NSW Rural Fire Service current incidents map

Posted on October 27, 2009 by glenn

The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) has provided an RSS feed with the latest updates on bush fires in NSW for a while now, and it’s a geoRSS feed with lat/long data included so you can see where each incident happens. However it wasn’t until this week, when their incident and major updates feeds were included in the data.australia.gov.au repository that I noticed something else. They don’t just have a location point for each fire, they have the actual boundary coordinates included.

This means that Google Maps can create a polygon overlay of each fire, showing its size and location. I’ve included it in Google Maps, you can see it here. Each place marker includes useful information like description of the location, what council area it’s in, what type of fire it is and the latest updates.

But additionally, if you zoom into one of the incidents, you can see the outline of the location of the fire and really get a feel for its size and what property it’s near.

After the devastation of last season’s bushfires, and the fact that this season is expected to be very bad, this service is one of many tools people can use to keep up to date.

It’s also worth giving props to the NSW Rural Fire service. They’re the only fire service in the country that is providing this level of detail in their public news feeds, and keeping it updated. Additionally, as far as I can see, theirs is the only dataset on the data.australia.gov.au that is actually a live data service rather than a CSV or Excel file download. If the government wants the data provided to be used they’re going to need to provide more live data. Or at least more up to date than last years crime data.

The map below has the RFS incident feed embedded, so it will update as the RSS feed from the RFS is updates. You can click on the link at the bottom to go to Google Maps, where you can add this map to your ‘My Maps’ section for later.

View Larger Map

What is a browser?

Posted on October 7, 2009 by glenn

While this post makes me worry a bit, it in no way suprises me. The lack of knowledge that the general public has around the technological tools they use every day is still incredible.

Official Google Blog: What is a browser?.

The little video that Jason has done up for this post is well worth pointing people to when they get confused, it’s a very susinct explaination of the difference between an operating system, a search engine and a browser.

It reminds me of this video where they randomly asked people “What is a browser”

Bing has 10% search market share. Maybe.

Posted on September 17, 2009 by glenn

So the latest news is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has nabbed 10% of the US search engine market and is now the fastest growing search engine. If Jason Calacanis is right, and every 1% of the search market is worth US$1billion then this is a nice chunk of change for Microsoft.

However I contest that these results should not be encouraging for Microsoft, for a couple of reasons.

They’re still in a bit of a honeymoon phase with Bing. They’re still releasing new functionality (You need to switch to United States to see that) and people are experimenting with it.
But more importantly I think, a lot of IE6 users had their default search set to Bing (and for a while there, couldn’t change back). But none the less a significant proportion of the browsing public still use IE6. Around 25% at last count, and a significant proportion of these will have the default search engine set. Defaults matter. Also, a fairly large chunk of these IE6 users will be corporate users who cannot change what browser they use due to (often misguided) corporate IT rules.

What this means in practice is that a lot of those using Bing aren’t choosing to do so (or are just giving it a shot), and if & when they are able to choose, they’re likely to go for Google. As corporate environments ever so slowly upgrade, they’ll allow users to at least move to better versions of IE, and possibly other browsers. When you install IE8 it asks you what search engine you want to use, and browsers like Firefox just set it to Google.

So while the month-on-month growth that they’ve seen over the last few months may be real, I’m not convinced the base numbers are really representative of persistent usage. If overnight people dumped IE6 for something better (oh please, Dear Lord, make it so) I think you’d see Bing’s usage numbers go through the floor.

Apparently essentialbaby.com.au considers fathers either ‘Onlookers’ or ‘Other’

Posted on September 14, 2009 by glenn

This image is part of the signup form for the now Fairfax-owned site Essential Baby, an Australian parenting and pregnancy website. To register for their site you have to fill in a surprisingly convoluted signup form, which includes this ‘Your stage of life’ option. The available choices seem lacking somewhat, especially considering that two questions earlier it asks you for your gender.

So I can say I’m a male, but I have so say I’m either a ‘Curious Onlooker’ of my family (man, doesn’t that sound creepy) or ‘Other’. Seriously? I mean you couldn’t add ‘Dad’ or just say ‘Parent’?

What’s even funnier is this is that these are two of the lead articles:

So we’re ok as something to read about, but they don’t really want us around there. Come on Fairfax, get it together.

Sending to Evernote from FeedDemon

Posted on August 14, 2009 by glenn

After writing my last post I remembered that I’d done up a send-to option for FeedDemon itself too. It’s pretty simple just download this XML file and save it to the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\SendTo\ folder. Restart FeedDemon and you can then use the Send To option to clip an item to Evernote. Same as the Google Reader version, this will clip the whole page that the news item is from, not just the news feed item, and it will open up a page that will let you tag or move the clipped item.

Send To Evernote from FeedDemon

Unfortunately at this point there’s no way to set the icon next to custom Send To items (that I’m aware of anyway)

Sending to Evernote from Google Reader

Posted on August 14, 2009 by glenn

While I’m not a big Google Reader user, preferring FeedDemon, the fact that FeedDemon now syncs with Reader is really handy when I’m not using my own computer because it keeps up to date with all my stuff. This week, the Google Reader team announced a couple of new features (one of which was inspired by FeedDemon’s Panic Button) including the ability to send a news item to other services.

It comes with a list of pre-defined options such as Delicious, Digg & Facebook, but it also has the ability to add custom ones using the substitution tags provided

Send To Settings

Because of this, we can set it up to clip stuff straight from Google Reader into an Evernote notebook. Stealing from the Evernote Web Clipper bookmarklet, you can create a custom ‘send-to’ destination like this:

Go to Google Reader and click on ‘Settings’ then ‘Send To’
Click on the ‘Create A Custom Link’ button
In the form that appears put ‘Evernote’ in the Name field, http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?title=${title}&url=${url} in the Url field and http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico in the Icon Url field
Click ‘Save’

You’ll then have Evernote in your send to menu

Send to menu with evernote

This will automatically clip the whole page that the news item links to into Evernote, so even if the RSS feed that you’re reading only does partial feeds, this will grab the whole original article from the site, great if you want to read it later when you’re offline with your iPhone or PC/Mac Evernote client. Once it’s clipped the page it takes you to a page where you can move the clipped item into a different Notebook & add some tags to it, but this is optional, the item is already stored in your default Evernote notebook

Clip confirmation page

So there you go, a really easy way to grab anything from Google Reader & stick it into Evernote

Twitter newspaper style for FeedDemon

Posted on April 2, 2009 by glenn

As Amit Agarwal pointed out in his (very detailed) post, the new FeedDemon is a great Twitter client, with a whole bunch of features to make using Twitter easier.

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that FeedDemon’s newspaper layout is very customisable, I while I use the Surfer theme usually, I found that for Twitter feeds it was very annoying. Showing the title is useless because the body of the post is the title, also, the large spacing around each post just used up a lot of space and meant I had to keep scrolling a lot to read the feed. Also, the thumbnails view is pretty useless for a Twitter feed, seeing as it’s just full of people’s profile pictures

So I took the surfer style & I’ve customised it for a Twitter feed (download here). FeedDemon is great in that it lets you set a custom newspaper style for particular feeds (Feed Properties -> Advanced). The new Twitter style removes the thumbnails, removes the post title unless you’re in headlines only view and trims a lot of the extra whitespace. Also I removed most of the action buttons as I don’t tend to send tweets or clip them (and if I want to, there are keyboard shortcuts) and unfortunately, which buttons show can’t be customised per feed.

Also, you can make your own custom buttons, so I added a Retweet button next to the new Reply button that sends you to Twitter with the retweet filled in ready to send. This was surprisingly simple. The fact that Nick has used standard xslt to style FeedDemon rather than a proprietary format means that you can do pretty much whatever you want to, which is awesome!

So this is what it looks like now

If you want to give this a go, download this file and put it in the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\Styles folder & restart FeedDemon. Alternatively if you a reading this in FeedDemon you can just click on the download link & it will install it for you. Then change the style for your Twitter feed(s) by right clicking on the feed then going to Feed Properties -> Advanced and pick Twitter from the list of Styles.

This is just a first idea, it probably needs work. I’m debating moving the buttons under each tweet, but I’m not sure. Also I’ve written this for the new FeedDemon 3 Beta. It may well work for earlier versions, but I don’t know. There’s a topic for this style in the Newsgator styles forum where you can leave comments / suggestions, or you can leave a comment here.

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here.

Getting FriendFeed real-time in your Firefox sidebar

Posted on October 17, 2008 by glenn

FriendFeed has released a real-time page that auto-scrolls all updates from your subscriptions. There’s a mini window option that allows you to see it in a separate window, but I’ve found the best way to view it is as a sidebar in Firefox.

To get this you need to bookmark the mini-window page, so open the mini window, right click on the page and select ‘Bookmark this page’. Then right-click on the bookmark, select ‘Properties’ and check the ‘Load this bookmark in the sidebar’ check box & click ‘Save Changes’.

Now when you select this bookmark, the real time view will open in your sidebar – awesome!.

PropertyPortalWatch.com is down, the day it appears in the SMH MySmallBusiness section

Posted on October 8, 2008 by glenn

UPDATE: And it’s back up again, on http://www1.propertyportalwatch.com/ www1.propertyportalwatch.com is on IP 74.124.211.14 where as www.propertyportalwatch.com is on 74.124.210.232. Looks like there was an issue with the server they were sitting on. Apache on www.propertyportalwatch.com is giving a 302 Moved Temporarily over to www1, so looks like it’s a technical failure after all.

Today, in the small business section of the SMH, there’s an article about the ex-CEO of http://realestate.com.au Simon Baker’s new venture called PropertyPortalWatch. Since being kicked from REA, Simon Baker has been working on this site which is meant to “congregate news, opinion and gossip about other property portals and companies around the world, in a one-stop shop for people within the [online real-estate] industry.”

However as of this morning the http://propertyportalwatch.com site has been down, with the site redirecting to an account suspended page on their hosting company’s servers. I can’t imagine that the SMH article got them *that* much traffic, especially seeing as in that article it said that Simon has been pouring a fair bit of cash into it, plus he said they have some “anonymous investors on board” too. As Scott on Twitter said “Never host your new startup on some cheap ‘n’ nasty cpanel hosting companies!”.

They’re hosting with a US based hosting company called InMotion. I can only assume that there’s been some accounting stuff up (as noted in the comments below, InMotion’s business plans all come with unlimited disk space & transfers), and it’s kind of embarrassing that it would happen on the day they get some free press from the SMH. If you still want to check it out, the Google Cache is still available. Simon Baker is still blogging at MyCEOLife. There, he posted about the new site last month, and linked to it from there as recently as last Saturday.

Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate

Posted on September 24, 2008 by glenn

IntenseDebate, a centralised commenting service similar to the Disqus service used on this site, has been acquired by WordPress parent company Automattic.

From the announcement on the IntenseDebate site:

So what does this mean for you, our valued users? A couple of things:
1.) We will be temporarily going back into private beta. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2.) You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3.) You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.

But don’t worry!
You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come! We will continue to improve our comment system and your commenters’ experience. IntenseDebate will continue to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog and build your reader community.

This isn’t a surprising acquisition. There have been rumours about Automattic buying a commenting service for a while now, with some suggesting that Disqus was also a possible target. Matt Mullenweg said on his post about the purchase that they’re going to keep the service platform agnostic (for now at least) but they’ll also roll a lot of the features into the hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress.

Seeing as they already own Akismet, which processes a large chunk of the blogosphere’s comments, ID will give them access to even more of the comments posted on the web. On the upside this will mean that they will be able to improve Akismet even more by processing the additional data, but it also means the one company has an extraordinary amount of information on what is posted on the internet. The potential for this to be a privacy risk or for them to sell this to marketers is a little bit disturbing, but so far Automattic haven’t given us a reason to be concerned.

However, similar to Google, they are getting by on a lot of community good will. And also similar to Google, they’re now in a position to really abuse that good will if they saw fit. Lets hope that doesn’t happen

Update: Here’s the response to the announcement from Disqus

Today, Automattic (the team behind the WordPress platform) announced their acquisition of IntenseDebate, a competing and similarly-focused comment service. From all of us at Disqus: congrats to the ID team on joining the Automattic family. We’re fans of WordPress here (this blog uses it), so I think it’s good that they’re beginning to pay more attention to the comments.

So what does this mean for us? The Disqus comment system is still the largest third-party comment system on WordPress, yet those blogs represent under 5% of all websites using Disqus. We pride ourselves on being an independent cross-platform service. Disqus will continue to innovate and provide the best discussion experience on blogs. Our company’s entire focus is on increasing the number and quality of your comments and that will never change.

As a true third-party system, Disqus can be open and extensible to other services and platforms, as well as offer unique functionality not limited by a single platform. I’m looking forward to the future of discussion and I hope you’ll experience it with Disqus.

Development on a shoestring

Category Archives: Internet