So the meme… I agree with Stephane that five is a bit limiting. Some of the “big ones” are bound to fill most, if not all, of the five spots. Hence, ten it is.

• All things Google

  It’s hard to beat Google. Not just in search, but their entire plethora of web apps these days. I’m a big fan of Google Docs, Google Reader, and Google Calendar especially. Not such a bit fan of GMail I must admit. “Conversation mode” and sub-par filtering are really not winning with me

• Facebook

  Is Facebook really useful, or just fun / a waste of time? Well, it’s both for me. Living abroad and traveling as much as I do, it’s a really useful tool for me to keep up with friends and family.

• Twitter

  Micro-blogging, once you get the hang of it (and stop sharing updates between Facebook and Twitter all the time!), makes a lot of sense. A good way to keep on top of things, professional and personal. (although to be fair, it’s mostly the Twitter APIs I use, as I very seldom visit the actual site but always use 3rd party client)

• Flickr

  Although Facebook wins on the “social photo handling” so far (can we have three cheers for people tagging, which Flickr also just added support for), Flickr wins in openness, full size photos, organization capabilities, 3rd party integration, groups, etc — which is to say, just about everything else than “fun photo album silliness”.

• Kayak

  When I have to book flight tickets, Kayak takes the prize for me. It just works, ‘nuff said.

• SeatGuru

  SeatGuru is a pretty useful tool when you have to chose the seat on your flight. It has a database over most carriers’ planes and have details about each seat. Handy to find a seat which has power for example, where you are not sitting halfway in the restrooms, etc. Indispensable for long flights.

• Dopplr

  Dopplr is yet another social network, focusing on travels. So now that I have booked my flight, and found my seat, using the two sites above, I use Dopplr to spread the word about my travel so that I can (re-)connect with people I know. Its rival TripIt is basically the same, although their email parsing seems a tad better (for automatically adding itineraries). Still, there’s something about Dopplr that I like better.

• Wikipedia

  Wikipedia has turned out to be the de facto fact finding place on the net, in spite of it being all user generated with all the issues that potentially have. Even so, when I look for facts, it is not exactly a matter of life and death, so it is ok that it could be a bit incorrect.

• Amazon

  Amazon has turned into the Wal-Mart of the web it seems, and has also started to be my first destination for shopping online. They have almost everything. Especially now that I have a Kindle, I’ve fallen in the big Amazon trap for books especially. Besides that, for the more geeky people, they also have “this tiny web service business” on the side, which is wicked cool.

• Last.fm

  Last, but not least, I am an avid “scrobbler”, and send most of my music listening history to Last.fm. Not only does it give me a history of my music listening, but also makes it possible to find recommended artists, find “musical neighbors”, concerts in my area, etc. Moreover I can also check out what my friends are listening to these days. (It will be interesting to see what will for last.fm, with Spotify, Pandora, rd.io, Vevo, etc. all maneuvering around in that space)

Then for the passing the baton / tagging people. I normally do not like these chain things, but here’s a try for the heck of it :)

• Thom, to wake him from his blog hiatus too
• Colm, for the Irish touch
• Dan, in hope of it not only being about rdf, xmpp, and remote controls
• Bjarke, for the Danish touch
• Jim, for the sporty touch

So using the favorites call, it’s easy to get my favorites list and embed a random one of them in a page: See the result here.

You can directly copy’n’paste the code directly and change the user quite easily if you do not like my favorites :)

Updated 19/11: I added some comments and made the source a bit more readable.

It took me 1 minute to create this:

Impressive. Now we just need that Joost component :)

Lots of kinks to to iron out before it’s a totally smooth experience, but we’ll get there I’m sure :)

Here’s my normal test video:

You can find the embed code by clicking the embed button on any joost link page, i.e. like http://joost.com/13600fs for the above. (or look at the source here :)

It’s version 1, so there are still some rough edges. Like that we really insist on having the above size. Bear with us. Expect things to improve shortly, and constantly :)

(do note that this is my personal blog … this is not “official Joost speak”)

I’ve hooked up the json favorites call in a DataSource and then connected it to a DataTable, and voila:

A simple (and ugly :) ) page showing my, and some of my colleagues’, favorites.

See the example here

It’s not just cut’n’paste though to replicate, as I’m proxying the API calls because of cross-domain… will try to find time to show one can get around that.

WARNING: The above builds on alpha APIs so we might just go around and change them all next week… Well, we’re probably not, just saying that we might change some things, so do not flame me when it suddenly breaks down :)

I’ve hooked up the json favorites call in a DataSource and then connected it to a DataTable, and voila:

A simple (and ugly :) ) page showing my favorites, and some of my colleagues.

See the example here

It’s not just cut’n’paste

WARNING: The above builds on alpha APIs so we might just go around and change them all next week… Well, we’re probably not, just saying that we might change some things, so do not flame me when it suddenly breaks down :)

Just created an index template with this content, and linked it to a file.

<MTSetVar name="body_class" value="mt-main-index">
<MTSetVar name="main_template" value="1">
<MTSetVar name="main_index" value="1">
<MTSetVar name="sidebar" value="1">
<MTSetVarBlock name="title"><$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$></MTSetVarBlock>

<$MTInclude module="Header"$>
<mt:setvarblock name="today_date"><mt:Date format="%B %e">
</mt:setvarblock>

<div class="action-stream hfeed">
    <mt:ActionStreams days="5">
        <mt:DateHeader>
            <h2 class="action-stream-header asset-name">
                <mt:setvarblock name="this_date"><mt:StreamActionDate format="%B%e">
                </mt:setvarblock>
                <mt:if name="$today_date" eq="$this_date">
                    Today
                <mt:else>
                    <mt:var name="this_date">
                </mt:if>
            </h2>
            <ul class="action-stream-list">
        </mt:DateHeader>

        <li class="hentry service-icon service-<mt:var name="service_type">">
            <span class="entry-content"><mt:StreamAction smarty_pants="1"></span>
            <span class="published"><mt:StreamActionDate utc="1"
                  format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"></span>
        </li>

        <mt:DateFooter>
            </ul>
        </mt:DateFooter>
    </mt:ActionStreams>
</div>
<$MTInclude module="Footer"$>

1) Added the Action Stream plugin to my Movable type installation.

2) Copied the config.yaml from Toni_H under plugins/joost/

3) Added a joost image to mt static path/plugins/joost/images

4) Added this under mt static path/plugins/joost/css:

.service-joost {
  background-image: url(../images/joost.gif);
}

and put it in my styles.css as:

@import url(/mt41-static/plugins/joost/css/joost.css);

And voila :)

Update 21/10: Added a dedicated page

‘nuff said :)

It will be two weeks of motorcycling in the beautiful Norwegian landscape to get there, and Lapland and Sweden on the way back — during midnight sun too. Riding there on a motorcycle, will be beautiful, but it will also be a challenge weather-wise, because even though it is summer, it is 5 degrees and raining in a some of region at the moment. I’ll be packing my long underwear for sure.

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Filters ignore punctuation

Somebody at Google had a smart idea: Why not just use the normal Google Search for searching mail and hence also use it for filters? Sounds good at first thought, but it is simply not good enough. If I want to search/create a filter for a mailing list, I find that I’d really like to search for a specific string like “[cheese]”. Problem is that Google ignores any special characters so it just turns it into a search for “cheese”, and lo and behold that can match a lot of, unrelated, mails.

I know that I can use listid/list to specifically filter lists, but I still find I have the need for precise keyword search — including special characters.

All filters are applied, always*

Google also have no way of chaining/prioritising filters. I normally have filters that filter on specific items, and then a “catch all” that filters whatever has not been filtered yet. This is not possible, since you cannot say “if this matches, filter no more”.

Conversation mode is weird

Conversation mode is again something that at first thought seems like a good idea, but does not hold in the long run. First of all, since all letters stemming from the same root end up in the same conversation in a flat list. That makes it impossible (very tedious) to figure out exactly what an email was a response to, if a thread forks.

Moreover, if somebody on an list thread responds directly to me (i.e. off-list), the entire conversation suddenly keeps appearing in my inbox. Eh, why?

Threads are just better… end of story.

Lack of keyboard shortcuts

There are shortcuts for a lot of things in GMail, but for very common tasks I find myself clicking around with the mouse like a mad. For example:

A) Go to a label

Whenever I want to read a mailinglist (which I filter specifically), I have to click on it. Yes, I can also type “/ label: ‘full label name’” … but it ain’t exactly quick, or user friendly is it?

B) Mark all read

So the shortcut for “marking all messages in a label as read”, is:

• Go to the label (see A)
• Add “is:unread” to the search (or large collections will take forever)
• Click “All”
• Click “Select all conversations that match this search”
• Click drop-down menu
• Click “Mark as read”
• Click “Ok”

sigh

C) Add a “cc” to a message

Have to click on the “Add CC” link

No way to insert text as quoted

If I have to quote some other source in an email, there is no way to insert the text as quoted.

Performance can be very slow

Sometimes Google just seems to hang for 10 seconds showing “Loading…”, and then “Still loading…”. Not sure what triggers it, but when you are used to instant feedback it drives you up the wall.

IMAP support is slow

It can take Google IMAP server up to 40 seconds to get the unread count for a “folder”. Guess how long it can take for my email program to update the unread count then …. ?

IMAP, mailing lists, and conversation mode is a bad mix

Google tries to be smart and only sends you each message (based on message-id) once to your IMAP client. But since Google also automatically saves every message you write in your “Sent mail” (which is good :) ), mails you write to a mailing list will not appear in the “folder” (filter) you filter on. Eh? How unusable is that?

All in all, it is not a particular good experience for me I must say. And I’m a bit stuck since both the web-interface and the IMAP support is sub-optimal, so I can choose between two things which are both bad… ggrrrr. I guess my next move is to move to a proper email program (again), set up an IMAP “caching proxy” to get over the slowness, and then live with the mailing list problem.

I’ve been thinking about moving my own mail to gmail, but that seems like a rather bad idea now.

Update: I am not alone it seems.