Sam Davyson

TechCrunch is a blog. It deals with all the latest web 2.0 products and services as (or in fact often a little before) they are released. It makes great reading and gives previews of loads of start ups. Some of them make it through. Some of them become the services that we all know and use. Most of them obviously don’t. A lot of the sites that are reviewed on TechCrunch are in invitation only betas, or public trials. All of them are web 2.0.

The blog is all written by Michael Arrington and is also translated into French. It is a great read, and I am adding it to my Blogroll as well as to my Gmail WebClips.

Want to get Live Mail for yourself now? Just read these instructions.

This continues from Part 1. Which I published earlier, and can be read here.

So the screen that you get when you log in with Firefox is something like below. It tells you that the mail beta has not been built fully for the browser that you are using. And that you should maybe use another browser (IE) for the moment.

[ View this screenshot in large. ]

I suppose that I have to admit this is fair enough. This service is not yet on general release. And credit to the Mail Beta team: you can read your mail in Firefox. You just have to use a slightly degraded interface to do so. Basically you lose the new parts of the interface, and what you are left with is much like the current version of Hotmail, with a slightly whiter stylesheet. For instance you lose the preview pane, and you lose the drag drop features.

So now I go to IE. And I login. The login page is probably temporary. But it sets the style for the service to follow. It is cleaner than what you see at the moment. And it is completely white. The first page that greets you when you sign in is the Today tab. This is shown on the screenshot below. I really thought that this would go in the new version. In the past it was always in the irritating jump page with Hotmail. It simply delayed your access to your inbox. And Hotmail used it to display particularly large adverts. They would argue that the function of the Today tab was to give you a dynamic view of your mail. Just the mail that is important to you. At a glance. But it never really worked.

[ View this screeshot in large. ]

They seemed to have departed from this a bit. And the Today tab no longer lists any of the mail that I have got at all. Instead it tells me about the new features in Windows Live Mail Beta. At the moment the new thing seems to be deleting mail. Which seems particularly funny to me after just recently when Gmail equipped themselves with a delete button. Anyway, you can see that the Mail Beta team have been kind enough to allow us to see how many messages we have got from the Today tab, even if we can’t actually see what they are. Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging. What a phenomenon. Not in the way that you think I mean either. Yeah sure it is amazing that suddenly everyone can write anything that anyone else can read instantly. That is cool. But I really for this post want to focus on the hug number of methods there are by which I can blog. It is tricky to chose between them. I can blog from my Flickr account. Which is good for doing images that I am hosting myself, as their is no bandwidth worries with it. I can blog from Digg. Which is good if the story from Digg sparks the post. I can blog direct using the software that powers the blog by logging into my server. It is a nice way of doing it. You get all the options, and can modify the theme while you are there. I do this sometimes. Mainly however, I blog with Performancing.

Performancing is an extension for Firefox that allows any user to easily blog to any blog from any site at all. That is because it is built in to the browser. You simply hit F8, and there you go. Get blogging. It is a good system. And the latest version is much improved so you can post straight to your del.icio.us bookmarks as well as blogging. It is also integrated with technorati. Although I don’t tend to use this service. I notice that it also works well with the categories that come with WordPress blogs like mine. Excellent.

Google Blogoscoped (at: http://blog.outer-court.com/) is the source for the latest news on Google. It covers all the changes in full detail as well as offering a load of extras. It also includes a very active forum which is an interesting sort of mix of blog post comments and a normal forum. It does also have a chat room with a very strange interface. It is run by the master that is Philipp Lenssen who is also behind Google Modules and a whole load of other stuff.

For the first time I am now publishing a blog using WordPress software. And what’s more is it is running on my domain. This increases the functionality of my blogging. Whilst Blogger is a great service it doesn’t give users all the options in the world. Using WordPress I still don’t have all the options in the world, but I do have most of them.

The template that I used to use for my blog however is not really liftable into this new one. I may get round to redesigning one for the future but at the moment this theme seems nice enough. I plan to change the header image from time to time. I will be importing the posts from my old blog to give the feeling that this thing does have some content in it, although I am aware that it is likely that there will be some formatting issues.

For now that is it. Welcome to the new blog.

This is the blog of Sam Davyson. It does not keep any particular focus other than the persistant aim for it to help me keep a record of some of my favourite sites on the internet. I blog here about these sites, about my own site, and about a few of my favourite programs (and in one case, its extensions).

This blog is hosted on my own domain at sam.davyson.com but it is powered by WordPress software which runs from my server. You can learn more about this blog in the relevant category.