billso.com

My readers might not have noticed that billso.com is a lot bigger as of today, with 5 years worth of blog posts from my various sites.

I’ve imported 717 articles that I wrote for my old alohapundit web site during 2003 and 2004.

I’ll be using some of these older posts as I add more content to billso.com

Many of these articles are short and pithy, but I’ve almost tripled the number of articles available at billso.com. Not bad for a couple of hours work!

What’s the title?

I didn’t title any of the alohapundit posts when i wrote them. These posts have been given compelling titles like “Post 856” which I published on 27 June 2003.

The tags for these imported posts are a bit off, but they’re usable for now. The tag cloud sure looks different!

I closed down alohapundit in late 2004 when I started using Bloglines. I’ve been importing articles from my old Bloglines blogs into billso.com by hand. I started that project on 26 January 2008. The software that I use at billso.com cannot import Blogline articles, but it can import Blogger sites.

I’m spending some time this week importing some of the better articles from my old blogs. Before I installed WordPress here on billso.com in January 2007, I used Bloglines.com.

The blogging tools that Bloglines provided left a lot to be desired, however. In fact, that user interface hasn’t changed very much in the last 2 years. It is very difficult to export these old articles to other systems.

My old articles were posted to Bloglines during 2005 and 2006, and I’m tired of supporting links to a legacy system. But I didn’t want to lose my articles from the October 2006 earthquake.

I am keeping the time-date stamps for these old articles, and I am adding an imported category to my content management system (CMS) here at billso.com. Each of these old articles includes a link to the original Bloglines URL, so that Google and other search engines can find the new locations.

The New York Times ran an interesting critique of the mobile Web yesterday. Michael Fitzgerald identifies some of the major obstacles to mass-market adoption of mobile websites, including the following items.

1. Inconsistent user interfaces on mobile devices – new users have difficulty finding the address bar and bookmark features. Fitzgerald fails to mention that, on some mobile devices, the font sizes are too small for most older users to read. Managers, who make media placement and Web development decisions, tend to fit an older demographic than their customers.
2. Poor formatting on small screens – RIM, Google, Bloglines and other service providers include reformatting and filtering technology in their mobile portals, but many web sites do not resolve well on a small screen.
3. Lack of support for Flash – as more Web sites adopt Adobe’s Flash technology for animation and other features, Web developers often fail to provide a low bandwidth or text only version that will work well or at all on a mobile device.
4. Slavish duplication of the desktop web model – this can also be seen in Microsoft Windows Mobile, which includes a Start button as a key part of the user interface.

For the most part, I agree with him – but I still use the mobile Web every day to check Gmail and read other web sites. The mobile Web isn’t a smooth experience yet, but it’s better than toting around a full computer, as my previous post about the US Census suggests.

This is an updated version of an announcement I posted in my old blog on January 12.

I’m using WordPress, Bloglines and RSS to distribute course announcements and readings this term. Since I’m teaching courses on information systems, it makes sense to use several modern systems to manage the courses.

This link is a good discussion of what a blog really is.

http://www.technorati.com/help/blogging101.html

This term, I’m going to be posting more links to previous articles that I’ve written. You’re welcome to search through my old Bloglines blog and read previous articles. Keep in mind that I change the assignments each term, and there will be some changes for Spring 2007.

We’ll discuss RSS later in the course. RSS helps me distribute course announcements without using e-mail or WebCT.

The next link retrieves a blog post I made in September 2006 that explains what RSS is.

http://billso.com/2006/09/23/what-is-rss-2/

You can also find my blog posts in my Facebook notes. If you use Facebook, click the Facebook badge on this page to add my account to your friends list.

I’m starting a new blog at this site, using a system that is much more powerful than Bloglines’ rudimentary tools.

I’ll still use http://bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman to post articles that I find in Bloglines. It’s the most used web-based RSS reader, as I pointed out two days ago.

While that site is an excellent search engine and a great clipping service, several users found the Bloglines navigation system very difficult to use. After my own struggles with that same UI this month, I was frustrated. There’s no good method to create a direct link to a Bloglines post.