EnerMeter

One of my colleagues, Orly, has completed the widgets that I recently discussed here: Daily Photo Fix Right On Your Desktop. You can see them in action at the FeaturePics web site.

There are links to download all four versions, Vista, Mac, XP, and Windows Hta, together with instructions for how to customize the RSS feed that will show up on your desktop.

Check it out, download the gadget of your choice, and brighten up your desktop -- for free.

By now most people have seen either MAC Widgets or Vista Sidebar Gadgets. There are also Yahoo Widgets and Google Desktop Gadgets. All told there  are a whole lot of these little applications out and available. On my Vista Sidebar I keep a CPU speedometer, a local weather Gadget (it is 2 degrees C here in Santa Cruz at this moment), and the Daily Dilbert. I did not pay much attention to them until a client asked for a special purpose version, and then began to look around at what is available and how to do our own.

Yahoo Widgets is where we started. They run on XP, Vista, and MAC, and there is a tutorial for getting started. Little did I know about how different the various platform’s apps are. Orly got the assignment to learn enough to build the first app. He quickly moved through the tutorial and needed a real project, so we decided that should be to capture the FeaturePics daily RSS feed and show the new images in the Yahoo Widget.

Orly goes to school all morning and helps his sister with her homework for part of the afternoon, but in a few days he had a functioning FeaturePics Yahoo Widget. The biggest challenge was learning how to tap into an RSS feed using JavaScript as the primary tool. As promised, the Yahoo Gadget works on XP, MAC, and Vista. But it only runs inside the Yahoo Konfabulator, which is a nice enough application, but Konfabulator uses a significant amount of memory, and on Vista and MAC it is not as nice as the native applications, so on to the MAC version.

Some days later there is a functioning MAC Widget and a week or so later one appeared for Vista. We have been running these in house for a few weeks now and every day or two a bug would get fixed and a new feature appear. In appearance all are very similar, but the functionality of each platform is slightly different, and the widget functionality is also slightly different across versions.

The Yahoo Konfabulator is freely available and works well, but from the first I thought it might be possible to build an XP widget that would work without the necessity of first installing a container application. The idea was to make use of a .hta, a technology that Microsoft introduced with Internet Explorer 5.0. Here is the MS take on the subject. The short answer, it works fine. This widget has

very similar functionality to the other versions, every few seconds a fresh delight appears on your desktop. And of course, when you click on the widget the page at FeaturePics pops up in your browser of choice.

It turns out that FeaturePics has a whole series of RSS feeds, including separate feeds for each of the FeaturePics author’s collection of photos. So Orly added a widget variation that allows for a custom URL – you can insert the URL of the feed for whichever author you may choose to follow, and the widget will cycle thru that particular set of photos. There is nothing to keep you from having more than one of these open at a time, so you can easily follow your two or three favorite photographers. I have a few photos for sale there myself, many from my several trips to the Galapagos Islands. You can follow the RSS link without the widget, but I suspect you will be more likely to look at them if they appear one at a time on your desktop. Feel free to browse them here.

We will soon be posting a page on FeaturePics that lays out the various versions and their respective functionalities. You will be able to click a button to download the widget of your choice. Stay tuned.

If you need an explanation of RSS, or even just want to see a simple but effective video: RSS in Plain English

In a post yesterday I mentioned Tags, but I did not tell the whole story. Today I decided to learn a bit more and found some good information.

There is a clear description of both and how to use them at PROBLOGGER that was written by Michael Martin from Pro Blog Design.

• In terms of coding, categories and tags are almost identical. A category system could very easily be used as a tagging system, and vice versa.
• So what is it that makes the two different? And how are they best used?

He goes on to tell us. It appears what I was calling tags are more appropriately called Categories.

If you want search engines to group your post with related posts by others, it makes sense to use the same tags as others use. Technorati has a list of the most popular tags. And I quickly found a list of more general tags as well at BlogHop.

One thing some beginning blog readers do not immediately understand is the value of comments. The comments content is often more useful to the reader than the original post, particularly on technical matters. So if you catch me in a mistake, or have anything to add, please do it in the comments.

Reviews of Windows Live Writer are generally favorable, so I decided to give it a try. This post is being written with Writer.

If you want to try it, the first step will be to get a copy and install it on your own computer. This is easily done by going to the Windows Live Writer website and clicking on the Get It Free button.

The install process is typical Windows. Just accepting the defaults seems reasonable to me, except for where the installer gratuitously offered to change  my browser Home Page and my default Search. I unchecked those.

The main advantage of Writer over just composing a post in the BlogEngine.NET editor is that Writer provides WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing. It is a lot like writing in a simplified version of Word. The spell checker will surely come in handy as well.

A couple of points from the Writer website that will be useful are:

1. Preview before you post

   Writer shows you what your blog entry will look like before you post it, using your blog's templates and formatting.

2. Compose your entries offline

   Publish them later, when you get back online.

There are helpful getting started videos at the Writer Blog Site in the May 2008 section. I watched the first one.

I read somewhere that Word 2007 (but not 2003 or earlier) works well also, but Windows Liver Writer is free, and it appears to work just fine.

Of course, I am a beginner too, but there are beginners and beginners. My friend said:

Yes, it worked this time and after I was in I attempted to make a change and it would not let me sign out, an error message came up and I sent the page to you etc. I am wondering, how am I going to learn how to do this?

Duh!

It appears that what you did was make a change to the Theme. This page looks like one of those available for preview, namely Mobile. But I just checked your site and you have replaced that pink Girlgeek strangeness I left you with, with a very nice looking page. I guess what you thought was an error message was a “preview”?  

 Pretty much everything can be customized. Eventually you can have a completely custom theme.   All the permissions stuff BlogEngine talked about I already did. Looks like you are ready to start posting. 

When you are in Internet Explorer and looking at a site that is also a blog, you will see a symbol that looks like the "Subscribe" button on your homepage. It is up as part of the browser toolbar. If you click it you will have the option to “subscribe”. After you do so anything new from that site will show up in the “favorites” section (feeds tab) of your Internet Explorer version 7 or later. I think you can subscribe in some versions of Outlook also, in which case the new posts would come in something like email does.  There are quite a lot of ways to subscribe,  Google Reader is one of the more popular ways to read blogs.  I use a program named RssBandit.

 So your friends can subscribe to you using one or more of these readers. 

When you create a new entry you can give it various tags. Tags are deceptively simple, and very useful. Lets say you write about three main topics, building your new house, astrology, and life in Panama. For the first month or two it will be easy to scroll through the entries and see those in a particular category. After a year there will be twelve months to look through one at a time. But if each Panama entry has a common tag, a single click will bring up all of them at once.

A search of your site might do much the same, but the tag method would be more likely to produce the results you intended as author.