours are so drab – all shades of grey. I just don’t get it and I’m not alone. I know they’re trying to impose some kind of interface consistency with their other apps. We’ll all experience a similar interface in GMail soon after what Google call an ‘automatic upgrade’ but really, I preferred things as they were. Thankfully browser plugins have already been released to remove some of the white space and display more feeds on the screen. Without a Chrome plugin to help, I’m getting just 17 feeds displayed in List View. Install New Google Reader Rectifier and I get 23 feeds, while FixStyleSheet for GoogleReader crams in 32 feeds. But why should I have to install Chrome plugins to get Reader to work the way it used to? Each extension takes up valuable memory. Why aren’t there preferences within Reader to tweak display settings?

It may well be that Google eventually responds to the widespread condemnation and reinstates internal sharing and something resembling the old interface, but I just can’t understand how a company supposedly with a lot of bright people can just get things so badly wrong in terms of user choice and design. If they don’t innovate well, or listen to users’ opinion, and impose badly designed stuff with cut-back choices, it surely doesn’t bode well for their future, or the users for that matter. Developers take note. We need a good Google Reader alternative to show how it should be done.

Any thoughts? As always I’d love to hear what you think.

Delicious

Most of you will probably know that Delicious relaunched under its new owners back in September promising an improved bookmarking service. First thing I noticed after the launch was that there wasn’t much buzz or enthusiasm in the tech blogosphere so that didn’t bode too well. In fact there was a lot more buzz when the sale was announced with people rushing to export all their links.  Anyway, if you’re a regular Delicious user, you’ll know that the service has been an utter disaster since its relaunch and is only now slowly starting to take shape – however it’s still lagging well behind the service I used to know, which wasn’t that great anyway and had stagnated for years. I have to say I’m surprised they launched when they did. They could at least have a taken a leaf from Twitter’s book running the old and new services side by side and giving users a choice until the problems were ironed out. Or just waited until it was right.

At the moment, it’s not possible to bulk rename tags, but doubtless that will come in time.  The old Delicious used to list all tags alphabetically on your ‘my links’ page which I liked. But now we have a truncated list of your most popular tags instead – not good. You can still get an alphabetical listing but it takes a couple of clicks so I’ve resorted to adding the link with all tags sorted alphabetically to my bookmark bar for quick access.

(Update – December 2011: It’s now possible to get an alphabetical listing of tags on the Links page. Thanks Delicious.)

Diigo

In the light of the lack of development of Delicious over the years, I’ve actually been using Diigo as my main bookmarking site for over a year now with Delicious just a backup of those links. It’s possible to save your links on Diigo to Delicious and although this didn’t work for a while after the Delicious relaunch, I note that it is back working again now.

One thing that bugs me in Diigo that I’ve noticed recently is that it’s been set up to display a maximum of 5000 tags. Although it will store more than 5000 tags, when you list your tags sorted alphabetically, it will only list the first 5000. In addition and probably linked to this, annoyingly, the Diigo browser extension won’t auto-complete tags which have names beyond the 5000th in your tag list. So if you want to use a tag say ‘zoho’ that you’ve used in the past, type in ‘zo’ and it won’t autocomplete. Okay, you might say 5000 tags is a bit much but if you use multi word tags, you’ll soon get up there.

(Update – December 2011: This flaw has now been fixed! Thanks Diigo.)

So that’s a quick look at some problems in Diigo and Delicious – if anyone’s interested. Judging by social networks, blogs and podcasts, probably not.

Do you use bookmarking sites any more? Or just search for the information you’re looking for? Drop a comment below.

I listened to a podcast recently which got me thinking about free versus paid software and online services. I’ve blogged about free software and alternatives to commercial programs before but Tracy Holt made a great point on The Techie Geek Podcast 90. Tracy and Russ were discussing freeing up space in web email accounts rather than paying for unlimited storage. Tracy ran through his lengthy routine for archiving emails then admitted he would have been better off paying $50/year for unlimited email storage which he does now:

‘My time is probably worth more than all the time I spent trying to free up space’

He’s right and that applies to software as well as online services, particularly if you run a small office/home office (SOHO). If buying software or online services or upgrading from free to premium versions is going to save you time in the long run, that precious time saved is also going to make you more productive and you should earn more in the same time available. So far this has definitely applied to me in my day job as a freelance copy editor. For example, I’ve invested a small amount in two commercial macros for MS Word which both save me a lot of time in the long run.

MegaReplacer is a batch search and replace macro for Word. You add a bunch of words you want to search for in a file and their replacements, for example, commonly misspelled words and when you run the macro it  goes through the file prompting at each occurrence whether you want to replace it. It’s essential for an editor. Without the macro, you just can’t do that quickly and you’ll most certainly miss some words anyway.

ReferenceChecker is a macro for Word to spot inconsistencies between reference citations in text and the reference list. It’s not important to understand exactly what the macro is doing unless you’re a copy editor, but believe me, it’s a lot quicker than going through the text manually and checking each citation against the reference list, and vice versa.

So particularly if you run a small office/home office, consider investing in commercial software or add-ons and weigh up the differences between premium and free versions of software and services and see if the increased productivity they’ll bring will save you money in the long run.

Have you invested in commercial software or add-ons, or paid for online services to increase productivity? Let us know below.

Search is synonymous with Google. For most of us, when we search, we google and we don’t give a second thought to trying or using any other search engine. Why would we? Google is just fine isn’t it? I’ve been online since about 1998. In those days, I used to read (paper) computer magazines to get the low down on all the best tech products and services to use. I seem to remember them recommending Alta Vista for search when I started, then I think around 1999-2000, Google became the recommended search engine and I switched to that and honestly I haven’t used any other search engine since then.

Why not just use Google?

Frankly, since the introduction of Google+, I’m a little worried that Google is heading to take over almost everything we do online, and collect masses amounts of data on us in the process. Apart from that, I believe Google needs competition to keep it on its toes and the competition needs to be encouraged especially if it’s providing a good service. So I thought it was time to look around and see if anyone else comes close to Google in search. Spurred on by very encouraging recent articles on DuckDuckGo by Rich Menga at PCMech, and Scott Nesbitt at Make Tech Easier, I decided to shun Google search for a couple of weeks and use only DuckDuckGo just to see if it was a viable long term search alternative for me.

So how does DuckDuckGo shape up?

Well DuckDuckGo is actually very good. I like the cleaner, uncluttered interface and better privacy. Definitions when presented are pulled from Wikipedia and shown in a red box at the top and the search results overall are fine for me and I’m sure for most people. Specialist searches are a little different though and actually very good. Here’s my experience:

I’m actually a freelance editor and often have to research published medical reference details. Authors tend to get the detail wrong here or miss out stuff so it’s left to the editor to sort out/check publication details like page numbers, volume number, year of publication. Very often I would just paste the article title into Google and it would come up with the full reference details usually on the first page of results – PubMed is a great source for these details. But when I tried this procedure in DuckDuckGo, I couldn’t get the details I wanted in the results – because in a general search, DuckDuckGo doesn’t go to PubMed. But then I discovered what they call !Bangs, or specialized site searches. There are a whole bunch of these specialized searches as listed here, including PubMed and to launch this, you just type!pubmed along with your article title and it usually pulls up the result. Not strictly true as it actually launches the link and opens PubMed with the result in the DuckDuckGo window. Which brings me to my next point.

Customizable

Settings are great in DuckDuckGo and it’s very customisable. You can elect to have results open in a new window, which is what I prefer. But in the case of bangs discussed above, they open in the same window. A click on the back arrow is needed to get back to DuckDuckGo. So I sent feedback to DuckDuckGo about this last weekend – and got a reply that same weekend – something you wouldn’t get from Google I might add – you can’t actually contact them! They responded:

…there is a strong case that a bang command is an external page by definition and should open in a new window. I’ve added it as a defect in our bug tracking software so I should get to it sometime soon!

Very impressed. Another minor change I made was to turn off highlighted (and clickable) results when you move over them. I often like to copy text straight from the results page and you can’t do this with highlighted results – once you click on the text it follows the link. To turn this off, go to Settings, Color Settings, and turn Highlight from Green (default) to off. Incidentally, once you have DuckDuckGo set up the way you want it, you can save the URL parameters so it will always load that way. I have DuckDuckGo loading in a tab when I start Google Chrome and I’ve added those URL parameters. You can add your own customized parameters in Chrome. Go to Wrench, Options and add it to your start up tabs.

Do you use a Google alternative for search? Bing, Blekko? Have you tried anything else? Or are you happy to stick with Google for the long haul? Drop a comment below.

Incidentally, if you are interested in reading about other Google alternatives, not just in search, here’s a great article on Techie Buzz.

Yesterday I received email notification of a blog comment which I should check was spam and approve or trash. It looked like spam – a couple of words and a shortened URL. But was the link important or interesting? I was a little wary and knew that this could be a security risk, i.e. don’t click a link if you’re not sure where it’s leading or you don’t know the sender. If you come across a shortened URL on Twitter, you can hover your mouse over it and the full URL will often appear – but not always. So what can you do to check out a shortened URL before you click?

Unshorten the link

Paste the link into unfwd4.me or unshorten.com to see the full URL. You may then be able to decide if the link is reputable and worth following. Still unsure? Try the link scanners mentioned below.

Scan the link

Copy the shortened URL into LinkScanner Online or Online Link Scan. They’ll scan the site and alert you if there may be a problem following the link. Or if you have time and want to try multiple antivirus engines, try the scanner at URLVoid.

After you click the link

After you’ve decided to click, browser plugins like McAfee SiteAdvisor and WOT (Web of Trust) provide another tool you can use to alert you of known dubious or untrusted  sites. I use McAfee and have found it to be fine. There are free and paid versions. The download link to the free limited version (SiteAdvisor) is currently at the bottom of their Downloads page. Web of Trust is also highly regarded in this fight against ‘clickjacking’ and avoiding malicious sites.

You don’t have to scan documents to your PC then save them into Evernote organizer in two stages, you can set up your printer/scanner to scan directly into Evernote. I’ve already posted about scanning directly to Evernote with an Epson Perfection 4180 scanner.

I recently got a Canon MP series multifunction printer with built in scanner (MP280) and had no trouble setting it up to scan directly to Evernote. Here’s what you do.

When you installed your Canon printer drivers and utilities on the CD which came with the printer, you would have installed MP Navigator, the application which, among other things, allows you to scan directly to an application, in our case Evernote. Switch on your printer and place a test sheet on the scanner tray. On your PC desktop click Start, All Programs and navigate to Canon Utilities and click on that and open the MP Navigator folder.

For me it was actually called MP Navigator EX 4.0 but you may have a different version. Then double click the executable file in that folder (again for me it was MP Navigator EX 4.0 as shown above) and that should open Canon MP Navigator. If you intend to scan stuff frequently to Evernote, you could copy a program shortcut to your desktop. To do this, drag that executable to your desktop while pressing the Ctrl key (this makes a copy rather than moving it).  Once MP Navigator is open, click on One-click at the top right and you should see the options below.

Click on Custom and that should open a box like below. If it starts to scan now, just click Cancel.

This is the part where we select Evernote as the program we want to open the scan with. So under the section Application Settings, click Set as shown above, then navigate to your Evernote folder (for me it was C:\Program Files\Evernote\Evernote but it may be different for you. You’re looking for the Evernote executable file as shown below:

Select that file and click Open. Evernote will now appear as the application in the Open with: box on the previous screenshot. Click Apply in the bottom left corner to save Evernote in that box, then click the green Scan button in the bottom right corner and if all goes well the test page should be scanned and Evernote will open to show it.

By the way, now this is set up, in future when you click Custom, everything will happen automatically so make sure you have your page loaded ready for scanning.

A few months ago, I posted on the top recommended Google Chrome extensions which I compiled from recommendations across the blogosphere. I thought I’d now list the extensions I find most useful, i.e. the ones I’ve installed that I use pretty much on a daily basis.

Several of my top extensions are also in the earlier post – LastPass, Clip to Evernote, and Shareaholic so I won’t say any more on them. Here’s the rest.

Diigo

I’ve been bookmarking sites with the Diigo extension for quite a while now. Diigo lets you import all your bookmarks from Delicious at the start and then you can set it up to send copies of subsequent bookmarks back to Delicious so you have all your bookmarks on two independent sites. This is the extension I use the most… by a long way. I wrote a post on bookmarking versus searching some time ago which you might like to read.

SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor will give you a safety rating for the site you have just loaded in your browser.

SEO Site Tools

SEO Site Tools gives the page rank at a glance and some SEO info on the site your browsing. There’s more info on it here.

Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus works away in the background to remove ads and pop-ups from websites as you browse.

iReader

Fed up with all the clutter on sites? Then install the iReader extension for distraction-free reading. The iReader icon appears at the right end of your browser address bar – click it to remove all the clutter and leave a page that’s a joy to read. The options let you disable images too if that’s what you want. You can also print the page without all the clutter. And if you’ve installed a pdf utility like doPDF, you can even print the decluttered page to a pdf. After installation, doPDF appears in your Print menu so you now have the option to print to a pdf format file. Here’s a post about using iReader.

Google Quick Scroll

The Google Quick Scroll extension helps you find what you’re looking for on a webpage faster, particularly on long webpages. I’ve written about it before here.

Google Reader Filter

If you spend a lot of time in Google Reader, then Google Reader Filter is a must. It cuts out entries you don’t want to know about and highlights ones you do. Again I’ve written about it before here and it now works in Chrome.

Facebook Disconnect

Facebook Disconnect prevents Facebook from tracking you when you visit a site which uses Facebook Connect.

Google Calendar – weekend coloration

Weekend coloration adds a different colour for Saturdays and Sundays. Not very distinctive on the new look Google Calendar though.

Unburner

If you click through to posts from Google Reader, you’ll see a lot of feedburner ‘junk’ appended at the end of the URL. Unburner removes all the unnecessary stuff so you get a clean URL for bookmarking. I’ve blogged about it here.

Well that’s my roundup of my useful Google Chrome extensions. I’d love to hear about any others that you find awesome. Drop a comment below.

A few weeks ago, there was a flurry of posts about the Chrome extension Super Google Reader which lets you read RSS feeds in full form in Google Reader. Some blogs only give truncated feeds and you have to visit their website for the full post so I thought I’d give it a try. Once I had reopened Reader, I had access to full RSS feeds using the Readable tab which Super Google Reader had added at the top of the posts as shown below.

But I noticed that Google Reader had slowed down considerably after I enabled that extension. Refresh, Mark All as Read and changing folders were all unacceptably slow so I ran through my slow Reader checklist which I’ve already posted just to ensure that the Google servers weren’t at fault. They weren’t. When I disabled Super Google Reader, speed was back to normal.

So if you’re experiencing Google Reader to be slow and you’re using Super Google Reader, try  disabling the extension and see if that helps.