I had posted recently on both my own profile, and the Page that I created for fans of the site that the Facebook blog import to Notes feature has been broken for a little while now, and so new blog posts here were not getting added over there.

Well, thanks to a mention on a mailing list by Kreg Steppe, today I discovered a neat little Facebook app called RSS Graffiti. It not only fixed the problem by taking an RSS feed and posting items as they appear on the appropriate Facebook walls, it actually goes one better, by allowing me to enter more than one feed to be posted. Previously, I had to use Yahoo Pipes to create a combined feed in order for two blog’s posts to get posted to a fan page wall, now I can easily do it with RSS Graffiti.

Plus, it seems to work pretty flawlessly, which has never been true of Facebook’s own importer!

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the announcement that Bloglines will be shutting down. Once upon a time, the service was one of the first to offer a web-based RSS reader, as opposed to a local client that polled RSS feeds for updates. As someone who uses quite a number of machines, that was a tremendous step forward when it came to RSS aggregation, and I signed up pretty early in the lifecycle.

However, that was then, and this is now. While Bloglines started out somewhat cutting edge, even offering such add-ons as a link blog, etc., it really pretty much stagnated over the years. Apparently, it has even had plenty of stability issues as well, but I had already moved away from it by the time it got real bad. In the mean time, other web-based RSS readers hit the market, most importantly Google Reader, and they kept right on adding features and values where Bloglines sat still.

In the Web 2.0 world, sitting still is death. No matter how nice your service is, or how many loyal users you have, eventually someone is going to do what you do, better.

Seems like that statement might apply to many areas of life, not just tech startups. I can think of plenty of career situations where the same thing holds true.

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!