Blog Renovation

Last Saturday, I decided to apply the finishing touches to my blog template. If I knew then of the headaches it would cause, I wouldn’t have started it. Here are the changes:

NAV BAR
This includes the decorated columns on both sides. Somehow the source file was missing when I first used this template from Bloggerstyles. Fortunately I came across it. It took me a whole night to fix this. It turns out that that Flickr and Photobucket offers the file only in resized versions and not the original if it’s more than 1024 x 768. I used Skydrive instead to host the file (and yet Internet Explorer refuses to display it).

TWITTER UPDATES

I got this idea from another template on Bloggerstyles and copied the code. Thankfully it wasn’t that hard to integrate.

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Tech Rush: Ubuntu (Linux) - The Underdog

A few days ago, I posted about my experience and opinions using Microsoft Windows and Apple Snow Leopard.

[UPDATE: I've since upgraded to Windows 7 and it really does improve on Windows Vista. But it's more of streamlining changes. I don't really see why Microsoft says its a brand new OS rather than an update to Vista.]

It turns out, there was still another OS very capable of providing what 'average' users require - Linux. Basically how I understand it is that Linux is the source code of an operating system. Many developers have made their own user interfaces around the Linux code. The interface I've recently been hearing about often is Ubuntu.

I've really looked down on Linux for the past years. There are many laptops sold here at a cheaper price often come with Linux as the operating system. I snobbed those models.

I don't really know why, but the news about Ubuntu in various websites and from twitter users made me curious. Without even looking at it's webpage I downloaded the installation file, burned it to a DVD and installed it.

I was surprised! What I thought was a 2nd rate OS, turned out to be a quite capable one. It automatically installs many programs to get you started immediately. There's Firefox for browsing, Open Office which takes the place of Microsoft Office and many, many others.

It boots up a lot faster than windows, it can use as litte as 2.5GB of disk space, it uses less memory, it'll run on almost any machine with ease, and Ubuntu and most of the software for it is FREE!

The only thing I'm looking for is a good blogging client, and a Linux equivalent of Adobe Indesign. If you make complicatedly long documents or you're a graphic designer maybe Linux isn't for you because Microsoft Office and Photoshop don't have Linux versions. But if you're like me who makes the occasional word document, blogs, chats, tweets, uses Facebook, listens to music... Linux is more than enough.

Sure if you want to customize you're Linux desktop, you may have to go into the Terminal (gasp) which looks like the DOS prompt of decades ago and arm yourself with programming skills. But if you not into that much customizing you'll be content with Ubuntu.

It's FREE!

(PS: This post was made purely in Ubuntu)

Tech Rush: TweetDeck & Digsby

I am still looking for the perfect desktop client for Twitter AND Facebook. There are many Twitter clients that offer full functionality and even additional functions like automatic URL shortening and uploading of pics to twitpic and other similar sites. However, I haven't found a Facebook client (even standalone ones) that completely removes the need to log into Facebook via a browser.

For the meantime, I'm using 2 programs: TweetDeck on the Mac and Digsby on Windows.

TweetDeck - this program runs on Adobe Air which is a kind of mini-OS. The advantage of Air is that applications run the same way on whatever platform. The downside is that programs running on Adobe Air usually use up more memory. TweetDeck offers columns for a variety of feeds. You can have columns for tweets, another one for direct messages, mentions and others. Here you can tweet back, retweet and others. For Facebook, there are columns for the main news feed, photos, videos, etc. You can "like" and comment on posts. Even if the main window is minimized, notifications appear onscreen for a few seconds when there are updates. You can tweet back, retweet, like, comment via these notifications during those few seconds.

I still am looking for additional features on the Facebook implementation: Friends cannot see that you're online and you don't get any notifications when others comment or "like" your posts or the posts you have commented on. The lack of the latter is really what turns me off because I still have to log into Facebook to check for new comments. It supports multiple Twitter accounts but only a single Facebook account. After about 3 hours of use, it's not uncommon to have memory usage reaching 200MB+!

Digsby on the other hand uses the Instant Messenger approach. It's interface is similar to YM and Windows Messenger. It supports YM, AOL, Google Talk, Windows Messenger, and Facebook chat. Online contacts appear in it's window just like YM. Feeds from multiple twitter and Facebook accounts appear as pop-ups where you can tweet, retweet, comment and "like" posts. Your online friends in Facebook can see that you're online, which is a good thing.

A nice feature here is that if you are doing something else while chatting with your contacts, a small pop-up window appears on your chosen corner of the screen showing the most recent message and a space for you to reply. After replying the window disappears allowing you to continue whatever you were doing without switching windows. It also uses less memory than TweetDeck.

The only thing lacking is also the absence of notifications of new comments on your Facebook posts. This is a feature which I really think will be the deal breaker among the social networks clients because this is the only thing that brings me back to the website. Mac compatibility of Digsby is still upcoming so I'm still using TweetDeck on the Mac.

Technorati Tags: tweetdeck,digsby,social networks,facebook,twitter,clients,chat

Tech Rush: Browser Wars

I’ve used the pictured browsers for some time in either Mac or Win [ ] and here are my impressions:

  Microsoft IE [Win only]: It's installed with Windows. That should say it all. I haven't been bothered to use IE for quite a while. It takes up a lot of resources and feels slow. I know that there have been a lot of improvements on it but I don't really think it performs that well. The only reason I don't uninstall it is because there are some websites (usually local ones) that only display properly on IE.

Firefox [Win & Mac]: Firefox is the only browser (so far) that I use in both my PC and Mac. It seems to have the same performance on both OSes. It's faster than IE and it was the first browser I used with tabbed browsing (although all have followed suit). What really makes Firefox indispensable to me is its many addons. Stuff like downloads, saving websites, blocking  ads, weather reports, tweeting, blogging,  etc. etc. are made easier because of the addons. I think it's almost as fast as Safari (more on this later) but a bit slower than Chrome. What really bugs me about Firefox is that it seems to have poor memory management. After hours of use, it isn't unusual to see (via Task Manager [Win]; Activity Monitor [OSX]) it using up to 200+MB of memory even with just 1 tab open!

Safari [Mac only]: it's 64-bit although I really haven't noticed any performance difference. Its faster than Firefox BUT... it seems to load the whole webpage before displaying anything. Contrast that with Firefox which gradually displays parts of a page while it's loading. That alone makes a difference to me since I get to see stuff faster on Firefox even if the full loading of the page completes faster on Safari. It doesn't have addons either but there are work-arounds.

Chrome [Win only]: the newest and fastest of the browsers I've used. I also like its minimalistic interface - no distractions. This has taken the place of Firefox as my primary Windows' browser. Downside is, it doesn't have addons or extensions so there are quite a number of instances where I have to fire up Firefox. Chrome is the only browser I've used that runs tabs in its own memory space. Technically that means that if a webpage goes bad, only that tab should go down. Unlike Firefox and Safari where a badly programmed webpage could stall the whole browser. I haven't really been able to test this feature yet but of the 3 browsers, Chrome has the best memory management structure. I'm looking forward to test the Mac version of Chrome, which is still in alpha testing.

 

 

Technorati Tags: browsers,safari,chrome,explorer,firefox,review,internet,computer