Classical Bookworm 3.0

After three days of tinkering this blog is now ready for action at Wordpress.com! The new address is, not surprisingly, classicalbookworm.wordpress.com. This is my third blog home in 7 (!) years of blogging, and I have to say this move was much easier than the last one. The import itself was almost instantaneous, which is pretty impressive when you are talking about 1,139 posts and 5,417 comments.

The reason it took some tinkering is that I had to remove all of my Amazon Associates links, since Wordpress.com only allows non-profit blogs. I think that is fair considering it’s a free service. You may see the occasional ad here but they are generated by Wordpress to pay their bills. To remove my Amazon Associates links I had to export my blog from Blogger and use some fancy search and replace in Notepad++ to turn them into plain Amazon links, which are allowed. Other than that I didn’t have to do anything to the export file and Wordpress slurped it up in one gulp. If I hadn’t had those links to fix I could have imported my blog directly from Blogger to Wordpress without exporting it. Nothing could be easier!

The rest of the tinkering had to do with setting up the new blog’s design and structure, and tidying up my categories. I moved all my sidebar links to a “page,” which you can find by clicking on “Bookish Resources” above. Since leaving Typepad I have been hosting my images at Photobucket so I didn’t have to mess with them, but all of my internal links are now broken and I will have to go through them one by one to fix them. It’s laborious but it’s also fun to rediscover old posts. I’ve probably forgotten most of what I have posted here so working on old posts is like finding books on my bookshelves that I’d forgotten I had.

I do have to apologize for the small font used by my new Wordpress theme. I was not aware of it at first because I have my minimum font size in Firefox set to 15. It looked perfectly readable to me until I loaded the page in another browser! If it’s a problem I suggest setting a minimum font size in your browser options. In future I might opt to pay for CSS access in Wordpress but at the moment I am enjoying the simplicity of using a stock theme and not spending too much time on design. Once I get started on CSS it’s hard for me to stop!

Do let me know if you find anything amiss, or if there is anything you would like to see here. Onward!

Censorship: Coming to a blog near you!

A few days ago when I blogged about Twitter’s new country-specific censorship capability, I did not know that the platform I was blogging on had already initiated a similar program three weeks earlier. Apparently the only indication of this fact was a new help article published on January 9th. There was no official announcement, and no attempt at transparency as there is from Twitter. Google does not say what will happen to censored blogs. Will they simply be invisible or will there be a notice saying they are censored? Will Google be publishing the take-down orders they receive the way Twitter will?

In any case, what this means is that if I blog about human rights, for instance, my blog could be blocked in any number of countries, and I may never even know it. But I am even more concerned about bloggers in those countries. When Wordpress was approached by China in 2006 to censor blogs, they were also asked to hand over user information. To their credit, they refused, and Wordpress blogs are still blocked in China (though the blocks are easily circumvented). But consider the implications if China made a similar request of Google. Google, along with Twitter, has now committed to obeying local laws, even if they violate universal human rights, in exchange for permission to operate in that country. If a country like China were to make a law that a web service must not only censor but supply information on all violators, how can a web company with resources invested in that country refuse? Now add in Google’s new “privacy” policy, which amalgamates user data across almost all Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google+, and of course Blogger. It is conceivable that a blogger who violates some censorship law might end up having their email, the videos they watched, and their friends’ names on Google+ handed over to their government. Now a service that used to give ordinary people a voice will not only take away that voice but could potentially denounce users to governments that imprison, torture, and kill dissidents.

I was already thinking of leaving Blogger but this is definitely the last straw. I do not want my blog to be subject to censorship laws in other countries, nor do I want to support a company that carries out censorship for the sake of ever-increasing profits. I am inclined to move to Wordpress, which has already refused to censor and so is blocked in several countries (though as I said above, it is easy to circumvent those blocks and indeed Wordpress is popular in China). They even state explicitly on their website that they support freedom of speech and will not censor blogs (with the usual exceptions of spam, pornography and hate speech). The only question is whether to use Wordpress.com or self-hosted Wordpress. Since I left Typepad in 2009 I’ve gotten used to not paying for my blog, but free Wordpress.com is somewhat limited in design and widget options. Moreover, with US media companies trying to clamp down hard on copyright infringement, I may be better off locating my blog in Canada. I do like the idea of owning (or at least renting) my own little piece of cyberspace, but I’m not sure I want to deal with the technicalities of running Wordpress on my own. I will have to investigate the options, but I certainly will be moving this blog in the near future. Stay tuned…

Duolingo: Mixing it up

Wouldn’t you know it, a day after I post all about Duolingo they start changing things! I’ve been working away on my lessons and it seems every time I look up I notice something new. The most obvious change is that the main page now has bolder graphics for the skill area “chips.”

It was fine before but this new design definitely makes it easier to see your progress in each skill area. As a person over 40, I have to say that bigger type and graphics is always a good thing.

There have also been changes to the web translation module. You can now see the previous sentences you’ve worked on, including your translations and the option to see other translations. This provides context at a glance, which is very convenient. It is also now possible to edit your translation after seeing other people’s answers. This is brilliant. Correcting your own work is a great way to learn.

One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post is how Duolingo mixes up the lessons and even the sentences in each lesson. You don’t progress by completing one skill and moving on to the next, like chapters in a book. After you get the basics in one skill, other skill areas open up and you are encouraged to work on them for a bit and then go back. Duolingo highlights the recommended area to work on and if you follow that path you will do a lot of bopping back and forth. This shows that the Duolingo people have really done their homework because it is precisely what the brain needs to form long-term memories and associations. The same pattern appears within each lesson. There you will be presented with a sentence to translate into English, move on to something else, and then get the previous sentence again but this time having to do the more difficult task of translating it into Spanish or listening and typing it out in Spanish. It is this element of surprise that makes the brain take notice and go to the trouble of putting that information into long-term memory. You know things are going to come up again, but you don’t know when or how, so you have to pay close attention to everything. Add to this the daily practice sessions and you have a system designed for learning success.

I can say a bit more about the social side of Duolingo now that I’ve found and followed a few people. Duolingo recommends people who are at about your level and when you follow them, your activity stream shows all of their accomplishments too. The top of the screen also shows how you rank in points and sentences translated compared to the people you follow. I think the idea is to motivate people with competition, but it doesn’t do much for me. There isn’t much emotional payoff when you are competing against total strangers whom you know nothing about and cannot interact with. I think those factors may change, though, since it appears there will be ways to connect via Twitter and Facebook, though those tools don’t seem to be fully operational yet. If it were possible to get to know people and when people I know are let into Duolingo, it might be more fun to race against them. However, I think Duolingo might get more mileage out of encouraging cooperation rather than competition. After all, part of the reason people are clamouring to get into Duolingo is because they love the idea of helping to translate the web together. Judging by all the desperate “Let me in!!” tweets directed at Duolingo, that motivation seems to be quite strong. It might be more effective to find ways for people to collaborate in their learning or translating instead of competing. I’m not sure what that would look like but I’m sure the clever people at Duolingo can figure it out!

Duolingo: First Impressions

After much begging and pleading I finally got my much coveted Duolingo invitation. In case you missed my previous post on the subject, Duolingo is a web-based application that teaches people languages by getting them to translate web pages. How this is possible will become apparent as you read on.

After playing with it for about a week my first is impression is: WOW! The user interface is absolutely flawless. Everything is clear, visually appealing, easy to navigate, and bug-free. I think the Duolingo people must be perfectionists to call this a beta. Perhaps they are not ready for a lot of traffic but the product itself looks more finished than a lot of things I’ve paid good money for.

As for the pedagogy, it is equally impressive. In the beginning you are led through a series of lessons that teach you different language skills and get you translating right away (see below—click image to enlarge).

Each lesson and translation you do earns you points and “unlocks” subsequent skill areas. You can also skip through a skill by taking a test. If you make too many mistakes you have to go back and do the lessons.

The lessons cover every aspect of language: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. They even cater to visual learners by introducing some vocabulary with pictures. However most vocabulary is presented in writing, with mouseover popups to explain each word.

Users are asked to translate from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. When translating to Spanish it provides buttons for accented characters in case your keyboard is not set up for Spanish.

For a little variety there are multiple choice questions in both directions.

The lessons also include listening…

…and speaking.

Obviously these require the use of speakers and a microphone or headset. If you do not have a microphone you can adjust your settings so that Duolingo won’t asks you to speak. I don’t know how well it understands what I say but I find that if I speak too quickly it asks me to try again. As for Duolingo’s voice, it is a computer generated female voice with a neutral Latin American accent. It voices all the Spanish text in the lessons, not just the listening exercises, so you get a lot of listening practice. I find it quite easy to understand, though of course the intonation and rhythm are not completely natural. I can understand some Spanish already so I can’t say whether a total beginner would be able to understand it at first.

Each skill area also includes simple translation tasks from live websites. Again you can use the mouseover popups to see definitions of any words you don’t know. The more you use the popups, the less difficult the subsequent translations will be, and vice versa.

As you can see, Duolingo provides you with a link to the website so you can check the context of the sentence, and it also shows you thumbnails of any images that might be relevant. After you have taken a stab at the translation, Duolingo shows you some other people’s translations and presents you with one of them to rate.

This is where the power of crowdsourcing is unleashed. According to Duolingo’s creators, by soliciting multiple translations and then getting multiple users to rate them, Duolingo can generate translations that are good as what you would get from professional translators.

Duolingo has other features as well. It recommends daily review and if you skip a day, Duo the owl starts to cry, so it’s best to practice every day! If you make a typo or error it tells you what you did wrong, and if you make too many mistakes you have to do a little extra practice. Every time you reach a learning milestone you see a splash page with a big bright gold ribbon and hearty congratulations, with the option to share your success on Twitter or Facebook. It may not seem like much but it really is encouraging. One small detail I really appreciate is that after you type or speak a response, the focus of the page moves to the “Check” and “Continue” buttons so you can just hit Enter to proceed without having to use the mouse.

I haven’t tried Duolingo’s social features yet. The website has a section where you can ask questions that others can answer (more crowdsourcing!), and each skill area also has its own questions section. You can also follow other users and view their progress. I don’t know whether there will be opportunities for interaction as well. There is an option to enable Facebook Connect so perhaps that is where you can chat with your new Duolingo friends.

The screen scrape at the top of this post only shows a fraction of the skill areas available. There are 44 in all for Spanish, and it is going to take me quite a while to get through them all. I don’t know what happens after that or how fluent I will be at that point. The lessons do cover all the parts of speech and most verb tenses. I presume that once you get through all the lessons all you do is translate, but perhaps they have other surprises prepared.

One thing I would like to do after getting through the Spanish lessons is to try another language from scratch to see what that is like for a total beginner. I already know some Spanish so the lessons have been quite easy so far. The only other language available right now (other than English) is German, which is fortunately a language I would like to learn. They are also planning to add French, Italian and Chinese (by which I presume they mean Mandarin) in the future. I am not too interested in Italian but I could stand to brush up on my French and I’d love to learn Mandarin. I have the feeling I will be spending a lot of time on Duolingo!

If you want to try Duolingo you can get on the waiting list here. It can take a while to get in (unless you try some creative grovelling like I did), but it’s worth the wait!

For more see Duolingo: Mixing it up.

Anti-social networking

I’m in a bit of a quandary. I love socializing online but it seems that as time goes on the big social networking sites are becoming more and more invasive, controlling, exclusive, and downright anti-social. First it was Facebook with its data mining, online tracking, and ridiculously complex privacy options. Did you know that even if you log out of Facebook it is still tracking your every move online? It can even share your surfing activities unless you figure out how to turn that off. And that’s just today’s trick. Tomorrow they will find a new way to collect data about you and you’ll have to go through the same exercise again if you want to protect your privacy.

Then there is Google+ which initially seemed like a much freer alternative to Facebook, until it turned out that it was designed as an “identity service.” With the recent harmonization of the Google privacy policy, that means that they can now track your activities across the entire Googleverse, as well as any page with a +1 button on it. Add to that the idiotic “real name” policy whereby anyone who tries to sign up with an unusual name or pseudonym can be suspended and their other Google services frozen. You could create a hundred spam accounts with “normal” sounding names with no problem but if your parents were hippies and named you Starflower your account will be flagged and you will be asked to submit government-issued ID. That’s like a coffee shop asking for your passport before letting you chat with your friends. It’s draconian and excludes a lot of people who have perfectly legitimate and sometimes life-and-death reasons for not using their legal name online. Moreover, now you cannot even create a Google account without joining Google+ and providing a “real” name. This applies to Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, the entire Googleverse. If you have anything to say that you do not want publicly associated with your legal name, Google is no longer the place to go.

Now Twitter, which has been credited with helping dissidents under repressive regimes to organize protests, is getting into the censorship business. They have announced that any government that wants to censor tweets on certain subjects or by certain users in their country can do so if they supply the appropriate paperwork. Twitter says “the tweets must flow,” just not the ones that any government finds inconvenient. Some have pointed out that Twitter is being quite transparent about this, compared to some websites (like Yahoo) that censor silently. Tweets won’t just disappear, they will be grayed out with a message that it has been banned in your country. But for a company that garnered such fame by facilitating the Arab Spring to now collaborate with governments to censor on demand seems particularly monstrous. Freedom of expression is a universal human right, not to mention a constitutional right in Twitter’s home country, so why are they denying that right to others?

I seem to have painted myself into a lonely corner with my ethical objections to these giant social networks. There are certainly alternatives. There’s Diaspora, a distributed, open source social network where you fully own and control your own data. It’s great but the problem is that about 99% of the people on it are software developers talking about software development. There is also identi.ca, which is an open source alternative to Twitter, but is also dominated by techie types. There are plenty of great subject-specific web communities out there, but obviously they don’t offer the convenient one-stop-shopping of the big social networks. Then there is the little problem of the good friends I have already made, mainly on Twitter. Just moving on and leaving them behind is not an option.

I honestly don’t know what to do. It does seem as though the free and open internet we used to know and love is being eroded, bit by bit. Both governments and corporations are getting more and more control over what we can do, share, and be online. The question of who owns the internet is being answered by those with the money and political influence to stake a claim in cyberspace. At the same time the open internet movement is strong, and as we saw with the SOPA/PIPA protest, the virtual masses are aware and willing to stand up for a free internet.

I am faced with the age old question of whether to vote with my feet or try to create change from within. I’ve seen some people leave Google+ in protest and others stay to fight the good fight. I cannot say which is better. It remains to be seen what will happen on Twitter after today’s #twitterblackout boycott. Perhaps people will decide to up and leave for identi.ca, Disapora, and other free and open social networks. It doesn’t seem too likely though. It also seems highly unlikely that Twitter would bow to pressure, refuse to censor, and allow itself to get banned in every country that stifles dissent. Those are some pretty big markets we’re talking about.

I guess I will just have to wait and see and try to learn more. I recently started reading the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog, which explores all these issues in detail. At the very least we should be well-informed about the forces that are shaping our online lives.

Learn a language while you translate the web

I was listening to Spark yesterday and heard about Duolingo, a new web project that aims to translate the entire web with volunteers who want to learn a new language. The way it works is that Duolingo presents sentences in the new language and the user tries to translate the sentence into their mother tongue. If you don’t know a word you can mouse over it and a suggestion will pop up. Computers are very good at translating individual words but terrible at putting them together into meaningful sentences, so that is what the human part of this equation contributes. How much you mouse over the words determines the complexity of the sentences you get, so the experience is always tailored to your level of proficiency.

According to creator Luis von Ahn (who also invented ReCaptcha, which helps digitize books), people are actually learning languages on Duolingo as quickly as they would using conventional methods. The system also asks people to vote on the best translations for each sentence, and they say the results are as good as you would get from professional translators.

Since I am interested in learning languages and like to play on the web I am very eager to try Duolingo, but it is still at the private beta stage. All you can do is submit your email address and get on the (reportedly massive) waiting list for an invitation. So far only Spanish, German, and English are available, but they plan to add more languages as they work out the bugs.

At this point Duolingo is entirely free with no ads, and von Ahn wants to provide translations for free at least for non-commercial content. However, Von Ahn has a habit of getting bought out by Google and it’s hard to imagine every web page being translated into every language without Google-sized computing power behind it. But it’s clear that von Ahn is not doing this to make his fortune but to allow the people of the world to understand each other. Perhaps this is the beginning of Web 3.0, where the world wide web will be truly accessible to the whole wide world. I can’t wait to try it and will report back when I do. In the mean time, watch the introductory video and sign up!

My little low-tech e-reader

As we all know, e-readers are all the rage right now. E-books are flying off the virtual shelves, and according to reports, there is hardly a Christmas tree in the world right now without an e-reader under it. This is definitely the year e-books went mainstream. My library is lending out Kobos and even my murder mystery-loving landlady has a Sony Reader now. I resisted as long as I could but as a lover of both techie gadgets and books it was only a matter of time before I jumped on the bandwagon.

I resisted in part because I did not want to get trapped in a corporate walled-garden where I could only buy e-books from one particular store in one particular format. Not that I had any intention of paying to rent an e-book (one never really owns a commercial e-book), but devices like that tend to be unfriendly to public domain and library e-books. Yes, the various vendors offer bazillions of free e-books and you can download programs to convert public domain e-books into the appropriate format, but that’s just not good enough. The big name readers were out of the question.

Much to my surprise, I found that there are quite a lot of alternative e-readers out there. These are e-readers with no strings attached—no exclusive affiliation an e-book store, and better support for different formats. I won’t even try to name them because there is such a variety, and that is not even counting the alternative tablet and mini-tablet computers that can be used as e-readers. The powers that be would like us to think that we must choose between two or three megabrands, but that is not the case.

After much sleuthing and comparing features and reading reviews, I finally settled on a humble but able e-reader that does exactly what I want without making me work for it. I chose the Ectaco jetBook. Never heard of it? Neither had I until I went on a quest to find every available e-reader. The jetBook is more popular in Europe because of its multilingual ability. That is one of the main reasons I bought it. It can display a plethora of languages including right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. Since I am interested in learning languages that was important to me. No other e-reader supports as many languages as the jetBook; indeed I could not find any others that supported non-Latin alphabet languages, and I gather that many of them have trouble with anything other than English. Ectaco is a company that specializes in translation devices and software, so language support is naturally a priority for them.

The other main reason I chose the jetBook is its pragmatism. For starters, the hardware is generic. Aluratek also makes an e-reader using the same device but different firmware. For me the “design” or “style” of my e-reader is irrelevant, so if they can keep the price down by using an existing technology, that’s fine with me. The screen is a 5” reflective LCD, which means it does not have the annoying page-turn flash of e-ink readers and does not cause eye strain like the backlit tablets. The pages turn instantly, and I can read it outside without glare. The buttons, of which there are many since it is not a touch device, are crisp and intuitive. Just about anyone could start using it right out of the box without much trouble.

As for the firmware, the jetBook is incredibly flexible. It supports more e-book formats than any other e-reader, including Adobe DRM, which many libraries use. I especially like the fact that it can “reflow” PDF e-books, basically reading them as text files, though it does preserve tables and figures. Not all e-readers can handle PDFs that way (or any way, for that matter). As I mentioned before the jetBook can display many languages, and it also includes a few language dictionaries, but they can only be accessed while reading a txt file and are limited to common words. An advanced language learner would still need a conventional dictionary standing by, but that would be true of any other e-reader as well. The jetBook also supports mp3 audiobooks (or music), but it lumps all the files together in one menu so it’s not quite as slick as I might wish if it were my primary audiobook reader. As it is my Zune (with the help of Overdrive) does a great job of playing audiobooks so I don’t need the jetBook for that.

Managing books on the device could not be simpler. There is no software to install; one simply connects the jetBook to the computer and uses the computer’s file manager to move files around. The jetBook only has a small built-in memory but you can add an SD card of up to 16GB, which is enough for several lifetimes’ worth of books. On the SD card you can create as many folders and subfolders as you like, arranging and rearranging them in any way that suits you. I really like a device that does not tell me how to organize my files.

As you can see, simplicity and openness are the hallmarks of the jetBook. It lacks some of the bells and whistles of the big name e-readers, and costs a little more since it is not subsidized by e-book sales, but if you are looking for a device that does not put any obstacles between you and your e-books, this may be the e-reader for you. When I bought mine I was not even sure that I would get much use out of it. I do not travel or commute so when would I need such a thing? As it turns out, it has many uses even at home. I’ve used it to read e-books from the library, online PDF e-books and articles that I did not want to read on the computer, and public domain books that the library does not have or that are simply more convenient to load on the jetBook and keep for as long as I like. I still do most of my reading from paper books and audiobooks, but there are many cases where the jetBook is the best way to read something and then I am very glad to have it.

If you’d like to know more, check out the Ectaco website, and to see the jetBook in action watch the video tour below. Just note that you can get a better price than this reviewer did by buying directly from Ectaco.

E-book or E-scroll?

Here is a very interesting discussion of why the e-book is really a step backwards in reading technology. Readers (the human kind) do a lot more with books than just start on page one and read each page in sequence until they hit the back cover. The popularity of e-books and e-readers suggests that this is exactly what many people do with many books, but it won’t do for serious study (and enjoyment) of books. The codex is still the best reading technology we have.

In his “Confessions,” which dates from the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine famously hears a voice telling him to “pick up and read.” He interprets this as a command from God to pick up the Bible, open it at random and read the first passage he sees. He does so, the scales fall from his eyes and he becomes a Christian. Then he bookmarks the page. You could never do that with a scroll….

But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn’t be done.

God knows, there was great literature before there was the codex, and should it pass away, there will be great literature after it. But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience. And until I hear God personally say to me, “Boot up and read,” I won’t be giving it up.

—Lev Grossman, From Scroll to Screen

via The Iconic Books Blog

MegaReader

Isn’t part of the point of reading to make the world go away? :D

 

via The Well-Read Man

New Year, New Look

When I moved to Blogger in the summer of 2009, the easiest way to set up a good-looking blog was to download a free template from one of the many template repositories online. The template I picked was lovely but even then is was not compatible with some of Blogger’s newer features and required some tweaking to get it to work. That incompatibility has gotten worse as Blogger, in all its awesomeness, has continued to add new features. There are several things not working now and it is beyond the point where I can tweak it back to life. So, it’s time for a change.

I could do what I did before and download another groovy template (how about this one?), but instead I think I will take advantage of Blogger’s new Template Designer. By using the built-in design tool I can avoid future incompatibility issues and save myself some coding as well. Things might go catawampus for a bit as I convert to the new template, but it shouldn’t be long before it’s all sorted out. I hope you all enjoy the new look!

Search and Serendipity

When I started this blog, near the end of the dark ages now known as Web 1.0,  I used to search for information about books. Google was my best friend, then as now, and through it I discovered many wonderful things and shared them on this blog. That’s really how blogging got started, according to some, with people trawling the internet and bringing together links that other people might find interesting. There was a name for that kind of blog: the filter.

That was all well and good when there were a few expert filters and lots of followers (not that I am an expert or ever had lots of followers; I speak in generalities). Now that web 2.0 is in full swing, everyone can be a filter. Sharing has become an integral part of searching, like exhaling after inhaling. It’s easy, it’s social, and it’s fun. Almost from birth we humans have a natural inclination to say “Hey, look at this!” whenever we find something interesting. For all we know that is how language got started. Given this propensity, web 2.0 was inevitable, and it’s no wonder it is so popular. We like to share and we like it when people share with us.

Serendipity is particularly delightful to us. One of the usual arguments in favour of shopping at bookstores and borrowing from libraries, as opposed to their electronic alternatives, is serendipity, the possibility of running across a book that you never knew existed but that has turned out to be wonderful. Essential to the pleasure of serendipity is that you weren’t looking, something just appeared in front of you, in the midst of a whole lot of other things you aren’t the least bit interested in. The more haystack there is, the brighter the needle seems to be. Web 2.0 is made for serendipity.

The problem (you know I was leading to this, right?) is that when everyone is a filter, more of the internet gets through until it is effectively the same as the raw web, that is, more than we can take in. But it’s not just the quantity that is the problem. Instead of searching specifically for what I want (and still having plenty of serendipitous discoveries, thank you very much), I now spend a whole lot of time sifting through shared content that I never would have encountered in my targeted searches. That’s not to say this stuff isn’t interesting—I find almost everything interesting to some degree—it’s just that the signal to noise ratio has gone down, and sometimes, with the quality of information out there these days, it’s even hard to tell the difference between the two.

So, is quantity or quality the problem? Clay Shirky famously questioned whether we are suffering from information overload or filter failure. He points out that there has been too much information for any one person to assimilate since the invention of the printing press. Somehow this didn’t bother me when most of it was tucked away in the libraries, archives, and museums of the world, but now that it is piling up in my various electronic inboxes I am feeling the pressure to address it somehow.

I think I might have to agree with Shirky that the problem is filter failure. Google is a good filter, and getting better all the time. You can ask for exactly what you want and zip through the results in a flash. Web 2.0, on the other hand, is a lousy filter. For one thing it is located in multiple places. You can do some aggregating with tools like Google Reader or Yahoo Pipes, but it still doesn’t compare with search in terms of one-stop-shopping efficiency. The other problem is that social media are, well, social. In web 2.0, information is attached to people, which gives it added charm but also makes it hard to opt out. Etiquette and affection complicate our ability to pick and choose information and information streams. It’s a problem we want to have—lots of friends sending us cool stuff—but it can get to be too much of a good thing.

One thing that concerns me is what effect this shift from search to serendipity has on us intellectually and personally. It’s a shift from active to passive engagement with information, from following our own internal impulses to being led by the flashing pixels before our eyes. Speaking for myself, I’m starting to feel like I’ve lost my way in cyberspace. I’m like Odysseus’ scouts on the island of the Lotus Eaters, who are enjoying the fruit so much that they forget they are supposed to be going somewhere. Where was I going? Oh ya, the classics! Where did I put my oar?

I really don’t know what the solution is. I try to cut back on blog subscriptions and Twitter follows, and then I find some great new people and I’m back to square one. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining—this is a “high class problem” if ever there was one. But at the same time I take my intellectual life seriously and right now it is definitely off course and drifting. I have long been concerned with respecting our planet’s finite resources but haven’t really given much respect to my own. The possibilities of the internet are limitless, but mine are not; I must learn to distinguish the two! I need to be my own Greek hero and drag myself back to the ship to continue my journey. I just hope the Skylla doesn’t get me!

“say everything” by Scott Rosenberg

say everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s
Becoming, and Why it Matters
Scott Rosenberg
Crown Publishers, NY
9780307451361

When I discovered blogging some five and a half years ago, I finally found my niche in cyberspace. At the time I had been sick with M.E. for a few years and was looking for ways to interact with the outside world using a minimum of energy. The other online options at the time were either too flighty and flammable (listservs and bbs) or too disconnected (the personal home page) for my liking. In the blogosphere I found the best of both worlds: my own home base where I could say what I wanted to say and also be connected to a whole world of other bloggers doing the same thing.

That’s exactly the kind of blogging that is celebrated in Scott Rosenberg’s say everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming, and Why it Matters.  Rosenberg painstakingly charts the growth of blogs, from the very first custom-coded online diaries, right up to the election of President Obama, using the stories of notable blogs and bloggers to illustrate the many faces of blogging. Don’t get the impression that the book is mostly concerned with the “big” blogs, though. This is a social history, and the author makes it clear that what is so wonderful about the blogosphere is the totality and diversity of the human voices it contains.

Rosenberg spends some time dealing with the anti-blogger backlash, making short work of just about every criticism you’ve ever heard about blogging. The chapter “Journalists vs. Bloggers” is particularly good, and when he compares the recent record of investigative bloggers to that of the mainstream media (WMDs anyone?), the journalists come off looking pretty incompetent. Unfettered by editors and the news cycle, bloggers can and do dig much deeper than journalists could ever hope to. Before I read the book I would have said that bloggers could never replace reporters; now I am not so sure.

At its heart, though, this book is about the “small” blogger, the one who just wants to say something and hear what others have to say. The critics who say blogs lacks quality miss the point entirely, according to Rosenberg. He uses a quote from blog pioneer Dave Winer to illustrate:

It was a mistake to believe that creativity was something you could delegate, no matter how much better they were than you, because it’s an important human activity, like breathing, eating, walking, laughing, loving.

Just as it is a mistake to stop creating because you are not a Picasso or Vivaldi or Austen, it is a mistake for established artists and media creatives to think that we are after their jobs. It is only journalists who ask whether bloggers are journalists; most bloggers couldn’t care less. The same question gets thrown at the litblogosphere. Professional book reviewers periodically get out of their chairs to thump their chests and declare their vast superiority over book bloggers, and we happily go on talking about books with each other.

The last section on the future and legacy of blogging was the weakest part of the book, but who can predict the future? “Now that we have begun, it’s impossible to imagine stopping” says Rosenberg in an earlier chapter, but given the rapid rate of change of internet technologies, I would hesitate to declare blogging immortal. Some have already said blogging is dead, replaced by less-demanding social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (though these are also notorious revolving doors). They point to the millions of inactive blogs as proof that the fad has passed. That only tells me that many who tried it found it was not for them. Writing is not everyone’s thing, and as Rosenberg says, “the act of blogging is fundamentally literary.” Those who are left behind are the ones who genuinely enjoy writing and reading the writing of others, and I don’t see that impulse ever changing, whatever technological platform is used to accomplish it.

I definitely recommend this book to any blogger interested in the broader context of what they do. This is your story. The book is very well written, and I think it will stand the test of time as a chronicle of the first 15 years of blogging. For a taste, see the book’s website for links to the many blogs mentioned in the book. Perusing them will give you at least a glimpse into blogging’s past. It’s up to us to create blogging’s future, one blog at a time.

UPDATE: I just discovered that the chapter on journalists and bloggers can be read at the say everything site. It's worth reading if you are interested in media issues. Click the "print" link if you don't want to read it with an orange background!

Blogs: Just a Passing Fad

Weblogs are a ‘revolution.’ They’re ‘journalism.’ They’re ‘art.’ They’re, again and again, the next New Thing. To which the only possible response can be: come on, people. . . . How can you not boggle at the level of self-delusion, of self-infatuation, it takes to declare that…the concept will be alive and well a decade from now? That weblog readership will increase a hundredfold in that time?

—Greg Knauss, November 1999 [In say everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters]

Heh.

How to Move a Blog from Typepad to Blogger

When I decided to move my blog from Typepad to Blogger, I went in search of technical information on how to accomplish this. There is no standard format for blog data, and at present Blogger cannot import blogs from other platforms, so I needed to find out how to convert the Typepad format to the Blogger format. What I found was . . . bupkus. I couldn’t find a single page or post on this particular transformation. There was lots of information on migrating from Typepad to Wordpress but nothing on moving to Blogger.

So, armed with congenital stubbornness and everything ever written by Bach, I went through an exhausting process of trial and error. Every time I hit a roadblock I’d search the web for clues and come up with something else to try. Eventually I got the whole thing figured out and I vowed to post the details online in case anyone else wants to make the same move (and I hope they do because Blogger rocks!). It’s my little contribution to the geekosphere.

As it turns out, moving from Typepad to Blogger is not terribly complicated. As the saying goes, it’s easy when you know how. It really comes down to using the right applications at each step in the process. Using the wrong one will get you nowhere, as I found out several times. Here is what worked for me:

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Export your blog from Typepad. (Manage | Import/Export | Export) This exports all of your posts, pages, and comments in Movable Type Import Format. This is a simple text file with UTF-8 encoding, which is standard but it shouldn’t be edited in just any text editor (see below). Details on the structure of the file can be found here (you may need this later on).

Upload your images to an image host with predictable file paths. I opted to use PhotoBucket, though I’m not entirely happy with their file management (you can’t view or search by filename). However it does produce predictable file paths which means you can update the image links in your blog with a simple search and replace (see next step). Picasa, Blogger’s image host, generates random image file paths and so you’d have to update each image link by hand if you went that way. Note that after December 15, 2008, Typepad started using randomly generated file paths for images and so any images posted since then have to be updated manually. Boo for Typepad!

Edit your export file with Notepad++. Editing the Typepad export file with Notepad, Wordpad, or Word will do something to the format that prevents it from being converted to Blogger format later. Notepad++ is free and has advanced search and replace features that are crucial for this sort of work. It also handles accented and other special characters (i.e. Unicode), which the others do not. For safety’s sake, save a version of the file at every stage in your editing. This can help with later troubleshooting. There are a number of things you will want to fix:

Image links. Use search and replace to bulk-update image links to your new image hosting location. Before last December 15th, the Typepad image file path was:

http://user.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/YYYY/MM/DD/image.jpg

Use CTRL-R to open advanced search and replace, check “Regular Expr” and “Wrap,” and uncheck “Selection.” Set up a search and replace following this model:

Search: user.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/200[0-9]/[01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/
Replace: imagehost.com/user/album/
(follow image host’s file structure)

The numbers in brackets represent possible numbers (e.g. 0 or 1 for the first number in a month). Fill in the bolded parts as appropriate. If you’ve been with Typepad for a few years, you might also have images directly in the /uncategorized/ folder. Browse through your export file to make sure you’ve found all the possible locations of your images

Keywords. Keywords in Typepad will become “labels” in Blogger (as will Typepad categories). If you don’t want all your keywords to become labels, you’ll have to delete them. If you only have a few keywords, it is probably easier to remove them in Blogger by selecting all posts and using the “Label Actions” dropdown box.

If you are going to delete your keywords and think you may have instances of “KEYWORDS:” in your text you’ll have to search for them first and alter them in some way so they don’t get involved in the search and replace. Try searching for “KEYWORDS: ” (i.e. with a space after) or “>KEYWORDS:<” (i.e. a separate line in html text) to find these. If you really need to keep them as is you can temporarily append a distinctive set of characters (e.g. $$$) and then remove them afterwards with search and replace.

Here’s how to remove the keywords:

Search (“Regular Expr” & “Selection” unchecked, “Match case” & “Wrap” checked): KEYWORDS:CTRL-M (Note: typing CTRL-M inserts an invisible line break character—you won’t actually see “CTRL-M”)
Replace: KEYWORDS:

This puts the keywords on the same line as the head tag, which is necessary for the following search:

Search (as before but “Regular Expr” checked): KEYWORDS:.*
Replace: KEYWORDS:CTRL-M

Extra line breaks. Until recently Typepad inserted line breaks between paragraphs (and some other tags) in the post HTML, which made editing it easier, but unfortunately Blogger renders these as real line breaks, which creates extra space between paragraphs and and the ends of posts. There can be several of these breaks in a row, so it takes multiple searches to get them all:

Search (“Regular Expr” off): >CTRL-M<
Replace: ><
Search: >CTRL-M CTRL-M<
Replace:><
Search: >CTRL-M CTRL-M CTRL-M<
Replace:><
…and so on until no more are found

Don’t actually put spaces between each CTRL-M—I just did that here so they would be legible. At the end of this process each post should be in one lump of HTML. It’s messy but that’s the way Blogger likes it.

Alternatively, you can set Blogger to ignore line breaks in the post HTML (Settings | Formatting | Convert Line Breaks: No). This just means that if you are composing a post in HTML you will have to code in line breaks (<br />) instead of just hitting Enter.

Your comment signatures. All the comments you left on your own blog will be linked to your old blog’s URL or your Typekey/Typepad Connect profile. Use search and replace to fix these as follows:

Search (“Regular Expr” off): URL: http://user.typepad.com/blog/CTRL-MDate:
Replace: http://www.blogger.com/profile/########CTRL-MDate:

Be sure to try alternative versions of your old URLs with and without a final slash. Repeat for Typekey and Typepad Connect profiles if you ever used them. Find your exact Blogger profile URL from your Blogger Dashboard (View Profile).

Anything else you can think of. Now’s the time to make any fiddly changes to your blog content. It’s a lot easier to search through a single text file than to edit posts individually once they’re in Blogger.

Split up your edited export file, if necessary. The blog conversion application you’ll be using can’t handle files over 1MB. If your edited file is larger than this, split it up at the end of a post, which is marked with 8 hyphens. Each file should have “TITLE:” at the beginning and 8 hyphens at the end.

Convert your edited export file(s). (Almost there!) Use the Googlecode Blog Converter for Movable Type to Blogger. As long as your file isn’t too big and the format hasn’t been corrupted, it should work first try. If you get an error, try converting an earlier version of your edited file to see if you can narrow down where the problem happened. Make sure none of your search/replacing has interfered with the Movable Type format. I had one file conversion fail because of a single missing line break! This is why you should save your export file after every edit.

Import into Blogger. If you haven’t set up a new blog in Blogger do so now. Under the Settings tab click “Import blog” and choose the xml file(s) you produced with the blog converter. Once you hit “Import” any number of things could happen. You’re supposed to see a screen with a sort of progress bar and messages about what is being imported. At the end you should get a message saying how many posts and comments were imported. More likely you will get an error message, or a hung progress page, or some half-loaded mystery page with nothing on it. Don’t despair. Go to Posting | Edit Posts and you may find your posts are there anyway. If not, wait a minute and refresh. If they’re really truly not there, try importing again. You may have to try three or four times, but it will work eventually.

That’s the end of the data migration! There are just a few more details to take care of in Blogger:

Theme: If you haven’t already, choose a theme for your blog. This will determine both the look and the layout of your blog. There are countless free themes available for download online—there’s no need to have a Blogger blog that looks like every other Blogger blog! Just beware that older themes may have to be modified to allow embedded comments (comments below the post). This is usually just a matter of inserting a line of code. Alternatively, under “Edit HTML” you can choose “Revert widget templates to default,” though this may reverse some of the customization of your theme. Always back up your theme before making any changes!

Sidebars: You’ll have to manually set up your sidebars, headers, and footers using Blogger’s Layout page. Though it’s a bit tedious to copy and paste your blogrolls, link lists, and other widgets, you’ll find that it’s much easier to edit and rearrange all of that content in Blogger than it was in Typepad.

One tricky point for book-bloggers is what to do about book lists since Blogger doesn’t have an automated book list gadget. One way around that is to use widgets from third party sources like Amazon, LibraryThing, or Shelfari. Or if you’re comfortable with a little HTML you can make your own with a blank HTML gadget. Once you have a template worked out then it’s just a matter of inserting the relevant book details. Here’s an example of simple code for a sidebar book list for someone with an Amazon associates account:

<ul> <!—BOOK ONE --> <li style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0; text-indent: 0;"> <a href=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ISBN/associatesID/> <img src=http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ISBN.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg / style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 15px 0px;"/> <p><em>BOOK TITLE</em><br/>AUTHOR</p></a></li> <!-- BOOK TWO --> <li style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0; text-indent: 0;"> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ISBN/associatesID"/> <img src=http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ISBN.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg / style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 15px 0px;"/> <p><em>BOOK TITLE</em><br/>AUTHOR</p></a></li> <!—BOOK THREE --> … </ul>

Simply update the parts in bold and you’re done. Be sure to use the 10-digit ISBN to access Amazon. They have yet to switch to ISBN-13 for their URLs.

Internal Links: By moving your blog, all your internal links will be broken. Every link in your blog to one of your blog pages will have to be updated. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this. Use search to find internal links in your Typepad export file (since it’s easy to work with), then find the new locations of both the post with the internal link and the post it is linking to, and update the link with the new address. It’s not fun but hopefully there won’t be too many of them.

Recent images: Images posted since December 15, 2008 will have some Typepad gobbledegook for an address, so you’ll have to update them with the new URL for the image at your image host (see above). Search your Typepad export file for “user.typepad.com/.a/” to find the locations of your image links.

Files: If you had uploaded any files to Typepad to share on your blog—music, home video, documents, etc.—you’ll have to find somewhere to host them because they can’t be uploaded to Blogger. I use the free web folder provided by my ISP. It’s not large but it’s large enough for my purposes.

Tell Google: Sign up for a Google Webmasters account and register your new blog so that Google will start indexing it right away. This will enable people to find your new blog via Google search.

Enjoy the wonders of Blogger! That’s it, you’re done! You can now enjoy the speed, reliability, functionality, and versatility of Blogger. One of the greatest things about Blogger, which is particularly helpful when you are setting up your blog, is the ability to edit any element from the blog itself. If you are logged in to Google you’ll see tool icons below every element of your blog. Just click on one to edit the content of that section and it will be updated immediately without having to refresh the page. Brilliant.

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Because I was making it up as I went along, I didn’t follow precisely these steps in exactly this order when I was migrating my blogs to Blogger. I ended up having to go back and edit some things after uploading to Blogger. In doing that I found that while Notepad++ is great for text files, it has trouble with large XML files (which is the format Blogger exports in). So if you want to bulk-edit an existing Blogger blog, try using firstobject XML Editor (foxe). It’s fast and simple, though the search and replace is very basic (no regular expressions or line break characters).

I should mention that I use Windows Live Writer to actually write my blog posts. I started using it after the last Typepad “upgrade” because their “improved” editor was practically unusable. I continue to use it because it is so slick and easy to use, and shows you exactly how your post will look as you’re typing it. It also has some nice image formatting options and helpful third-party plug-ins (including one that automatically posts a tweet when you publish). It’s free, and it’s just extremely good.

Finally, I’ve discovered a handy tool for backing up your entire blog, images and all. HTTrack is a free application that will download every page from a website and download all the images and other paraphernalia that goes with it. This might be a handy thing to do before deleting your old blog just to have a record of what was there in case you need to restore something at your new blog. You can never have enough backups, right?

I hope this doesn’t all sound too daunting. It’s not difficult if you go step-by-step. Try printing out this post (with Internet Explorer; Firefox doesn’t print well) and using it as a checklist. I took a whole lot of notes as I went along and that was very helpful in keeping things straight. It does take time but it is worth it to get away from the cost, limitations, and frustrations of Typepad. This is one case where you don’t get what you pay for! Blogger, despite being free, is a powerful blog host and will let you do just about anything you can imagine. I definitely encourage Typepad users to take a look at Blogger and consider making the switch. You won’t regret it!

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Addendum: One thing I didn’t realize about Blogger when I wrote this is that it doesn’t support <p> tags. Using the Compose editor will strip the paragraph tags from your HTML and replace them with two <br /> tags. If you have any paragraphs with CSS classes, they get converted to DIVs. This does not affect the appearance of your posts, but it does mean that if you want to style paragraphs either inline or through CSS, you will have to use DIV or SPAN tags to do it. It’s an oddity and I really hope they change it because <p> tags are fundamental to HTML.

Housekeeping: Links Astray and Stroppy Comment Boxes

Moving a blog is not unlike moving house: some things inevitably get broken or go missing. In the case of this blog it appears that some links have gone astray so I am now in the process of going through and checking them all. I’m also updating all 294 internal links so you won’t be sent back to my glacially slow old blog on Typepad (reason #27 why I left).

If you’ve had trouble leaving a comment here, give it another try as I’ve changed my settings to broaden the commenting options. And if you see anything else amiss, do feel free to leave a comment or send an email and let me know. Thanks!

UPDATE: I tidied up the template and that is supposed to solve commenting problems. The template I'm using predates embedded comments so it probably didn't have the right code for that section. Fingers crossed...

Fun and Games with CSS

Lately I’ve been seriously contemplating moving my blog to another host. Actually I contemplate moving almost every year, but end up staying with Typepad partly because of certain key features and partly because of inertia. But things are different this year. Amid much fanfare, Typepad recently “upgraded” its platform, and it’s been a disaster (not that they’ll ever admit it because they are into being “positive”). Oh, the blogs are still up, but the system is riddled with bugs that are taking months to fix and which never should have been there in the first place. I’ve actually had to switch to composing posts in Windows Live Writer (which is excellent, by the way) to save time and frustration. Typepad did add a few “new” features, but they are things the free blog hosts have had for quite some time now, and we are still lacking features that are standard elsewhere. That’s just not good enough for a paid host!

So, I’m looking at Wordpress.com. One downside is the lack of design options, but for a mere $15 a year one can edit the stylesheet (CSS). It’s not quite as easy as Typepad’s more automated design functions, but my level of discontent has gotten to the point that I’m ready to try it. I know a little CSS  but not enough to design a whole page from scratch, so I’m trying to learn more now. Whether I move or not I’m sure it’ll come in handy.

CSS design tutorials and websites abound, but I wanted to share one that pausetowonder sent me. The CSS Zen Garden is a showcase of what can be done with CSS. Designers are invited to take the bare bones content of the page and apply their own styles to it. The result is a truly mind-boggling diversity of looks and layouts. You can browse the designs here, but I’d also like to point out some that might be of interest to a bookish crowd: Ballade (Gorey-esque); Odyssey (Homer-esque); Angelus (inspired by medieval prayer books); and Kelmscott (inspired by master printer William Morris). It’s an inspiring collection and makes me think I could perhaps come up with a much more interesting design for my blog. Like everything else it’s a question of time. It’s nice to know what’s possible, though.

Post Titles [Are they descriptive enough?]

Most days I sift through mountains of blog posts (and increasingly, tweets) with sometimes cryptic titles and link references. While it can be fun to discover what a post or page is really about, when time is short I must admit I do sometimes pass over ambiguous links in favour of something with a more definite payoff.

Andy Wibbels just brought up this issue on the Everything Typepad blog. His advice: “Always Be Obvious” and “Stop Being Clever.” Where’s the fun in that?! He’s got a point, though. Regular readers might be willing to give a favourite blog the benefit of the doubt—we’re just talking about a click and a few seconds of attention, after all—but someone scanning through a pile of Google results might not be so willing to investigate a mystery link.

I’ve seen high-volume blogs that use parenthetical comments after post titles or links to narrow down the subject matter. As clunky as it is, it does make sifting through posts easier. It’s essentially a form of tagging, or like subheadlines in a newspaper (remember newspapers?). You can keep the clever title, but just add a little comment that indicates the general topic.

What do you think? Have you ever glossed over a blog post, here or anywhere, because it wasn’t clear what it was about? Do you like to know what you’re getting in to or do you like to be surprised? The litblogosphere is a distinct community and the usual rules of cyberspace don’t necessarily apply here. We like stories. We don’t like spoilers. We’re curious. We don’t mind spending time reading interesting things. We’re about quality over quantity.  We aren’t out to get maximum hits and rake in the advertising revenue. So maybe this just isn’t an issue here, but I thought I’d open the floor to see if anyone has an opinion. What do you like: clever or obvious?

DIY Kindle

Someone on the Acer Aspire One user forum recently posted instructions on how to turn a netbook into an e-book reader. The demonstration uses Google Books and Acrobat Reader, but with the proper application and display settings it can apply to all sorts of online books. My adapted method is:

• Download the book and shut off the wi-fi to save battery power.
• If the book is in plain text (e.g. many Project Gutenburg texts) set the browser or reader preferences to render fixed-width text in an eye-friendly font.
• Set your reader to open documents where you left off. (In a browser you can just leave the tab open or use an extension like Taboo to save the tab and your place in it.)
• Open the book in the browser or reader.
• Switch to full-screen mode. (Go to the View menu and learn the hotkey. It's usually F11.)
• Rotate the display, either in the reader or with your display adapter. Use hotkeys to avoid having to "mouse" on a right angle.

That last bit is very important because it is extremely difficult to use a mouse or trackpad when your display is rotated. Scrolling is done by keystroke. It might also be handy to learn the hotkeys for zooming in case the font is too big or too small for your liking.

Obviously this isn't going to be as light and handy as a Kindle, but with my little netbook it is no more unwieldy than some of the tomes I read, and it has the added bonus of being a computer! I can look something up or post a quote to my blog with just a few keystrokes. Although the display on the Aspire One is phenomenal, I don't think it's as sharp as the Kindle appears to be, and it may cause eye strain after a while. I don't know if I would want to do a lot of reading this way, but it might come in handy if I find a book online that I can't get anywhere else or that I just want to peruse.

Here's how it looks. The picture doesn't do the screen justice, but you get the idea.

Breaking News: Book Blogger Missing; Feared Abducted by Silicon Mafia

I'm sure it hasn't escaped the notice of my regular readers that I haven't been posting much lately about my reading. That's because there hasn't been much reading to post about. The problem started in late July when I discovered the wonderful world of netbooks. Netbooks are teeny tiny little laptops that work as ultra-portable satellite workstations. I've been wanting something like that for a long time but I didn't know they existed. As soon as I saw them, I was hooked.

The original netbook was the Eee PC, and its popularity has attracted the attention of other manufacturers so now it has some very stiff competition to contend with. The stiffest probably comes from the little beauty I am typing on right now, the Aspire One. It's affordable, powerful, versatile, and just plain pretty. If you want to know the specs, mine has a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB RAM (upgradable), a 120 GB hard drive (other models come with solid state drives running Linux), wired and wireless network cards, three USB ports, two SD card slots (one of which reads as an extension of the hard drive), a spectacular display, and all the usual inputs and outputs you'd find on a computer these days. They say they keyboard is 85% of the size of a regular keyboard, and I find it to be plenty big enough. Even men who claim to have "sausage finger" don't seem to have any trouble with it. One thing it and other netbooks lack is an optical drive, so to load software (or play music or movies) you either have to download it off the web, connect an external drive, network to your desktop, or copy to a thumb drive or SD card. With all those options it's hardly an inconvenience.

As you can imagine, I've been quite occupied with getting my new toy up to speed. I've learned about the wonderful world of wifi, and have partaken of the hotspots at some local branch libraries. I've learned about the baffling world of networking, and with the help of my desktop have managed to load this baby up with all my favourite software, movies, and those all-important Firefox add-ons.

Just when I thought everything would be going back to normal, a very good friend of mine offered me his Office 2007 disk, which he had no use for, being a Mac user As a Microsoft drone, I greedily accepted the offer, and went to work installing it on both computers (which took far less time than it's taking me to write this) and started learning what's new in Office. I've discovered the joy of OneNote. (If you have this on your computer and haven't used it I definitely recommend having a look.) I also got started on cleaning up the thick sediment of email that has accumulated in Outlook. Then I got an idea (uh-oh): What if I could access my Outlook email on my netbook? After trying various options, and corrupting one or two email files, I've come to the conclusion that this can't be done in Outlook alone. However there are plenty of companies out there who would love to sell me a program to synchronize Outlook across my network.

I would be trying out one or two of those applications right now if not for Danielle's post in which she courageously faces her TBR piles (plural) and cuts them down to a size that she might be able to conquer in the 15 or so weeks until Christmas. What got my attention was the 15 weeks part. It still feels like summer here, but the calendar says that if I don't get cracking on my own Mount Everest I'll still be at base camp come 2009. So my netbook has been spending a little more time recharging, my desktop is spending more time in sleep mode, and I'm starting to get some reading done. Thanks, Danielle. :)

And if this happens again, feel free to send me one of these.

Bothersome Bloglines

It appears that my blog's recent move has befuddled Bloglines. It seems to be reading my feed just fine, but it insists on linking to my blog at its old address. Clicking on an individual post title leads to the right place, but the blog title at the top still uses the old address. I guess that once Bloglines associates a feed with a blog URL, it never changes. Unless someone out there knows how to tame Bloglines, I think anyone who subscribes with Bloglines had better re-subscribe to my feed. I created a new Feedburner feed with an extended title so it should be easy to distinguish from the old one, which can then be deleted. Sorry for the trouble!

UPDATE: Bloglines has updated my blog's URL in their database, so all the links should be correct now. Thanks for subscribing!