I’ve searched the blogs, and the forums and don’t see where anyone else is having this issue, but over the last few days I’ve saved a number of links to Delicious, but they don’t show up in my list of bookmarks, nor are they included in the RSS feed of recent bookmarks. (Thus they don’t update the list on the side of the blog, nor in the daily RSS feed of the blog)

However, if I go back to the same page and try to save it again using the Delicious Firefox extension, it shows as already having been saved. Saving it again changes nothing.

Anyone?

This evening has proved to be a night of upgrades. Actually, I did more upgrades than I had planned because they went so smoothly. Scary, I know.

First on the agenda was the upgrade of my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4. I had read a number of horror stories about the upgrade, and therefore delayed it for a day in order to make sure I had a plan in case things went wrong. Once I had convinced myself that I would be able to deal with the common problems, I pulled the trigger, and it actually only took about 30 minutes, and was completely smooth. Everything seems to be working, and I am really enjoying folders and the integrated inbox. Haven’t really tried to do any multitasking, but then again that wasn’t one of the major selling points to the upgrade for me. I was more interested in the simpler interface thanks to folders!

So, feeling good about updates, I started hitting the WordPress updates to version 3.0. Four WordPress installs and less than those same 30 minutes, all is well on that front too. Oh and yes, now that WordPress offers Multisite, I might have to look at combining those four installs into one, or at least two, one per domain, but that’s another project for another day. I don’t know enough about how it works, or how I would merge the databases together to attempt that right now. I do like the new look of 3.0, and am looking forward to digging into the details more.

Besides, my visit to a friends house on Sunday to do some technical work for them went smoother than expected and now these projects have also taken less time than I thought they would, I should probably quit while I’m ahead this week, eh?

I’ve seen it twice in the last day on this blog, and thankfully Askimet caught it. In my spam queue there were comments that were identical to existing comments on the same post, just with a new user name and URL added to them. It threw me for a bit of a loop, obviously, to see a very familiar comment in my spam filter, only to realize it was a copy of the existing comment, hence the deja vu feeling when reading it!

So is this a new spammer technique? Take the exact contents of an approved comment, and replace the web page link and user name in an effort to trick filters into approving the comment? It sort of makes sense, but I wonder what kind of script they’re using to do that in bulk. Of course, since the Askimet plugin for WordPress caught it any way, I don’t really care that much about how it works. I’m just curious.

I just looked at my site, actually in the process of searching for something I had the foresight to blog about because I knew I’d need those details again, and realized I haven’t posted anything in a week. Heck, I’ve barely posted anything to Twitter or Facebook either! You might be wondering just what the heck is going on.

Rest assured, I haven’t decided to stop blogging or anything like that. Sometimes, life gets in the way. Between a very busy workload, and Angela getting ready for a two week stay in Europe, sitting at the laptop and composing something coherent about any topic has been pretty much impossible. As I’ve mentioned a few times, when you work in Litigation Support, and getting ready for a trial, it can be all-encompassing. We haven’t reached the all-encompassing part yet, that’s coming in the next few days though, but it was encompassing enough that, combined with trying to spend time with my wife, something definitely had to give!

So, now that she is on her way, trial prep kicks in to high gear, and we’ll just have to see how much mental energy I actually have to login and come up with something interesting to write about. I wouldn’t hold my breath, but then again, who knows how many neat little Trial Director tricks I’ll master over the course of the next week or so. If I can remember them, they might even make an interesting blog post. If I can remember them.

So, stay tuned, you never know when the mood to post will strike. I just can’t promise it’ll be as often as it usually is!

I noticed this evening that they’ve added a beta “browse bar” feature. Seems that, in a nutshell, you can use that address to simply browse from one bookmarked site to the next. Great for creating a to-read list, or even a nice quick check of a handful of sites you want to look at.

Go here, for example, to “browse” my latest bookmarks one at a time instead of just seeing the list of links.

And yes, it also supports tags, simply add the appropriate tag to the end of the address, like this http://delicious.com/browsebar/mikemac29/photography

Nice. Think I might have to consider creating an ediscovery reading list this way and sharing it with others. Could be a very useful tool to help attorneys and others stay on top of ediscovery news without the need to click through articles or use an RSS reader themselves.

What other uses can you come up with?

Writing this from my iPhone using the WordPress app. I like the ability to write quick posts fe anywhere, but like email on my phone, anything that will require a lot of typing will have to wait until I’m at a keyboard!

On the other hand, this is a great way to handle comments, I can approve pending comments, delete spam comments or even reply to comments quickly, just so long as I have my phone with me.

So, as you’ve probably noticed, the blog is now running on WordPress, and the blog home page is now being redirected to the main page of the site. There is still much work to do, to tweak the layout and work on pages, etc. but I think this is pretty much where we’re going to stay for now. I managed to pull in all of the blog posts and comments in from Blogger, but also decided to leave the static blog pages in place so as not to break 8 years of links from outside sources. Of course, I turned off the ability to comment on those too. If I can ever get a decent redirect solution in place I might take those pages out, but I’m not holding my breathe on that one. The existing RSS feeds, however, have been updated, so if you’ve been getting the full blog feed, or the tech, litigation support, or photo only feeds you should continue to see everything you were before.

Still, running WordPress now opens up some new possibilities, so I’ll be looking into some of those, and experimenting along the way. First, though, I’ve got to clean up some of the loose ends that the transfer left behind this week. Then we’ll get into some of the new things!

In light of last week’s announcement of changes at Blogger, I’ve decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I’m going to be converting this blog over to WordPress. Of course, with over 8 years of customizations to the site, it’s not going to be a simple process to convert everything, so just be aware that it’s going to be going on if/when you see some things looking wonky around here. In fact, the site will probably disappear for a few hours sometime later this week, as I move it to a different server in preparation for the WordPress install.

Of course, since I have to be in court tomorrow, nothing starts until I’m comfortable with the knowledge that I won’t be spending any of my evenings and weekends working, at least long enough to see this transition through. Given the industry I work in, you’ll forgive me if plans change and I have to put this off a little bit.

Last week, I was fully prepared to be working long hours for the entire month of February, and things changed suddenly. It’s the nature of the business really. You never know when, or if, a case that you’re preparing to go to trial, will settle. It often ends up with us doing a whole lot of prep work, only to find that it never gets used, but you still have to do all the work the same way for every case, because some of them don’t settle and you have to be ready to go in court!

Anyway, consider yourselves warned, and hang on. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for a bit, but I think we’ll all be better off in the end for it!

Google’s Blogger platform rolled out another new feature this week, one that many users of Blogger have been waiting for, and once again, one I can’t use.

See, ever since Blogger rolled out “new” templates a few years ago, the ones that support widgets, and began building all sorts of cool widgets for their users to use on their blogs, they have pretty much only worked on adding new features to those templates.

The problem is, if you, like me, use Blogger to publish to your own site through FTP, and not to Blogspot, you can’t use the new templates, and thus, all of the new features of Blogger, are not available to you. The Blogger team over at Google seems to be blissfully unaware that, long long ago, many folks actually used Blogger, and continue to use Blogger, so that they could publish static HTML blog pages to their own sites, at their own URL, with their own hosting, without the Ad bar being added to their templates.

As I think about it, the last time Blogger added a feature that we could, you know, use, was categories, or maybe comments? (Upon further review, scheduled posts were available regardless of where you are publishing within the last year) Any way, it’s been awhile. Almost all of the innovation at Blogger now seems to be around widgets, and other tools for use with Blogspot hosted accounts. Those of us who don’t have those, get nothing. I can’t help but wonder if the fact that Blogspot hosted accounts have ads on them is the reason?

It’s almost enough to make me switch this blog to WordPress too, except I don’t have nearly the time to move 8+ years of stuff to a new platform!

Update: Seems I posted this a bit prematurely, as Rob Fahrni has pointed out that Blogger is actually going to eliminate support for using FTP to publish to your own site.  So, it appears I’m going to be spending my time moving this to WordPress or using some sort of Google hosting/redirect, which doesn’t really interest me at all.

I was able to spend my lunch hour yesterday taking in this webinar by Kevin O’Keefe, and I have to say, it was pretty good. I thought Kevin did a good job tying social networking and blogging with traditional business networking, and also giving folks who are looking for ways to get their firms and attorney’s interested in blogging some good ideas to mull over.

The big takeaway, for me, was that blogging for the firm is similar to blogging here, but also not. Here, I really am just trying to share information, and learn from other folks who either leave comments here or have their own blogs and continue the conversations there. I have developed lots of relationships with people in a variety of areas, most of whom are not potential clients of my firm, but who do have a lot to offer me in terms of ideas and tips. When I talk to an attorney about blogging, for them, it really is more strategic than that. The number of page views don’t mean anything if the people reading aren’t potential clients that you are connecting with, and no matter how great the content may be, it isn’t going to foster those relationships that bring in business if it’s not the information these folks want to know. You have to know who you want to reach, and what they want to read, in order for the blog to be useful to them.

Anyway, that was my quick highlight, you can check out the recording and grab the slides for yourself, Kevin has the links,  if you’re interested.