Testing an app.

Testing this app on my N900, called MaStory. It's awesome, at least if this post works it is.

To be honest, I would be happy with an app that just pushes posts from my phone to my blog. MaStory is quite a bit cooler. It lets you view and edit old posts. You view and edit the post as plain text (WYSIWYM), but it makes a handful of often-needed codes easily accessible through the GUI. It will upload images from your phone. It's linking is very intuitive ( select some text, hit the link icon, enter in the URL, it will apply the link to your selected text).

You can schedule posts to appear in the future!

It even has a preview--not a true blog preview, but a formatting preview that even shows embedded images. Really helps proofreading a lot.

One thing so far is missing. One thing.

That's right, dear readers, it's missing the tags for the "read more" link that keeps things short on your front page. Not a big deal. Makes no difference to the rss feed readers, but I'd like it.

Oh, also would be nice if CTRL+I made highlighted text italic, and CTRL+U for underlining, CTRL+B for bold. That would make things a bit easier as well. Maybe I'll send in a feature request.

All in all, if MaStory works (and you're out there reading this right now), I'm sure I'll be using it quite a bit.

David

This post was written on my N900 (duh).

As it should be...

Finally got a replacement N900 today.  Was planning on hastily throwing up some whiny posts trying to decipher tracking info, but didn't have the time.  Rest  assured, I handled the wait childishly.

So now I'm going through, changing all the settings back to what I'm used to and installing all my favorite apps.

Just started walking to a PC to do a quick Google search, remembered I had a N900 again, then instead made my search where I stood.

As it should be.

David


PS - This post was typed on my N900.

WAIT!

You know, it was only a few posts ago that I mocked my earlier self for freaking out over confusing tracking info.  You know, because I was really anxious to get my N900.  I have to say, some of those posts are embarrassing.  I was acting rather childish, right?

Except here I am again, waiting for payment from a warranty company who I will name and will talk all about in a future post, just not until we've actually finished our little transaction.

So I'm checking both my email and my dashboard on their site every few minutes.  Refreshing Gmail even though I don't think it needs to be refreshed anymore to update it.  I'm generally freaking out.  There's a 6pm cutoff here.  If I don't order a new phone before 6pm on amazon, I won't be able to get that phone next day.  No sir.

What the hell?

Anyone looking at my blog in the wee hours of the night might have noticed a bunch of gibberish-y posts disappearing and reappearing.

That was me, I admit it.  Admin stuff.  Oh, what was I doing?  Only this:

(this probably won't work if you're viewing this in a feed reader)

Click me
A sentence magically appeared!!!


If that worked, then you're looking at the product of hours of work.  A sentence was supposed to appear under "click me" btw. If you click on "click me" again, then the sentence should disappear.  Why hours of work, you ask?

Because, dear reader, I don't know javascript.  The last few hours involved me cutting and pasting bits from different scripts that basically worked but had little problems.  Most required a different script for each block of text.  For example:

Click this one now
Some scripts required multiple embeddings of the same script in order for multiple blocks of text to be shown or hidden in one post.  With the script I have now, all I have to do is keep a unique id in the text's wrapper (a new unique id for each block of text)


It wasn't easy.  I honestly can't believe it worked.  I literally tried one last thing, saying to myself "If this doesn't work I'm going to bed".  And I meant it this time.

Another good thing about this script versus others:  Other scripts will expand the text once the link is clicked, but if said link is at the bottom of a post, the browser will for some reason jump to the top of the page, losing your place. This one doesn't. Or shouldn't.  Hopefully it works for all of you like it does for me.

Well, bed time for me.  Time to get up I mean, but I think I'll go to bed instead.

David

Welcome to the Blunderdome

Blog migrated? Yes! YAY!!!!!


Okay, here's the deal:

Announcement!

Those of you who have an eye for drastic changes may notice there's something different about this here blog.  That's right, I've switched over to Blogger.

Note to self, how are rss feeds being handled?

Still working on getting the favicon to work (this little gem here )

Some internal links may not work.  Still need to work on a few things.  Content form perhaps?  A little theme tweaking?  For now I'm just happy to have something reliable that I don't have to worry about as much.

David

Thinking about thinking about thinking about moving to Blogger

I suppose I will, seeing as how I just transferred all my posts from my old Wordpress blog to this Blogger one.  Why?  Perhaps more on that later, but for now a few observations:

I have, not counting this post, 154 posts published, and 69 drafts drafts for potential posts saves.  I have at least 60 more drafts in my outliner (which is Cherrytree by the way).  Seriously.  Probably 40 more scattered across my PCs saved as plain text files.  And another dozen in my phone.


Well, they were in my phone.  My N900 is dead.  Got wet.  Just did my absolutely final, last-ditch effort to revive it with no success.  Needless to say I'm fairly depressed.  A friend of mine is graciously loaning me his old MyTouch.  I must say, having used Android quite a bit over the past few days, I can confidently say Maemo is the best game in town.  Which just makes me more pissed off at Nokia for screwing over MeeGo, which could have been even better.

So I imported my blog posts, and I had to go through and re-publish them on blogger.  I stumbled across this one.  The post I hastily threw up when my N900 arrived in the mail.  A bit of salt in the wound.  The N900 did live up to the hype, by the way.  Worth the god-awful obsession over UPS tracking info voiced here and here.  Not going to lie, the supposed N9 prototypes looked awesome (another thing the MyTouch has shown me is that I need a physical keyboard), the mock-ups looked way better than the ugly N900 (it is ugly, but it's useful in a way no other phone is), but if the N9 isn't on the table I'd still pick the N900 over any other phone out today.

Anyway, looking through all my old posts, what did I see?

A lot of talking about the N900, mostly speculative.  A lot of talking about netbooks.  A lot of posts about my sleep schedule, which maybe I shouldn't have bothered keeping in the move but whatever.  I'll let someone out there be bored beyond all belief if they want to read them.

I saw a lot of extremely long posts.  I do go on.  Really.  I should be writing novels or something.  I should take all my draft posts about Asus netbooks, replace all the individual model names with "Thomas Crescent" and pretend like it's a cyber-novel about an android on a quest to reduce his size so some boring blogger somewhere can type on him.  That novel would be doubly-awesome because I would be in it (the boring blogger!!!).

 I would take the time to count the number of words those draft posts would net me, and I'm sure it's 5K-10K+ words, but I should probably go to bed instead.  Then again...NO LARK!!!  DO NOT START ANY MORE PROJECTS!!!  The filing cabinets!  For the love of god, just look at the filing cabinets!!!


Looks like it's time for me to go to bed.  Links may be broken for a while, or forever, once I switch the new blogger blog to my thriceberg.com domain.  I'll try to fix them but, you know, Thomas Cresent.  HE WANTS TO HELP ME TYPE ON THE GO!!!  It's got action, it's got drama, it's got me typing on an android's impossibly strong pectoral muscles (but not at all in a gay way) (Wait, why do I have an erection right now?  Maybe it is in a gay way) (Oh never mind, that erection's left over from me thinking about walking around with the N9 and N900 in the same pair of pants.  Mine.) (You think I'm joking).

Oh wow, it is late.  Apologies, mostly of all to myself.  Good night.

David

Switching Browsers

I've been a fan of Firefox for a long, long time. Way longer than this guy, I'm sure. Look at him. He probably thinks Firefox is an animal from one of his precious Harry Potter books.

Let's be honest though, Firefox is getting a bit slow. It's bulky, it's sluggish, it takes up a lot of screen real estate for itself rather than the web pages it's meant to be displaying. It is, I've decided, no longer what I'm looking for in a browser.

I've played with Google Chrome a bit in the past, but there were always a few things keeping me from switching over. For instance, the last time I tried it out, there was no plugin support (was there, or was it just that no Firefox plugins I used had Chrome corollaries? I'm not sure.)

Well now my two major Firefox plugins, Xmarks (for syncing bookmarks) and LastPass (for managing passwords) both work in Chrome.

And Chrome is so much faster at everything! Of course the Google suite of products,which I use quite a bit, works much faster, they'd be stupid not to optimize for each other. Google Reader, Gmail, Google Calendar, all are pretty snappy. Even Google Instant, which usually slows my netbook down to a crawl, is practically usable!!! I'm smitten!

Okay, not entirely smitten. It is just a browser after all. Hold on, I'm going to install Xmarks in Chrome real quick so I can get a link I'm going to put in a future post, Of course, I'll have to restart Chrome before I can start the plugin, and it'll be a bit messy, with pop-up windows all over the place...WHAT!?! I don't have to restart Chrome in order to use plugins I've just installed. I"M OFFICIALLY SMITTEN!!!!!

Also, What!?! no stream of annoying pop-ups about installing a plugin, just a bit of text that shows up at the bottom and walks me through it?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I scoff at people when they say that Apple has too large a foothold in the smartphone market, and that Google has too large a foothold in the search market, for either to ever be dethroned. Firefox has been around for quite a while. It has been awesome for a large portion of that while. But it's gotten stuck in a rut, and it's user base slowly being usurped (as Android is usurping iOS and a handful of search engines are slowly chipping away at Google).

Case and point, the plugin system. Firefox has one. It's great. Better, I think, than Chrome's in some way because I still don't believe there's anything like NoScript for Chrome, nor is it possible to make something like that for Chrome. Or so I hear.

On the other hand, on the usability side, Chrome is way better. No popups! That's so much easier. No restart needed to activate plugins. That is a much bigger deal than it sounds.

You can imagine someone looking at Internet Explorer (or more appropriately, Netscape) and ending up with Firefox, a much better and much more advanced browser. You can then see how Google looked at Firefox, threw that dawn-of-the-internet bullshit UI away, optimized the hell out of it, and ended up with Chrome.

So yeah, I'm a bit excited. And happy. For now.

David