This summer, I finally followed through on a couple of experiments I’ve had nagging at the back of my head for a while:
Seeing if I can tolerably get by on standard IMAP email hosting after 9 years on Gmail, just to know if it’s a viable alternative in some kind of hypothetical doomsday scenario
Moving my blog – the one place where I’m not a CMS/blog developer, but a writer – from a traditional server to one of the more modern “app-as-a-hosted-service” platforms. ZekeWeeks.com is now hosted on WordPress.com Business – I’m just at the start of this experiment after a few years of “not good enough” attempts on various managed WordPress services, and will write about it later if anything interesting comes up. :-)
Even though I was interested in seeing the current state of email outside a proprietary host, I approached that experiment with skepticism and low expectations. And I certainly didn’t expect it to turn out like it did!
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Web Inspector CSS gone in Chrome 19: Bug or Design Change?
Technophiliabug, chrome, chromium, css, google, web inspector, webkitZeke Weeks
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I depend on this feature a ton, and am hoping this is a bug instead of a conscious change in functionality. I haven’t had the time to do all the testing and bug tracker searching across the Chrome, Chromium, and WebKit projects yet, but I’m hoping I can get some word on this change from someone with more knowledge about the issue:
(Click to view in full resolution)
Chrome lets you create new CSS rules right inside the DOM inspector. I used to be able to then view all those rules in the Resources pane, but now that view instead shows the document source. This could have been a conscious decision – perhaps people want to see their changes to the HTML in addition to the CSS – but it’s clearly favoring one output over another. Perhaps what I’m looking for was moved, or deemed irrelevant? I wish I knew.
I’m cheating on RSS.
Blogging about blogging, Technophilia, The Social WebCrowdsourcing, google, reddit, rss, social, TwitterZeke WeeksLeave a comment
I usually favor decentralized, open technologies, but I must confess: I almost never check my RSS subscriptions any more.
I used to use RSS as a one-stop way to cut down on my endless cycle of refreshing a million different blogs for news. Now, the opposite has happened: a couple of news sources are so much better in quality than the rest. I get my general news through the New York Times, and my tech news comes through The Verge or Ars Technica. These guys are beating everyone else at news depth and analysis, making most other blogs in their field redundant.
There’s a lot I risk missing online by doing this. But instead of drowning in an endless feed of RSS updates, I’ve curated a couple of social sharing tools to give me a pulse for the rest of the Web: Reddit (I unsubscribe from most of the default subreddits and subscribe to quality niche ones) and Twitter (again, being picky about quality sources.) I’d like to see Google+ take off in this role, but Google still needs to improve their API enough for killer apps to take advantage of it.
This new way of consuming content online is an unexpected one for me. I usually prefer more open, decentralized stuff, and RSS is the poster-child for such a thing. But as a constant news stream, it just doesn’t do enough to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. It’s still very useful and necessary, since it can syndicate a lot more useful information than just the news articles I’m talking about. Even though I sacrifice some openness, I find crowdsourced social aggregators far more useful, especially when I have some curation controls to personalize what I’m getting.
Sorry, RSS. You have a lot to offer as a technology, but my life is easier having left you.
