A plugin for Movable Type weblogs that allows you to send out notifications to subscribed users when a new comment is posted to an entry to which they have subscribed. This works well with message boards that employ it. I hope “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/ implements the same thing as I am planning to migrate to it shortly (I like the nested categories and the ability to post password-protected posts).
Archive for the 'Software reviews' Category | back to home
9 July 2004
5 July 2004
The latest beta version of “Skype”:http://www.skype.com/ – the popular phone software which lets you conduct free calls between PCs anywhere on the Internet – now lets you dial any regular telephone in the world too. It’s not for free but doesn’t cost much (land lines in most industrialised countries seem to cost Eur 0.012/$.014 a minute, though calling most mobiles costs much more).
The “Free World Dialup”:http://www.freeworldialup.com/ network (accessible via “various software packages”:http://www.freeworldialup.com/support/software_downloads) used to offer free calls to ‘normal’ phones as well as free PC to PC calls – it may still for all I know – but it is rather tricky to set up, while Skype is known for its straightforward installation. I haven’t tried either myself recently so caveat downloader.
28 May 2004
opensourceCMS is a very cool idea. It’s a sort of playground where you can kick the tires of lots of open source groupware, weblogging and content management software. This kind of software requires some skills and time to install so having a way to try it out and see what it feels like to use without having to install it yourself (and then uninstall it if it isn’t what you want) is very useful. Of course nothing you do with it is permanent – ‘Each system is deleted and reinstalled every two hours. This allows you to be the administrator of any system here without fear of messing anything up.’
16 May 2004
Not to be left behind by “blogger’s recent improvements”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#001103, Moveable Type has announced a public test of its “new version 3.0”:http://www.moveabletype.org/mt_30_beta_survey.shtml though not much information is available about what’s in it (in fact it appears the new version means more a change of architecture than additional features “at least at first”:http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/04/wheres_the_beef.shtml#more).
Unfortunately, at the same time that they announced the beta programme they announced a change in pricing structure and if you look at the MT page where they “announce the new pricing”:http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml you will see a growing groundswell of anger – mainly about their decision to restrict the number of authors you could have for a weblog and still be able to consider it non-commercial.
To their credit, in response they have “dealt with the problem”:http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/05/movable_type_30.shtml pretty effectively – they are now offering ‘Personal Edition Add-On’ packages that let you add more authors to their $69.95 low-end paid-for package (which covers up to five authors). I think this is fair – if you want up to three blogs for yourself alone you can download their software for free. For multiple authors on the same blog, you have to pay even if you are non-commercial, but only around $14 each.
People with earlier versions can keep using them for free, whatever configuration they have.
11 May 2004
You’d think from all the discussion about blogging being a highly interactive community activity from “Joi Ito”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html, “Jim Moore”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html, “Ross Mayfield”:http://www.socialtext.net/mayfield/index.cgi?social_network_dynamics_and_participatory_politics and others that “Blogger”:http://www.blogger.com/, one of the most popular weblog services, would have been supporting the ability to comment for a long time now. But of course it hasn’t been – until now.
Of course a dedicated blogger could always add the facility to comment to their site using an external add-on but how many would? Well, apparently not many. Overall, “less than half”:http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Ejpd/classes/ics234cw04/herring.pdf of people have comments turned on in their weblogs and this largely depends on what the default setting for the software provided is (and the number of comments actually made on most weblogs is low to none).
Anyhow, let’s not be too churlish – the latest revision of Blogger does add some good features – it even adds one or two things I can’t get through Moveable Type (as standard) yet – the ability to email a posting to your blog for example, and the creation of a standardised ‘blogger profile’ page. It’s just a pity it only offers Atom, not RSS feeds, and doesn’t support the absolutely vital feature of categories (see below this post and the list of categories I provide on the right).
2 May 2004
The HTML that Microsoft Word 2000 generates if you “save as HTML” is full of weird tags. These are designed to make the pages produced resemble the original as closely as possible and to make it easy to move back and forth between Word and HTML but if you want to incorporate text from Word documents into normal web pages easily what you need to do is to download the Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0 (an official Microsoft application).
23 April 2004
Microsoft is offering a “preview (beta) version of the software”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/prodinfo/sp1/default.mspx for free download. Here’s “what OneNote offers”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/prodinfo/sp1/guide.mspx. It claims to be ‘a single place for users to electronically capture and organize typed and handwritten notes, audio recordings, graphics, and other rich media’ – sounds a bit like “NVivo”:http://www.qsr.com.au/products/productoverview/product_overview.htm the qualititative data analysis software I have been using recently. As you’d expect it is a lot more glossy in feel and more consistent with Windows conventions than NVivo but is unlikely to have the kind of depth of ‘serious academic functionality’ NVivo provides. Still I am looking forward to kicking it around. I wonder when this preview edition will expire? It is not clear whether the software will expire at all. Certainly there is nothing that tells you when you install it.
As a bonus I find that with this new version of OneNote I can use the Microsoft speech recognition software that was installed when I installed Unreal Tournament (it would not work with my old copy of Microsoft Word). I am finding it works remarkably well so far.
Does anyone know where I can get some documentation on how to use Microsoft’s voice recognition software? (Things like how do I indicate I want to use punctuation?) There doesn’t seem to be any that was installed when I installed the game.
Thanks to Steve Hatch for the link
20 April 2004
The clever people at DemoLinux have produced a freely downloadable file you can put on to a single CD-ROM. The advantage of this is that as long as your PC allows you to boot from its CD-ROM drive this disc provides a useable installation of “Debian”:http://www.debian.org Linux you can run on your PC without having to change any of its settings. An ideal low risk way to get a taste of what Linux can offer without the hassle of re-partitioning your hard disk etc. It even includes a version of OpenOffice – the open source substitute for Microsoft Office.
Thanks to “Follow Me Here”:http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/2003_11_01_blog_archive.html#106779797278667523 for the link.
24 March 2004
I continue to look for a good cheap way of searching my local hard disk as easily as I search the web. Jeremy Wagstaff has just produced a handly master list of hard disk indexers. I am still toying with all of them. All I want is decent Boolean search and Acrobat support. DTSearch has this but it also has a crappy interface and costs too much for consumer use.
80-20 doesn’t integrate with non-Outlook email (I use Eudora) – indeed if you don’t use Outlook it really really doesn’t want to install at all. X1’s price seems to have gone up from free to $50 to $100 and it doesn’t offer Boolean search. The latest entry, “HotBot Desktop”:http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040322-1.shtml doesn’t offer Boolean search either though they say they are using DTSearch’s technology which should have been able to provide this function. I’ll still be taking a good look at it though.
23 March 2004
I just discovered that Amazon US is selling my book Dealing with E-Mail for 60% off – it’s $2.80! At that price you’d be crazy not to buy a copy. Here’s an overview of the book:
This book was designed to be a simple non-technical guide, inexpensive enough to give to everyone in an organization, that would nonetheless introduce workers at all levels to many of the key techniques they can use to manage email more effectively and the key security and legal issues they may face. These include:
- Filing your email automatically
- Managing email address books
- Making sure your address does not get picked up by spammers and
- Removing spam automatically when it arrives.
- Dealing with email-borne viruses
- Writing clear and culturally-sensitive email
- Preventing confidential email from being intercepted and read and
- Being aware of legal issues that may arise including sexual harassment, commercial confidentiality and breach of contract.
The book has been written to be broadly applicable to users of any e-mail system and from any country.
As organizations increasingly use email as a business-critical tool they will become vulnerable to email-borne viruses, spam, legal problems and un-manageable volumes of unnecessary messages unless they ensure that everyone – not just the IT staff and HR managers learns some of the basic techniques outlined in this book.
There is also a “companion site”:http://www.well.com/user/derb/dealingwithemail/ for the book containing more detailed information and up to date tips.
