It used to be that I hammered out text messages each letter at a time, manually typing rather than mess with that “T9 crap” and then I discovered how it worked. That’s right, I did it the hard way for a long time until I took the time to learn how to text faster.

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K and I have a non-aggression pact when it comes to the PC Mac wars. I have my PCs and she has her Macs. We respect each others’ machines and life moves on.

MindComet has tipped the tide of this war, broken our standstill. How? Well, we’re a Mac office so I’ve adjusted and am happy to say I’ve had little trouble with the machines. There are some frustratingly simple things I’ve had to unlearn. Not to mention it drives me batty when I’m switching between my Mac and the PC I’ve remoted into to test for IE6 bugs. Why does it drive me batty? The difference between Option + R and Ctrl + R. The Option key is where Alt normally is for PC users. But that’s a small thing.

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I just got back from Los Angeles last night. The weekend went very well with lots of networking and interviews getting done, I also did a lot of networking and it was funny, as soon as I asked someone their email address and they began saying “firstname.lastname” I knew it was at gmail.com.

On the flight I was pondering just why it is that everyone has the mature email address at gmail. I mean, 99% of the time that’s the way it is. Then I realized why: It came about when Generation Y was entering the work force.

Hotmail and Yahoo may be as old as the Internet, but that means we all have emails like “masterblaster1968@hotmail.com” (my apologies to whoever has that email address.) They were the geek names, the identities we used online when the idea was anonymity. The Internet has grown and matured and now it is used to build your real name for school and employers.

Yahoo, a few years ago allowed their users to change their name, which is when I got a mature yahoo email address as well, but I never use it. Why? I was already established in Gmail.

Gmail simply hit the nail on the head when many of us didn’t realize the board was loose. The right interface, great storage, and the better features were all factors in a major coup for a market many considered to be a solved system.

Now sadly the Gmail interface is falling behind. We rely on tools like Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail firefox plugin, and other such apps to increase it’s usefulness. Rumor is that Google is working on an upgrade but we haven’t seen it yet. Now we’re hearing things of a company called zenbe.com (I’m working on a review of it actually) and Xobni for Outlook.

So, is Gmail the king? No, it will be dethroned. But it was a major stepping stone for the realm of email, moving us past limited space into lifetimes of email, from folders and into tagging, and more!

Two weeks ago I was searching my own name on Google to see what sort of presence I had for my name. I know there is a hockey player who has a fair bit of attention and there used to be an Olympic sprinter, so how did I fair?

I did alright, it turned out that at that time my Twitter account was higher ranked than this blog! I was shocked.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. And it means understanding, at the most basic levels, how Google (and other engines to a lesser extent) search and rank your website. Yes Google is largely based off of other links to your page, but also is a whole host of factors you as a blogger can affect. While we (SEO people) don’t know the exact formula for Google’s secret sauce, people with infinite patience and a algorithmic approach are able to determine the importance of various factors.

For example we know that having the search term in your domain is a major boost. So “PatrickJarrett.com” would immediately be better than “TrickJarrett.com.” Things like the use of the <H1> tags, the appearance of the search phrase inside the body of the page, whether it is bolded, or in links or in image alt text. The list goes on. I’ve seen lists of over 250 things which affect how your page is ranked.

All I did to bump TrickJarrett from the 2nd page of results for “Patrick Jarrett” is add an H1, add it to the title tag, modify some wordings to use the full name and sure enough this morning I’m front page and #4 on the results. With a bit more work I can be the #1 result for my name.

I awoke with a start, the room was dark and all was quiet. I heard the TV on in the other room but presumed K had just fallen asleep with it on. I listened and could hear Mattie in her cage, and it struck me that I didn’t take her out before bed. She would be nearing 8 hours without a trip outside. Usually not an issue, but she had eaten since going out. I feared the worst, thinking she had had an accident in the cage.

My sinuses have been clogged and even without that my sense of smell is iffy, so I couldn’t smell anything but I got up and pulled on jeans and a shirt. I retrieved Mattie’s leash and took her out for a quick walk. She did her business and when I got back inside I checked the cage to find it clean – thank goodness.

After putting Mattie back into the cage I crawled back into bed and proceeded to toss and turn for half an hour. Finally I gave up trying to fall asleep and got up. While in bed my brain had been crunching over a few coding issues with a project for ManaNation. I trawled my RSS feeds for anything of interest and I scanned my forums, most hadn’t had any post since I went to bed just 7 hours ago.

I settled in to work on the code and sure enough, the early hour, the quiet email and twitter, and the quiet house allowed me to really dig into the work and lay down some quality progress on the project.

It was extremely refreshing since, when I went to bed last night, I was fuming with frustration over another project. I take coding very personally and if I can’t solve a problem, or if something I do continues to be an issue, I get extremely upset. So to get up and in the early hours knock out two hours of solid progress on a project is a great boost to my morale.

RSS is amazing. It’s the natural progression of information, but it won’t be the end of that path. Until that evolution comes though (or has it?) I’m living the high life using Google Reader with my tweaks.

First, if a feed doesn’t fit my needs, I make it do so. With io9, a gawker sci-fi geek blog, it includes spoiler posts – majorly uncool. I hate spoilers in any form. I rarely watch the peek into next week’s episode of any show I’m watching, even that is too much for me. So what do I do? First I sent them an email suggesting that they offer a feed sans spoiler posts. Then I decide to take the initiative and I use Yahoo Pipes to easily filter the feed with any post which contains the word “spoiler” in its title. This same concept can be done of course with any feed that contains posts you never read.

Secondly, one thing Google Reader does poorly is implement tags. They treat them more as folders in their display rather than tagging. If they want to fix their tags they need to completely overhaul how they are presented, entered and handled. Until they do, it feels more like a non-limited folder system where things can exist in multiple folders. That being said, I’ve today created a new “tag” (folder) called “_Top.” The _ (called an underscore) is used to put the tag at the top of the listing. And this tag is used to mark feeds which I discover myself reading much more frequently than skimming. This way, when I log into Reader and have a large collection of feeds to read, the cream is at the… top.

Thirdly, I implemented a page-to-rss app for Paul Graham’s essay page. He has a link to such a feed maintained by some individual, but since I would rather put my data in the hands of corporations I worked it through a handful of sites to provide a clean and perfect RSS feed from his page.

Fourthly, I’ve begun actively seeking out utility feeds. Things like weather reports, news alerts, etc. The more I can funnel into this channel for information, the better. In addition I am able to rss things like my calendar and reminders (like my instapaper feed.)

Going back to the first example, I need to spin off and discuss Yahoo Pipes some. I think this is a tool which really isn’t getting a fair shake. It’s an easy to comprehend tool to create complex data processing applications, with a heavy emphasis on RSS feeds since they are, by design, best used for this sort of thing.

My day job is actually implementing a solution through Yahoo Pipes. We have software which has a collection of RSS feeds but inexplicably does not offer a unified feed, and so very easily we are able to create a unified feed through Yahoo Pipes. Sure, we could write our own solution, but it would take us 30 minutes of time, where this one will take us 60 seconds.

I began this post a few weeks again as ManaNation was growing, and it was about to outgrow the Godaddy shared hosting. In the process of writing it I hit a money crunch and GoDaddy revamped their shared hostings, upping limits and so I did a small service upgrade which has since allowed us to continue sitting on their server. However, I’m again considering the move, so this post came out of the dust closet and here it is.

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photo credit: Jaako

A question which is sure to be asked a lot in the coming days or weeks is, “Which of these services should I use?” My main friends from Dragon*Con use Twitter to communicate through the day though they also have pownce apps, and the main difference is the ability to receive new messages as text messages. For a lot of people, I suspect that will be the main reason to stay with Twitter.

For me though, I turn mobile messages off with Twitter except on rare cases. If I want to check Twitter I’ll hit the site up with the phone’s browser. Mostly I use these services as sort of a group IM without the immediacy. I can send announcements telling people about stuff, or asking a question and waiting for my cloud of friends to respond or let the issue float by.

So there are really, in my view, two users – Those who use it for mobile messaging specifically, and those who use it for messaging from the office or computer.

If mobile messaging is your thing, Twitter is still atop the heap. Despite hardware issues and regular downtimes, it’s still the only game in town.

If desktop messaging is your thing, then Pownce is probably going to quickly become your default so long as you can get your friend cloud to make the jump. Sure you could fall back on Facebook, but for me Facebook is way too cluttered for the communication I’m looking for.

I still code better late at night. I don’t know if it is the ability to focus with fewer distractions or what, but I’ve knocked out a lot of progress on a project for my dad.

Update: I’ve discovered that while what I did worked, it also cut out the stats somewhere along the line, so I’ve rolled back to my previous settings and I’ll explore it more this week.

Podpress is far from perfect, but it’s closer than many other podcasting systems out there. The developers have put a LOT of work into it, so much so I half expect them to begin spinning off their own blogging app. The fundamentals are all there, they just need to build their own system for handling posts and such. Not that I am recommending they do so, WordPress is great, there is just so much code in this plugin that it is halfway there already.

For ManaNation though, I’ve been quietly hacking myself some custom features or abilities. Since ads are going to be a major revenue source, I wanted to open that door on their popup video player, I got some help on their forums and found the javascript which launched the popup player, then I modified it to show my logo and some ads.

That was all well and good until something better, and cooler, and ultimately more awesome, came along. Shadowbox.

I link-logged it yesterday during work and then last night I sat down and figured how to hack it into the system.

First, I installed and tested Shadowbox on the WordPress installation. I chose to use the Yahoo YUI framework, uploaded the necessary javascript and css files, and linked them in the theme header. I tested a few links with the ‘rel=”shadowbox”‘ and sure enough it worked like a charm.

Next, I ditched Podpress’ whole javascript popup launch, instead I created a php page which I called ‘popupvideo.php’ and had it create the same page I was generating through javascript, it also accepted a php variable (videolink) which it used in the wmv player to load the video for activex or the embedded player.

Third, I modified the code which generated the popup link (in podpress-theme.php) to instead create a shadowboxed link to the popupvideo.php file. This took some trial and error as I had to find the proper variable for the code “$val['URI']” which is the link to the media file.

Fourth, I fiddled with my page’s design some. I’m still not totally happy with it, but I like it better. This way I don’t lose visitors to new links, I can pop them up in site. Sure, some might find it annoying, but for my podcast audience I don’t think many of them will be unhappy with the change.

I just got word from Helio about their new slider phone, the Helio Mysto. I never did make the switch from Sprint to Helio as I haven’t been convinced of their financial stability but this new phone is tipping the scale into taking the plunge. Check it out: Helio Mysto

For those visiting the site, they may notice a new widget on the right. Skribit.com is a site with a simple purpose – letting the readers suggest your blog topics. The concept isn’t new, of course, but the idea had faded for several years and it was born out of a single weekend of work (largely.) It’s the brainchild of Paul Stamatiou, one of my favorite bloggers and a kid from my old school GT.

So anyways I signed up for the beta and it was interesting because I went through the registration, all the normal stuff, name, email, password, etc. Then it lets me add my site, TrickJarrett.com and after I do that, it tells me I haven’t been authorized yet. Now, normally limited beta tests use an invite system, you sign up to be invited, here you sign up and wait to be authorized. It’s an interesting twist, and from the standpoint of a business or website I think it’s pretty smart though they ought to give users a bit more of a heads up about it.

Anyways, the widget is super simple, uses iframe technology and is just a drop-in and go. I ended up modifying the size to make it fit my wide sidebar portion, but that wasn’t a problem either as it sizes to the iframe (I was afraid I’d have white space or things run off the bottom, but it looks like they got all of those bases covered.

Let’s see how it goes for a few weeks, and if my readers have any questions for me to put it to use. I know most of my readers are close friends and RSS readers, so we’ll just see how this goes. If it doesn’t get decent usage in the next few weeks though, I think it will get the unceremonious ax.

I got my invite to Xobni last night, so I’m testing it at home with my ManaNation mail. So far it’s pretty cool but I don’t think it’s a killer app. It’s been getting a lot press recently, but I’m not too impressed yet. If you want an invite, leave a comment and I’ll send them when I get home.

Normally this sort of link would just be relegated to the Asides, but to put it bluntly – this moved me. I’ve always been a large fan of Lessig’s and hearing that he spoke at TED caused me to immediately put work aside and seek out the video. This is, perhaps, the most eloquent speech I have ever heard concerning the problems with modern copyright.

Please, if you have 20 minutes, watch this video. And I do mean watch it. Listening does not do justice to his presentation.

ESPN is a burgeoning powerhouse, and as it has discovered its audience is interested in more than just football and basketball – really it was the arrival of Texas Holdem which showed this most clearly. However most people only vaguely recall the previous coverage of gaming which they provided.

Closest to my heart there was a time when they covered Magic: the Gathering tournaments. I think they did maybe two of them before deciding the audience wasn’t there. They’ve also done Chess and video games, but all of which were small unheralded tests several years ago.

What we’re seeing though is an ever growing G4tv, a growing gaming coverage community (my little project humbly included), and an audience increasingly diverse. South Korea is on the vanguard of this trend, but America is close behind and all the games are slowly moving toward a central solution. Gaming is moving from the geeky few to the commercial masses.

So it seems to me that ESPN, fresh off of creating ESPNU and exploring their niche spin-offs, should begin looking towards a gaming dedicated channel and website.