Dear Reader,

Thank you for taking the time to read and subscribe to my blog. Without you I would just be talking to myself, and my wife would think I’m crazier than she already does. I love technology and using it to further God’s kingdom, and sharing it with you makes it even better! For those of you with your own blogs, I enjoy reading them as well.

I need to start writing thank you notes more often, and thus decided to practice on you. That doesn’t mean I don’t mean it, I do!

Thank you again for your readership, comments, and the community you’ve helped me quickly become a part of.

Sincerely,

David Szpunar

An excellent warning for me as I try and keep my rambling ways under control, from email to blog posts:
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
—Mark Twain

Back in early 2005, Google created rel=”nofollow” as something to help stop comment spam on blogs. I was blogging elsewhere back then, and remember all the excitement. It hasn’t worked. The Akismet plugin for WordPress takes the cake for spam catching as far as I’m concerned, and nofollow hasn’t really lived up to expectations. That’s why some people have disabled it. Now some people includes me. The majority of comments that make it past Akismet are real comments, so I won’t begrudge you the link boost in Google, Technorati, or other search engines that recognize nofollow. If spam picks up and it gets too bad? Well, I can always turn it back on. That’s the beauty of WordPress plugins!

Have you ever not wanted to forget about a book you never quite had time to read but want to, so you kept the book out from the library (if your library allows) for more than a year, renewing it over and over again until someone puts it on hold and you have to return it? I’m asking you this question, whether it’s happened to me is none of your business :-D

Anyway, if you could use a great way to keep track of the books you’ve read, are reading, and want to read, so you can share them with others or remember them yourself, my wife found an excellent site a couple of weeks ago called GoodReads. A free account lets you add books from their database or from Amazon.com, rate and review the books, add to as many “bookshelves” as you want (read: tags), and basically track all that goodness. Now you can return all those books to the library, knowing you can find them later. Or just keep track of what you’re reading and what you’ve read, or use the RSS feed capability to share your favorite reads with others. I mention the service here because it’s where I’ve started keeping track of the technical books I want to remember for my reference and to pass along to others, even if I don’t buy them for my bookshelf. The ability to track the fiction I’m reading is just a nice side-benefit, and the bookshelves feature keeps them all organized. In only a couple of days of using the site, I’d “shelved” 14 books in my account!

If you add enough books, you can also request Librarian status so you may add and edit metadata about the books on the site. My wife had to do this right away of course (and had more than enough books added to her profile in under 24 hours), since she’s a real-life librarian :-) (Did you know librarians need a masters degree? I didn’t either until I married one! Well, I did know before we dated, she didn’t wait to tell me until we were actually married…but I didn’t know until she told me.)

OpenDNS has listened to their users and released Adult Site Blocking to complement the rest of their DNS arsenal! True, ScrubIT beat them to it, but when you combine the reporting, the ability to sign up for accounts now (I still haven’t been invited to the ScrubIT beta and signed up well over a month ago), the ability to select from six different categories of adult content blocking, and the source of the block list, you have a rather well thought-out combination that gets my vote!

They are using St. Bernard for the block list, the company that makes the iPrism for corporate content filtering. I’ve had some contact with them recently (watched an online live demo and gotten some quotes — the demo was impressive but not worth the time given the price of the quote vs. our budget) and they seem to be a classy company, near the top of the choices for premiere content filtering.

OpenDNS also allows you to put your custom image on the block page (for their typo correction, not just the content filtering). Their service is already being put to use in several churches, but I can’t help thinking this will bump that trend right on up! Andrew Mitry at Anchorite switched from OpenDNS to ScrubIT in March (it sounds like he either used OpenDNS before or liked it, hard to tell from that post), while at the same time commenting that OpenDNS appeared to be more mature (an assessment I’d fully agree with). This is the first time OpenDNS has responded with a content filter on this level however. In my experience (and I’ve corresponded with several of the OpenDNS staff including owner David Ulevich), OpenDNS doesn’t do something unless it can be done right, and going with a large provider like St. Bernard for their list sounds just like something they’d do.

Now, to test extensively! Detailed reporting (especially at the user or internal IP level) is really the key component missing from this service, since you can add your own blocked domains as well. I also don’t see a way to override specific blocked pages if you run into a site categorized incorrectly (although OpenDNS is known for adding additional control features later on). And, while it will catch direct-access porn and other adult content, it can’t do much for direct-IP access sites, or a bigger threat, open proxies (possibly the most well-known being Google’s own English-to-English translator, among hundreds of others) since it’s not doing URL filtering or any content inspection, just DNS blocking. But it’s a good first line of defense, at an even better price. Our free wireless internet is getting switched over post haste!

I’m trying to keep the non-original-content posts to a minimum but I found Amber Mac’s post and pic of a geeky church sign she saw funny enough to share (thanks to Tech No Babel for the link).

I didn’t see it until Thursday evening, but on Wednesday our new house was framed! It’s really awesome to see the slab go on the dirt, but it’s just started to feel real now that we can walk around from room to room, even if we can walk through the studs as easily as the doors at this point. The builder says closing is usually 90 days out from framing, so we’re getting closer and closer; just have to make it through the summer! I took several pictures Friday night and I’ll have to see about posting them in Flickr this weekend.

Out of the terrible tragedy of the murdered Kelsey Smith in Kansas, Clif Guy over at The Appian Way (host of this fall’s Church IT Roundtable) has an extremely interesting post that gives a behind the scenes peek at how they built the findkelsey.com website (inaccessible to me as I write this, but it’s in the Google Cache) in the midst of being bombarded with enough hits to cause a heavyweight slashdot effect, with major news outlets linking to them and their main terms all over the top ten Google searches for at least a day.

The news is tragic, but there’s always been a passion sparked in me when I hear of people stepping up and using technology in heroic efforts to assist with emergency situations. Ranging from listening in to the Amateur (Ham) Radio “severe weather net” on my handheld ham radio during thunderstorms, hailstorms, and tornadoes to the scramble to get everything in place for to handle a high-volume website in real time for something like this, it causes an itch I haven’t been able to personally scratch, but I enjoy living through the experiences vicariously. Part of me wonders if someday I’ll be in the wrong place at the right time to lend a hand — something that both excites and terrifies me. Fortunately, as Christians if we take a step back, we should realize that even in a high-stress situation, whether it’s our life in danger or someone else’s, God is in control and all we can do is the best we can do. Keep up the good work in all its forms. And at the least, pray for Kelsey Smith’s family, friends and community in the meantime.

I posted the DNS resolution issue I encountered with the LAMP Server appliance from VirtualAppliances.net on their support forums. They’ve responded that they have yet to reproduce the issue but are working on it. I’m looking forward to getting this working, and I’ve also requested a quote from them to see what a custom appliance would cost that includes LDAP support, which I would need if I want to use HelpSpot’s Live Lookup feature to connect to Active Directory and pull account information into HelpSpot. We’re small enough that this would be useful but not a must, so a lot of it is based on the custom appliance price.

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for quite some time for reading RSS feeds. The RSS functionality has improved in each new version, and there are a couple of features that have kept me from changing (I tried a bunch of feed readers, web-based and thick client, before settling on Thunderbird, which I also use for some personal email accounts). It’s been very good, but I have missed the ability to read the same feeds on my Treo 650 (I’m too cheap for QuickNews and didn’t like the older version I tried) or on other computers besides my laptop. Google Reader is a nice setup for Palm-based feedreading, but I have issues with it on the desktop.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Version 2 has a mostly nice newsreader features. I have my feeds sorted out into folders and it has good new item notification, starring of good items, and color-coded tagging options. The main feature I like, however, is that for feeds that don’t include full content, it automatically loads the original post URL in the reading pane. This is huge. No opening up a new window or tab to view the full text of a post, it loads just like an HTML email would in a preview pane (which is basically what it’s doing, given that Thunderbird is first and foremost and email client). This is really nice for branding, so I see the original site design while reading the article, and it’s nice for reading comments since they’re live from the site right after the post. It’s not nice for reading offline (not that I do that often), since nothing will load at all in that case as opposed to pre-downloaded full text.

Google Reader: I’ve tried this over the past week, importing my feeds using an OPML file that Thunderbird exported. The export/import process worked flawlessly and all folders and such were maintained in Google Reader. The reading interface is nice, but very different than what I’m used to in Thunderbird. Full text feeds are great, I can read them easily and in one tab. I don’t like it to mark items read automatically, so I turned that feature off. I can star items, like in Thunderbird, and then easily see one list of all starred items (across all feeds) in a “virtual” folder view, which Thunderbird lacks to my knowledge. But there is no tagging feature, which I use to mark items Important, To-Do, Work, Personal, Later, etc. in Thunderbird, which color-codes the items for easy visual reference in the future, in addition to the starring feature that both share. But feed items that don’t have full content show a small snippet and I have to click to open the original source in a new tab. Then I have to remember to go read it. And with my Firefox instances tending towards 20-120 tabs open at any given time, the last thing I need is to open more tabs! I just want to load the source page in the reading pane (scripts can be stripped out; Thunderbird does this).

Reader also has a nice mobile web interface that works well on my Treo 650. However, I’d like a separate list of feeds marked “mobile” that are the only ones that show up on the mobile interface, because some feeds aren’t worth taking the time to load and read on the Treo. The full-content issue shows up again here, as loading a new page is painful on the Palm browser, so I don’t want to see partial content at all, another reason for separating out a subset of feeds for mobile use. I’d also like to see the mobile interface provide checkboxes for marking read and unread, and starring, because each time I click the links for these options, the browser has to redisplay the post, and then I can return to the feed list or go to the next feed item. And a link to the Reader mobile home at the top would be nice, so I don’t have to wait for the full page to load every time just to go back (yes I know I have a browser back button).

Because of the issues I have with the partial content feeds on the full and mobile versions of Reader, I’ve pretty much trimmed out all the partial feeds from my subscription list, while leaving my full feed list intact in Thunderbird. This duplicates my read-feed management, but makes Google Reader feasible for mobile and on-the-road use. I currently have 51 subscriptions in Google Reader, while I have 70 feeds from Thunderbird. For the mathematically challenged, that means I’ve pared out 19 feeds from Google Reader that I still want to track but I don’t want to read partially or via mobile. I’m still working on this so Reader may get pared down even further. I do like the Reader Trends view, which made me aware of a few feeds that haven’t been updated since the middle of last year that I’ve removed from my subscriptions altogether.

Reading feeds, at least the full ones, offline, used to be one reason I stayed away from an online reader. It hasn’t been much of an issue, with wireless at home and work and showing up more places, but it is nice for traveling, especially car rides and airplanes, and hotels that charge for internet access. Ever notice that cheaper hotels are more likely to provide free internet access compared to higher-end hotels, which tend to charge around $10/day for the privilege? This isn’t just something I’ve noticed; a company that we’ve worked with that does a lot of hotel WiFi installations told me this based on their client base. There are obvious (yet annoying) reasons for this, but I digress. Offline use isn’t usually important to me, but can be useful. Google just fixed this problem by releasing Google Gears, initially using Reader as their test service. You install the browser add-in, and Reader can then be taken offline, using Google Gears to synchronize and store the data offline. I have yet to try this, but I’m going to install it in the next couple of days. I expect possible hiccups, being a beta service, but it’s a bonus feature anyway. Gmail support for Google Gears will be much more interesting! As long as they address security issues first. Ross Hollman has some good additional Google Gears info, as does David Berlind at ZDnet; I won’t rehash here for now.

Those are my thoughts. I don’t have any conclusions yet. I also just found some new-ish software called FreeRange WebReader. I’m running the beta on my Treo now, and for reading full content posts, it’s very nice! It’s a service, through their site for management, and you can keep your feed list in your account with FreeRange or you can link to your Google Reader feeds. So far it’s caused my phone to reset twice, but it is in beta, and it’s a nice interface. It also doesn’t download full posts until you want it to, which saves memory card space. Navigation is a bit buggy but is fast and easy, and it’s well-formatted for small-screen use. The downside is that for more than 10 feeds, there’s eventually a cost (although so far I haven’t been asked to pay, perhaps it’s a beta thing?). This might be a useful alternative to Google Reader Mobile, but less than an hour’s use is too soon to tell.

Interesting side note: you are the reason I decided to try Google Reader after using Thunderbird for so long! How’s that? FeedBurner tells me more subscribers to my blog use Google Reader than any other feed reader of any type! I figured, there must be a reason! Bloglines is second most popular, but I’ve already used them in the past without being fully impressed. They were the first feed reader I ever used, now that I think about it. If you think your reader is better, leave a comment and let me know! Or if you know something I missed about Thunderbird/Reader, etc. feel free to chime in.