Paul F. Olson's Stuff & Nonsense

For an old guy, I’ve been getting into a surprising amount of Web 2.0 stuff lately. Bookmarks on del.icio.us. Bloglines and Google Reader accounts. Even a myspace page, set up in a moment of weakness last year, when I was struck with a sudden fear that the whole world would be using myspace some day and I’d better reserve my username in a hurry. (For the record, I set up my page and haven’t been back since; just visiting myspace for a few seconds at a time makes my head ache.)

Why am I doing all these things? Beats me. It’s nothing more than curiosity, I suppose. If you hear enough people talking about the same things long enough, you’ll eventually cave in and check them out for yourself.

Myspace aside, I’m enjoying my Web 2.0 experiments.

After years of using many different RSS aggregators – various Outlook plug-ins, Firefox Live Bookmarks and Sage, and of course, Opera’s built in reader – I didn’t quite understand the benefit of having a third party gather my news and store it online. I’m still not sure I get it completely, but I will admit it’s handy to have access to all the same feeds on all the different computers that I use, no matter where or when I use them. Of the two services I use, I like Bloglines a little better than Google Reader. It seems a bit more casual and homespun, while also performing a little smoother and swifter, at least on my machines. Both are pretty nifty, however, and if you’re thinking of trying a Web-based service, I could enthusiastically recommend either.

Del.icio.us was another one that initially baffled me, a philosophy I just couldn’t comprehend for a very long time. You use a Web browser to surf, right? And every Web browser saves your bookmarks or favorites, right? So why do you have to keep those same bookmarks online? Then I tried del.icio.us and pretty much fell in love with it right away. As with newsfeeds, it’s very handy to have all your bookmarks in sync at all times, no matter where you are. I like the tagging system, too -- it makes so much more sense than endless folder hierarchies. And I absolutely love the ability to search through the millions of bookmarked sites that other users have shared. Sometimes those are the most interesting, enlightening, entertaining and helpful searches you can do – and they are available to everyone, even if they don’t have a del.icio.us account.

I doubt I’ll ever take the leap and abandon my “Web 1.0” life completely. As an example, I still use Opera’s built-in feed reader to keep me abreast of the four or five sites I need to follow on a timely basis, since it dumps the stories right into my e-mail as soon as they arrive; I don’t need to go to Bloglines or Goggle and read through a long list of 150 stories from 35 different feeds to find them. And I imagine I’ll still bookmark most critical sites on my various computers, just so they’re always right there at my fingertips. But I’ve still delved farther into the social Internet than I ever thought I would, and so far, it’s been a pretty interesting trip.

I finally had a chance to play around a bit with the stylesheet for these pages, something I'd been meaning to do for ... oh, about two months now. I didn't accomplish too much, but at least I got rid of those awful default colors and created a new image for the header.

(Side note: stare at that header for a while and tell me if it doesn't look just the slightest bit, er, creepy. I didn't see it at first, but after a while I got the distinct impression that something otherworldly was approaching out of the fog. Or maybe that's just me. )

I may try something more ambitious, style wise, in the future. At the very least, I'm sure I'll tinker with the colors some more. So don't be surprised if the next time you stop by, this page looks completely different than it does right now.

By the way, I must send belated congratulations to my buddy, Dan, for being named last week's Opera Community Member of the Week. While we all appreciate blogs that are silly/artistic/fun/eclectic/humorous/poetic/bizarre, it's nice to see someone acknowledged for doing serious, thoughtful work.

Dan's blog is deceptively simple. At first you think he's just collecting news about Opera and offering some off-the-cuff comments. Eventually, you realize that he's doing some really heavy lifting. He puts a lot of thought and effort into his essays.

Back in the days when we were both active members of Opera's USA Ambassadors, I always looked forward to a post from Dan. Even when I disagreed with what he said, I always learned something.

It's the same way now that he's blogging. Whether they're meant to simply remark upon the news, clarify some confusion, cut through the fog of press release BS, shake up the status quo or even challenge the Opera establishment, Dan's remarks are always illuminating and a lot of fun to read.

If you don't already subscribe to his feed, I advise you to click the link above and subscribe now. You won't be sorry.

I am sooooo happy to have my e-mail back.

The newest weekly build fixes that nasty little bug that prevented e-mails from being displayed until the window was resized, either by minimizing and maximizing, hitting F4 a couple of times, hitting + and - or some other method. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I got caught flat-footed by that one (repeat after me: "always read the known issues, always read the known issues"), but I was in a hurry that day, grabbed the new build, and bam! I paid the price for my negligence and learned a valuable lesson. Don't download and install weeklies when you're too busy to pay attention to what you're doing. On the bright side, I never had an inkling of any other problems with that build. It worked like a charm all week long.

Things are progressing well with my other Web project. We're having fun building the site bit by bit. The official launch announcements went out this week and we're starting to get some visitors. If you haven't checked it out yet, please take a moment to stop by, maybe read and comment a bit. We'd love to see you over there.

Another nice thing: I see the USA Ambassadors recently updated the Choose Opera Web site. Having played such an active role in developing that site, I'm very happy to see it's moving forward again!

Preview or not, Opera 9 has finally taken the big steps necessary to become my default browser. It’s been days (actually several weeks) since I’ve had a significant crash. That fact, combined with general improvements in many areas, led me to take the plunge and start using O9 for regular daily browsing activities, as opposed to saving it only for testing and play.

The latest word is that the second preview version will be unveiled soon – probably by the time anyone actually reads this post. If you haven’t yet tried O9, I encourage you to do so. Of course, all the usual disclaimers apply. The builds are still “experimental,” subject to doing odd things, and probably should not be relied on by those who are unaccustomed to the quirks and frustrations of beta testing, those who are nervous about encountering thorny problems, or those using their browser or e-mail for mission-critical projects at work or home.

With that out of the way, go ahead and give Preview 2 a spin as soon as you can. When you discover all the nifty stuff -- widget support, BitTorrent, rendering improvements, and a host of other goodies -- you’ll see why I’ve fallen in love with it.