Offmessage

I done gone made a thing – portify converts audio files from any format to one more suitable for your portable player.  For me, sadly, that means converting everything to mp3.

Testers are welcome, particularly on non-Linux platforms, but please be gentle

You may have noticed I’ve started this up again.  I’m trying to do one post a day again – I reckon it’s either that or kill it altogether and accept that all I’m actually good for is tweets about snow.

Anyhoo, today’s post is actually on the Isotoma blog.  It’s about old versions of python. Well, I’m not going to write two in a day, am I?

Forkd gets the elevator pitch treatment over at the PDA blog.  And a stumping great picture of me.  Which is nice (if you like pictures of people in suits looking simultaneously smug and stoned, that is).

There’s a lesson in this somewhere.  I’ve been a heavy NetVibes user for a long time now.  It came on the scene at just about the time that I started to rediscover the joys of RSS and so for me I’ve never really known another online RSS reader.  I’ve invested a lot in the application, not only in adding and organising feeds but also in learning to accept its shortcomings.  It was never perfect, but I’d come to love it anyway.

As you can imagine I was pretty excited to get the new version (ginger).  Finally, I thought, they will have addressed all the little niggles and all those smart alecs who use google reader will be silenced.  That’s what I thought.

Sadly what I’ve been given is a service that:

• Adds even more unused/unusable space to the screen (try using it on an eee now; it was already shocking)
• Has nasty CSS bugs
• No longer actually keeps tracks of what I’ve read
• Randomly forgets to update some feeds for days at a time
• Keeps chucking errors
• Has been offline 4 or 5 times in the week or so since I’ve been upgraded
• Breaks Coriander based bespoke Universes (that sentence may make no sense – if you are a ginger user make sure you are logged in and then visit a site like www.captaintheband.com to see what I mean)

But at least I’ve got yet another public persona to maintain. Now is the time to try Google Reader one more time, methinks.

And the morals of this story?  Stick to what you’re good at.  Listen to what your users really want. “Me too” is not a strategic decision.

I am an Internet veteran. That is all.