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McLaren and O’Connor, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

It seems that this has been rumoured for a while I guess… but this is the first I’ve heard of it… From Nick Bradbury (the maker of the simply awesome TopStyle Pro CSS / XHTML / HTML Editor):

Yahoo Acquires Flickr

People have been hinting it at for quite a while, but now it’s official: Yahoo has acquired Flickr and Ludicorp.

Seems like an interesting, though not exactly surprising, move by Yahoo. Seriously, when are Google and Yahoo just going to take it into the street and start beating down on each other directly?

Link (blog.flickr.com) / Source (nick.typepad.com)

As nerdy as this is… the inner-geek in me thinks it’s kinda cool…

From: Joystiq

Star Wars Galaxies, like any MMOG, is a great toy. You can play with it any way you like, and the results can sometimes be very satisfying. Check this out for a great example.

Alpha Company, 203rd Tatooine Expeditionary Stormtrooper Legion is a group of Empire-lovers who have displayed impressive loyalty and discipline. They’ve recruited competent people and taken out a good number of rebels. To reward them, SOE sent Darth Vader to meet with them. You’€™ll find the screenshots of the event here.

For diehard Star Wars fans only.

[Thanks Bernie!]

Link to article…

The executive producer for Scifi/Skyone’s new Battlestar Galactica has had a show blog for quite some time, which is pretty is pretty progressive to begin with. Then today I notice from a boingboing article that he’s started a show podcast. I thought “thats sorta cool” but didn’t really read the whole blurb.

A minute later I looked at the article again and saw the really awesome part of the story. The guy isn’t just doing a podcast, he’s doing AUDIO COMMENTARY for shows that are AIRING right now. Right down to “Beeps will indicate when to pause for commercial breaks”. Talk about awesome. Sure this may only interest a small niche of the overall audience of the show. But these are the people that normally have to wait for the DVD releases to get this kind of bonus feature!

Imagine if Directors/Creators/Writers of movies offered this kind of thing for movies that were still only in theatre?!

It would seem that adding raw html to the comments field of a captured item to be auto-published by Onfolio is a no-no. They all were all html-escaped to <a> text. Too bad. I’ll have to think about this I guess. (FYI: I’ve fixed all the links through blogger’s edit posts feature)

I’m testing out using Onfolio 2.0 (PR) to start capturing links to comment on in my main blog.

Running my linkblog, through Onfolio’s “Capture Item”/Publish Collection feature has been incredibly easy. So easy, in fact, that I find I’m even LESS inclined to post on my real blog when I come across any items I find interesting.

So I’m going to try out having two auto-publishing Collections folders. One for my linkblog, and one for this main blog. Whenever I come across something that I actually have comments on, I will try and send it here, otherwise, it goes over there.

One thing that will really help this whole process, I think, is, according to comments left in my last onfolio posting, there will be an option to post only a summary of the captured feed item when Onfolio 2.0 final arrives.

Anyways, so this link was really just a test to see what it would be like to actually use Onfolio for more of my main bloggin activities.

Final Observation: I tend to like to riddle my postings with links to other posts or sites, and this is probably going to be seriously unpleasant using Onfolio 2.0′s capture item dialog. The space for comments is a little too small to be adding in anchor html tags, and the fact that the dialog locks the rest of the browser (it’s a modal dialog) makes it hard to find the URLs for linking to anyways. The slide-out “property-tray” is a little easier to work with, but too many clicks away when I’m reading feeds and wanting to make a post on something (Capture Item, switch to collections, hilite captured item, open property-tray).

Enjoy an amusing link posted to one of my favourite “E/N” sites, Fazed.net…

From: FAZED

I want to leave this guy feedback for being the greatest eBayer EVAR!+++++++++++++++

Link to article…

While I’m at it with my amazon linkery , I might as well pass on this deal that I saw there today as well:

Canon PowerShot SD110 3MP Digital Elph with 2x Optical Zoom

List Price: $399.99
Price: $179.88
You Save: $220.11 (55%)

55% off is a hard deal to beat, and I’m a pretty big fan of the Canon Powershot cameras. My parents have one, as do several people I know.

Checkout the features and reviews over at Digital Photography Review

I saw the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Full Trailer” at Amazon.ca today (disclosure: I’ve added my amazon associates id into those links)

I looked for a quicktime version at the official site and at apple.com’s trailers page but couldn’t find it.

Looks like it might be pretty good. Let’s hope so.

Update: It seems the official site now has the full trailer up in your favourite real/quick/wmp formats. Go here.

Oh what a difference a release can make…

This week I’ve had the pleasure of revisiting Onfolio 2.0. A while ago I tried out Onfolio 2.0 beta 1. Back then I said “as a research tool on a more powerful system with feed-reading as a secondary activity, it might be a great tool. As a quick and easy in-browser feed-reader, it’s not my cup of tea.” [Onfolio Follow-up]

My initial interest in trying out Onfolio 2.0 was due to my search for a better feed aggregator. Feed aggregating is a new feature for Onfolio in 2.0, and in it’s beta 1 incarnation I felt that the feeding aggregating was playing second fiddle to it’s primary research / collaboration functions (not surprisingly).

Last week Onfolio released Onfolio 2.0 Preview Release. This time around, my opinion has drastically changed. In particular, the interface, which, in my beta 1 experience, felt inelegant, often interrupting me for 2-3s on each operation, has been incredibly sped up. No longer do you have to deal with progress dialogs with every action (at least that’s how it seemed back then). The few remaining progress dialogs on the more intensive actions (e.g. generating the feed newspapers) appear and disappear almost instantaneously, and are completely unobtrusive. All-in-all the application feels very responsive, even on my poorly under-powered 4 year old p3-450 (which is even below the stated minimum requirements for Onfolio 2.0).

My experience has been so good with Onfolio 2.0 PR that I’ve been using it as my primary aggregator for the last week and probably wont be switching back to FeedonFeeds in the near future. For some context to the extent of my feed usage, since switching from FeedonFeeds I see that my FoF has collected 692 new articles, all of which I’ve read through Onfolio instead.

Furthermore, my enjoyment of the feed aggregation interface has actually led me to explore the research / collections side of Onfolio a lot more. One thing I’ve spent a lot of time with is the weblog publishing of Collection Folders. It was ridiculously easy to setup my linkblog last weekend, with Onfolio’s great integration with Blogger (one among the many blog APIs it supports out of the box).

I have noted some issues with my use of Onfolio this week, which are listed below.

Comments about the Feed-Item Capturing
I only have one minor comment about the wondeful feature of capturing a feed-item into a collection folder (and then in my case having it auto-publish every 5min to blogger): Despite unchecking the ‘Open Destination folder’ option in the Capture Item dialog, the Onfolio sidebar still switches from the Feeds tab to the Collections Tab (it just doesn’t select the folder the item was captured to).

Comments about the “Publish to the Web” feature of Collection Folders
First, when posting a captured feed-item, Onfolio posts the entire post as the body of the posting (giving a very clear citation of the source).It would be great if you could set Onfolio to only post a summary of the captured feed-item. This would be useful for the ongoing controversy of linkblogs and the posting of full item contents. Many bloggers would be more comfortable if linkblogs were only posting parts of their items. The only problem with this is the unpleasant issue of parsing html tags to make sure when you post a summary you’re not breaking open any html tags (like unclosed anchors etc). I suppose you could just strip the HTML and then summarize, but that’s kind of inelegant if you ask me.

It would be great if Onfolio supported something like “perform a HTTP Get on the following URL after publishing to weblog”. Users could then specify their bookmarked Pingomatic URLs to have that link fired after a publish event occurs.

There have also been some issues with charset conversion of captured feed-items and the posting of them to weblogs. You’ll notice some of the articles on my linkblog are completely blorked with improperly converted character issues.

Lastly (this one’s pretty minor), Onfolio’s captured-item publishing template proceeds the quoted item body with a
<p>From: …</p> line, but places no space in between the </p> and the <blockquote> tag. When some programs create an RSS feed they strip out the html, and the From: … line merges without spaces into the first word of the captured item body.

Comments on Onfolio’s Feed Aggregating
The Newspaper interface works great, but it would be nice to have a few more options for specifying what the newspaper view will show you. I’d like to have an option somewhere in between displaying “Items published today” and “Items published this week” (Perhaps “Items Published in the last [ ] days”).

With many feeds in your aggregator, views like “items published this week” can easily overwhelm a browser by trying to display hundreds of items in one page. Pagination (Show x items/page) would be great.

I would also love if unchecking “Automatically mark items in newspaper as read” to actually disabled automatically marking items as read until I MANUALLY (would definitely need a shortcut key here, say… Shift+space maybe, in addition to the ‘read/unread’ icon) mark an item as read. As it is now, simply selecting an item (say to send it to a linkblog) marks it as read, which isn’t always what I want. I understand what it’s doing now (with the option checked, every item is marked as read the first time it is shown in a newspaper view, rather than when it is selected).

It’d be great to see a “collapse on read” view much like how I’ve setup feedonfeeds (screenshot).

That being said, I love the newspaper view, and in particular love the shortcutting of the up/down arrow keys for moving back and forth between items).

Anyways…

Ultimately, the Preview Release of Onfolio 2.0 is an fantastic. The feed aggregating features have taken a strong place as a primary feature of the product. I was convinced enough in my first day of usage to switch to it for my feed reading full-time. Hopefully my issues here addressed much like my issues with beta 1 were. Nevertheless, the comments I’ve made here, in contrast to my last review, are in no way going to keep me from using Onfolio 2.0 PR full-time. This is a fantastic version upgrade. I highly recommend people should give it a try. Kudos to the Onfolio team.