Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/John_Lennon

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law? – Dick Clark

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dick_Clark

Fed up with the new StumbleUpon? Step back in time with the new Delicious.

I’ve had a StumbleUpon account for a while and like a lot of people, I don’t care for the new makeover. ReadWriteWeb this morning suggested Pinterest was the way forward but if you look at the site…it’s obviously dominated by women. That’s fine, but it’s not for me.

I decided to look into an alternative social bookmarking site. Reddit was ugly, Digg is awkward, Google Bookmarks didn’t offer what I was looking for. I finally settled on Delicious.com. I thought they had wound up last year but clearly they have not.

What I like about it is the simplicity and the blog like format. You are offered the bookmarklet as soon as you sign up so no pressure to use toolbars or extensions and I managed to import all my StumbleUpon favorites to Delicious very easily using  the Stumbleupon toolbar. It has a ‘stack’ function which seems to work like Pinterest but I haven’t tried it yet.

I’m surprised by it’s invisibility. It’s clearly ideal for disgruntled stumblers like myself except it has a limited ‘discovery engine’ so that might be an issue. Mainly what you get though is a step back in time to what the experience of using StumbleUpon used to be like.

Recommended if you can live without the ‘discover new sites’ feature of StumbleUpon and find Pinterest a bit girly.

Blog now split into two.

Tech reviews and political comment don’t mix generally. Someone who might want to look at a political post is unlikely to care about say Google+ and vice versa. In recognition of this I have split the blog as follows:

Archkilljoy (new) covers politics, comment and the Anglo-Saxon stuff formerly done under the Speardane authorship.

Neutropolis is now purely for the web reviews, Linux and suchlike that was previously done under the Neutropolis authorship.

Layouts, themes and favicons are all deliberately the similar. In the long term, I hope this will minimize confusion and irritation.

Google+ Taskbar icon for Windows 7 . More Tweaks.

Further to my last post, to enhance the previously mentioned taskbar launch icons I have taken to attaching other shortcuts above them.

If you are really lucky Windows might let you do this:

This is particularly handy as the main link is to my personal G+ stream but the link under HootSuite is the link to my Archkilljoy Page stream. It’s a neat way to flit between the two.

How’s it done?

To get the pretty icons effect, go to your home folder (the one with your name on it) and navigate to the favorites folder. This contains all your Internet Explorer favorites (you have to have Firefox AND Internet Explorer installed for this to work.) Drag the relevant shortcut to the desired taskbar icon and drop it fairly precisely in place. There are lots of nuances as to how this actually works. Someone should try it in Google Chrome.

Fairly easy tweak if it works – why not give it a go.

Google+ Taskbar icon for Windows 7

Took HootSuite off the taskbar. Nothing wrong with it but it is slow, dull and really geared up as a manager rather than a reader. Twitter has returned as a IE9 Pinned Site and my Facebook group is pinned in Firefox. Google+ is now pinned to my taskbar and I have set up the Google+Facebook add-on to Firefox, This means all the most useful functions of HootSuite have been replaced tidily.

My Taskbar now has this to launch Google+ directly in Firefox:

I would have used the old black icon but that doesn’t work well in my black taskbar. Next to this icon you can see the GMail one I have had for a while now, made using the same technique.

 
 

If you would like one for your Windows 7 Taskbar, here is a walkthrough:

1) Right click to bring up the New – Shortcut command.

2) This brings up the ‘Create Shortcut’ box. Into this box cut and paste the shortcut in this form:

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe” https://plus.google.com/u/0/

This works for any browser and any shortcut – just change the URLs. Code is slightly different on 64 bit Windows 7 systems I believe.

3) This will say ‘firefox’. Change it to ‘Google+’.

4) Now you need a new icon. I have used one from Pixelpinch and it is replaced easily from from the ‘Properties – Change icon’ menu. All icons tend to come in PNG format so convert the png to an ico at http://www.convertico.com/

5) The new icon can then be pinned to the taskbar or start menu or left on the desktop if you prefer.

Google+ Pages seems to be in low level chaos at the moment with lots of fake sites:
Jolicloud and StumbleUpon are up and look okay. WordPress and LinkedIn look fake. Facebook and Twitter…don’t even think about it.

I am now on Google+. Here’s why.

Back in September I deleted my test Google Plus account for a number of reasons which I detailed in this blog post at the time.

Now with the advent of brand pages I think all these problems have resolved in an interesting way:

1) Everyone I know is on Facebook. Moreover no-one I know is planning a move to G+. In the real non-techie world, people are not going to suddenly adopt a new social network just because they ought to. So, it’s hard to have a social network with no-one to socialise with.

Everone I know is still on Facebook but it no longer matters as there are lots of brands to connect with often oozing a lot of good content.

2) There is no equivalent of the ‘Share on Facebook’ bookmarklet. The ‘Share on Facebook’ java bookmarklet is excellent and gives complete and accurate control of content sharing. There is also an equally good Facebook ‘like’ bookmarklet. The G+ equivalents, even the browser add-ons are appalling. This won’t do.

Okay, content sharing is still a problem but some of the chrome extensions are quite good. At the moment I’m sharing manually which is fine for me, maybe not so good for other people.

3) I blog under a pseudonym. This means I can be frozen from the system at any time. Or I can go to Facebook who don’t care. No contest.

This is perhaps the most interesting and unexpected resolution. The pseudonym issue has become irrelevant as I can now post as a brand. In my particular case this makes perfect sense as I have gone to a lot of trouble to frame my content across the web under a uniform icon and usernames and this has become a brand. I’ve signed up for Google + itself however, under my real name like Google want’s so everyone is happy and no rules are broken.

The Google Plus Pages interface is remarkable pleasant. I can’t ‘+1′ anything but all the other function seems to be there. I like the username cues at the top and access to other profiles is via a dropdown next to the username

The stream page is virtually indistinguishable from a personal page.

The profile page has ‘recommended links’. I don’t think they really want you to post links to your other sites. Shame.

I have reposted my last few Facebook shares just to get started and they look really good. Plan is that long wordy posts go here on Neutropolis and all short posts go to Google +. Everything is manually posted to Twitter for now, which is set up to continue to automatically repost to the Facebook feed, but without the superior presentation.

Finally it’s important to tell Facebook users about the change using a ‘Moved to Google’ profile pic from  Turhan Aydin‘s site http://turhan.me/+me/index.php

Nurses on Facebook

How stupid are these people? In fact I think this is fairly common.
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Nurse sacked over Facebook patient picture

Father of the Year – Halloween Edition

Definitive seasonal political incorrectness.
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Father of the Year – Halloween Edition