Things To Come

Oh dear, I seem to have fallen a bit behind with my 23 Things.

As if that's not bad enough, there is another Thing just on the horizon which will whisk me away from work for a little while.

But all good Things don't necessarily come to an end, and I will be continuing with my personal exploration of all Things Bright and Useful when I am once again the Lord of my own Time.

Bye for now!

Doodle-don't; stick your Tungle out instead!

I got all excited last week about the prospect of using Doodle.

Having now set about using it to arrange a national meeting I've rather gone off it - for speed I just used a standard email instead.

One thing I really didn't like: the way that you have to specify each possible start time - if all day is available for a meeting then that might require participants to click on 8 times just for that day.

Tungle looks a lot lot better in this respect - just drag the "roller" to "paint" whatever hours you are available.

The down-side - no apparent option to keep participant availability hidden. There's always something...

Firefox - the (perhaps second) most devastating browsing machine ever built!

Ah, Firefox. A film that I thought was OK-ish when I was a child, though a bit boring as I didn't think there were enough airplane bits in it. When it came to machines I was more of a Blue Thunder, Airwolf, Streethawk, or Knight Rider kind of boy.

To be honest I can't remember that much about it.

I don't have that much more to say about Firefox the browser, except that I already use it and Chrome in equal measures (Internet Explorer has been relegated for Microsoft Web Outlook, as the crafty M$ types haven't built it to run on any other OS; though the Add-ons IE Tab or IE View fix that!)

My own version of Firefox is perhaps not the sleekest of beasts - too many extensions bogging it down, many of them unused and ripe for an uninstall. Also, I've closed down much of its immediate functionality to protect myself from live code on infected websites (e.g. NoScript and FlashBlock - very hand in a dangerous world!), but then I like to make life hard for myself.

Which brings me to the "List of 100 FireFox Add-ons to Create a Truly Brilliant Browser". Now I know any list like this will be objective, but I can't believe there are no security extensions (such as NoScript, FlashBlock or FlagFox) on there. Surely security has always been one of the browser's most trumpeted trump cards?

Doo-da-loo - time management

I've been checking out the Doodle tool for coordination of meetings. I must say that I'm fairly impressed... to a point.

I've tried a few of these web-based schedulers in the past, mainly Meet-o-matic. Now I'm far from a fan of Meet-o-matic - it just seems too clunky, too limited. Even the registered version doesn't have enough features, often requiring a long stream of text in the comments section to add nuance to the various "shades" of availability you might be trying to describe.

Doodle seems a lot better, and I can see myself using it at home and work, especially for national (non-University) meetings where the Outlook scheduler is not an option.

I've always felt that ultimately, the best meeting coordination method is full access to every participant's diary, along with a dose of common sense. However not surprisingly not everyone would be comfortable with this!

As part of my job I arrange a fair few meetings on behalf of other people, sometimes involving a large number of people. As it is often impossible to find a date that everyone can attend, it is sometimes necessary to make a decision regarding the best date for the meeting, and this might not necessarily be the date when the majority can attend. In this respect one of the potential drawbacks with using Doodle is also one of its strengths - its transparency.


For the majority of meetings the fact that all participants would normally see everyone's recorded availability would be advantageous in finding a time that suited everyone. However if some participants were to appear, shall I say, less "critical" than others then I can foresee a situation where individuals might begin to feel "slighted" at the final decision on dates...

That said, with a bit of exploration I've managed to find how to enable the options to conduct a "hidden" poll, as well as the extremely useful chance to state "if absolutely necessary" (this blog post has been retrospectively edited as a result!)


Personally I wouldn't be so comfortable either with the prospect of allowing automatic submission of my possible availability by scheduling tools, at least not without the final decision on suggested dates being my own. We can all fall prey to bad practice when it comes to the upkeep of diaries, either blocking out too much time in an attempt to protect some own-time, or failing to quite record every minute that might be required of an appointment...

Enough rambling, I'd better do "some things".

Thing 7 (use Doodle to schedule a meeting with a fellow 23 Things participant): Well, I did some "fantasy scheduling" with various figments of my imagination - does that count?

Thing 8 (add Doodle to your iGoogle page): Erm... I've added the Widget to my homepage. Can't for the life of me get my log-in to work though!

iGoogle and RSS

So, iGoogle then.

The problem I've always had with iGoogle is that it puts you at risk of information overload. If you're not very strict with yourself you end up overwhelmed every time you open your start page, eyeballs scanning over every inch of the screen. Even though "modern" iGoogle has implemented handy tabs, its still ever so tempting to check on every one of those RSS feeds that dumps onto your page.

That said, if you are going to check each information source anyway, or if you might otherwise miss something important or interesting, then of course it is still incredibly useful, especially when you factor in access of your page from wherever you are - particularly nifty if you use your mobile phone for web access.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of iGoogle is the scope provided by Gadgets - even though each tool or resource is available somewhere else on the web, being able to access them all onto one place is a much more straight-forward way of keeping on top of your electronic life! And a great excuse to play Pac Man again...

Final thought on iGoogle: Back in the day people used to have home pages, a handy source of links to favourite webpages (though when a fellow 23thinger-er mentioned earlier today that she was struggling to find a way to put raw basic weblinks on her iGoogle page, I realised that this was something that Google seemed to have missed - until we found the Bookmarks gadget). People also used their homepages as a way of marketing to the world the type of person they wished to portray (or be!), and this was taken further as blogs and social networks developed. At least with iGoogle it is a resource solely for the "i" - something purely for your own use.

But wait, I seem to have overlooked RSS feeds somewhat in this post. The trouble is that they've become so ingrained into the web the web works that there's nothing much more to say. (A great excuse not to bother!). But undeniably very useful, whether on iGoogle, Google Reader, or whatever may be the aggregator of your choice.

Some quick thoughts on blogging

When blogging was in its infancy I sometimes used to think that a lot of organisations were fairly slow on the uptake regarding its potential for use within a commercial environment. Now that the massmarket has caught up with regards to social sites I wonder whether the audience's attention is elsewhere, especially now that the majority are happily ensconced within the walled community of Facebook (the collapsed community of Warwick Blogs being a case in point). In a way its a shame, as the Web2.0 software has come on leaps and bounds since those early days, and the architects are obviously trying to incorporate as many social and sharing options as possible. But as an open and transparent channel for communication and sometimes feedback, when approached right blogs can still be important, whether the audience be internal, external, or more of a personal aide-mémoire.

My summary in five words (two of which are the same): Less personal, more scope, more professional

New Year, New Blog

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the most difficult part of setting up a new blog so far has been finding a good blog title. Having toyed with all sorts of naffness (“Hurley’s Penultimate Number” anyone?) I gave up, returning to default ageing geek mode...
I started blogging way back in 2003, and it became a pretty time-intensive part of who I was (sad, I know!). Since then spare time has dwindled to almost nothing, and I do feel like I’ve let a part of me fade away. It’ll be interesting to see whether this rekindles the fire (especially now its easier to do these things on mobile devices), or whether the explosion of other social media resources has rendered personal macroblogging a spent force (not that I’ve really found the time to do anything other than tinker at the sidelines of all this modern jiggery-pokery in recent years…)

Sob… I used to spend hours doing this stuff. Back then it was all fields round here… Cascading Style Sheets were but a twinkle in a blogger’s eye – we were all html-monkeys back then. Now I’m all in the dark – but looking forward to being illuminated.

Anyway, as requested in Thing 2.3, I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to acquaint myself with a whole host of new Web 2.0 goodness, and to see what's changed over the years - as it is I only really touch on some of these sites whenever the need arises rather than by choice! I've already got a horribly decrepit iGoogle page attached to one of my other Google accounts (not updated in a long LONG time), I used to be a very active Flickr user before parenthood intervened, and I've done little more than dabble in Google Docs, Twitter and the like. But as with most new technology we end up using it without even realising it, so it should be interesting to step back and see...