Technically Speaking

Adobe Labs has released a new RSS feed aggregator called myFeedz. Adobe brands it as a “social newspaper”; basically you include topics in your myFeedz profile that you are interested in. Then when you log in, myFeedz checks for RSS feeds that match your profile topics. Matching topics published in the last 24 hours are displayed. Thus, the content is always fresh — in the last 24 hours — and you don’t have to find the feeds yourself; they are “pushed” to you.

Once you are reading the feeds selected for you, you can give feeds a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (Stumble-Upon style) so myFeedz gradually learns the kinds of feeds that are interesting to you.

I only started using it recently, but so far, it’s given me some interesting blogs with posts I’ve found interesting. My only complaint is that they need an editor (even a spell-checker would do). When you are creating or modifying your profile, you can specify feed languages you are interested in. Look at the selection option for Portuguese:

Of course, what do you expect from a company that can’t spell “Feeds” properly! <grin>

(For those of you who don’t know, one of my pet peeves is the intentional misspelling of words, especially in company names.)

Thanks for your patience while we have been down and out. We had some trouble, initially, as we switched from one server to another, and then I was on vacation for a while and didn’t get back to the blog.

But today we’re back and ready to go!

I am upgrading my server (although I’m staying with the same hosting provider). There is a scheduled server outage this evening from 6PM MDT to 9AM MDT tomorrow. My new server gives me reselling power, and allows me to consolidate all my hosting domains into one account.

Any comments that are posted during that time may be lost. I’ll post again when the server move is complete, so you can know it is safe to comment again.

See you on the other side!

UPDATE: (4/17/07) No word yet on the server move. Consider the site off-line until further notice. –PP

This blog is always a work in progress. I frequently make minor tweaks that affect small usability features, and occasionally, I make more visible changes.

Today you can see the result of my most recent redesign of my blog. Structurally it’s pretty similar to the previous layout; this time around, I widened the body of the blog a bit; I didn’t love how narrow the column was, so I tried making the whole thing a bit wider. As part of that, I picked a new background color and a new blog header image.

I’ve also tracked down a bug in the sidebar that has been driving me crazy for months; I couldn’t get my links sections to appear properly; that has been fixed.

I’ve also implemented a new rotating profile image. There are currently four different profile images; one is randomly selected when the page is loaded; if you want to see a different profile image, just refresh the page. (The profile image is at the top of the sidebar.)

There have been a couple of other tweaks and changes. I want to publicly note that the header image, as noted in the new copyright statement is derived from a work licensed under the Creative Commons Share Alike license. Therefore, the header image is also released under the same license. That header image is the only image that is an exception to the site’s copyright policy; all other images and all other content on the site is protected by copyright.

I hope you like the changes. Let me know what you think, either in the comments, or by sending me a message.

Today marks the two-year anniversary for Technically Speaking. I started this blog as a blogspot blog two years ago today. Even though I’ve moved the blog to my own domain now, I still have all my old posts.

If you are interested in reading that first post, you can go here, or for other archived posts, you can check out a new feature I’ve added to my blog: the Technically Speaking Archives page.