January 2005 | Main | March 2005

Trying out new tool: Lektora

Today I read Tris Hussey's account of his appearance at Northern Voice, where he mentions Lektora. Lektora is a browser based RSS reader, created in Canada. Tris demo-ed an integration of both Qumana and Lektora. Qumana is a tool that can be used as the hub in your personal information flow. I use Qumana to collect items that catch my eye, and afterwards I can work on those items, turning them into blog-content or other documents. Qumana lets me post directly into each of my blogs, or save it to my hard disk. Both Qumana and Lektora are in beta, and need work to be able to please larger audiences. But they serve me fine, and I don't mind the opportunity to be able to help shape a tool by providing feedback.

Up until now I used RSSReader to read my feeds, which has quite a market share here in the Netherlands, but I am not really convinced that it functions correctly. Feeds disappear, and old posts suddenly pop up as new, even though they don't show up in the XML feed.

The appeal of Lektora for me is that it is browser based, written in Javascript mostly, but all data is stored locally on my machine. It imports and exports OPML, which allows easy synchronization with Bloglines which I use to create blogrolls. Lektora needs some work on two aspects: First, I want to control all settings and aspects of appearance myself, and that is not possible yet. Second, at some points it makes decisions for me which I cannot roll back if I want to, nor prevent. This is the type of behaviour I severely dislike in Windows apps: assuming it knows best. I understand you have to be able to take decisions when users don't want to or aren't able to, but you also have to accomodate those of us who both can and want to be behind the wheel ourselves.

[Update] Apparantly Lektora under Windows requires me to run both IE 6 and Firefox if I want to install it properly. No problem on my company laptop that has both, but a big problem on my Windows desktop where I deliberately disabled IE because it was hindering my attempts to remove adware. This is a deal-breaker to me. Why is it that it will only run under Firefox when IE is enabled as well? Time to test the new Linux-comatable version on my Linux desktop, and see how it works there.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 21, 2005 09:41 PM)

Sparse Blogging

As I got several remarks in the last few days that I was blogging very lightly, let me try and explain how come.

The short answer is that I have been busy. The longish answer that I have spend a large amount of time on client projects, setting up our new corporate weblog at Proven Partners, building a platform with both wiki and blog functionality for the Dutch Connection, a business development club, writing articles, trying out new lay-outs for this blog, setting up a workshop to explain social software to companies, organizing Blogwalks, and spending lots of hours in the car and in trains.

Basically I spent my time trying to converge and focus. My blogging mostly is a way of capturing my diverging activities, my time to widen horizons and tie together things that seemed unrelated before and thus create new meaning for me. Times of exploration are followed by times of application and focussing. Just as worthwile and intense, but mostly off-blog.

But don't worry, I am still here, and I am trying to find ways of using my weblog for non-diverging activities. And of course it would help if I learned how to write off-line better as well. Even though it feels very different from on-line writing it would help to use my time spend on trains better.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 21, 2005 09:09 PM)

Margot Wallström Weblog II

Earlier I wrote about the new weblog of Margot Wallström, vice-president of the European Commission. Then there were no interactive components in her weblog. But now there is. Comments and trackback have been added, as promised, and also a RSS feed is now available.

Ms. Wallström writes about the responses she got to her weblog per e-mail:

Thanks to all of you who have read and reacted to my blog! And I guess it‘s in the human nature to react more emotionally to the negative comments. The one I liked the most was the guy who wanted my recycled paper bag to throw up in! Funny!.......
The EU negative crowd in the UK or elsewhere seem very happy to have found in me another object for hatred – help yourselves! To those who have sent encouraging messages: that‘s what keeps me going – thank you!

Also the url of the weblog has changed. First it was hosted under the European Commission pages, now that url is redirected to weblogs.jrc.cec.eu.int. JRC stands for the European Joint Research Center. The fact that the url now contains a subdomain weblogs seems to promise more EU weblogs in the future.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 7, 2005 07:47 PM)

Firefox Vulnerability

Boing Boing reports an exploit that most browsers, except IE, are vulnerable to.

Shmoo Group demonstrates the exploit, and explains it workings.

Following the proposed fix for Firefox worked for me, though there are reports that it might not work for all.

1) Goto your Firefox address bar. Enter about:config and press enter. Firefox will load the (large!) config page.

2) Scroll down to the line beginning network.enableIDN -- this is International Domain Name support, and it is causing the problem here. We want to turn this off -- for now. Ideally we want to support international domain names, but not with this problem.

3) Double-click the network.enableIDN label, and Firefox will show a dialog set to 'true'. Change it to 'false' (no quotes!), click Ok. You are done.

4) Go check out the shmoo demo again and notice it no longer works. (Chris Smith)

UPDATE:
Firefox has released an update which fixes the problem.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 7, 2005 04:22 PM)