Weclome to our new look

Welcome to the new look. Leave a comment to let us know whether to stick with this one or go back to the old one. Or, for a more radical look, check our our flirtation with Wordpress. Ooooo, dark!

In addition to the new Blogger template, I added a few new items on the right side, including a list of all tags, a blogroll (list of blogs, for people who speak English and not Web-hipster-speak), and links to our outposts on LinkedIn and Facebook and a few other places.

After you visit the Wordpress page, vote for your favorite look (more than 1 vote is ok) on the top right.

(Yes, we are still flirting with moving our digital domicile to Wordpress. But after stumbling across the beta of Blogger, I'm not feeling the urgency. Still, Wordpress does do some pretty templates. How would this be for a tech marriage made in heaven: Google's innovative Web technologies married with Apple's design savvy? I mean, I love Blogger and Google Mail and Google Docs and Google Calendar and Google Reader -- but they sure are dowdy compared to to Apple Web properties.)

Google Reader

After using Mozilla Thunderbird and a few Web-based apps to read my RSS feeds for years, I've switched over to Google Reader.

Why, you might ask?

Here's the rundown:

1. Access from anywhere. The obvious reason: the list of feeds and unread articles is available from any browser. Now I don't have to be at home to follow the feeds I care about.
   
2. Compelling user experience. This is really a first rate Web application that does almost everything as well or better than a rich client. Don't get me wrong: Thunderbird is a 10x better email/RSS client than Outlook. But since Google Reader isn't trying to double as an email client, it's easier to navigate, supports more features, has plentiful and intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and even supports offline viewing with Google Gears. Speedy, too.
3. Easier sharing. If you look in the right column of this blog, you'll now see a handful of the articles I found interesting. I don't have always have the time inclination to comment on what I'm reading -- so this is the lazy man's way of just saying, "hmmm: mildly interesting...check it out."
4. Spot-on recommendations. Google Reader suggests blogs based on what other people are reading, and the recommendations are much better than Tivo recommendations (which I've found to be generally bizarre).
   

Tech note addendum to the post below

For those of you embedding Flash animations on your blog (like the one below), I discovered that you can resize the Flash by editing the object width and height parameters when you copy the HTML code into your blog entry. The original animation was way too big because its width was 600 pixels. By editing the width value to 425, it just fits. If you want the object centered more accurately, I think 400 pixels is just about right. Adobe takes care of dynamically resizing the animation to fit. Cool.

(Apologies if this was already quite obvious to you.)