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Blogging Is Not Easy

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

I would like to begin this blog post with a warning. It contains comments about blogging that will likely be considered boring by those who are already familiar with blogging. In addition, what is said in it may sound like comments from someone who is something of a “newbie” when it comes to blogging. However, the title of this particular blog entry might have been enough of a warning about the content of the entry. So I suppose that many of those who are reading this may want to avoid reading the rest of this post.

To those who are still reading this at this point, I would like to say that it is good to have you still reading this. I have considered this blog, among other things, a journal in which I document what it is that I have to say each time I write a blog post. It is for this reason that I consider it worthwhile to have a blog, even if I do not have many people reading what is posted here. However, I do need reasons to motivate me to add onto what I have here. And having people view what is here is most likely what will motivate me to add onto what I have here. And how can I get people to want to read what is here? Well, I’m sure that the content here would have to be interesting, and I would need to find ways to get people to know about and be interested in what I put up here. And I am sure that over time, I will improve on my ability to make the content here more interesting and my ability to inform people of this content. And I will certainly need to find ways to improve on this blog’s content and the way I inform people about it, with the apparent lack of interest in what I posted here last week.

Having said this, I suppose I could say that perhaps the title of this entry was not perfectly accurate. Blogging may be easy to do. It’s doing it well that is not easy. I’m not sure what the future might hold for this blog, but I know of one thing that is in its future. With the way that I have enjoyed working with it, it will certainly continue to be here.

Filed in Blogging | | Comments (3)

Searching Digg for What Has Actually Been Dugg

Sunday, September 2, 2007

It seems that each day I visit the popular website Digg as part of my daily routine, I find at least one interesting story there. With this happening, the number of articles that I add to my own bookmarks there (or “digg”) on that site on that site increases. Over time what happens is that it takes more time for me to find an article that I have previously “dugg” when I view my previous diggs. So when I try to find a story that I chose to digg in the past, it takes longer for me to find it than I think it should. And there is no feature on Digg for searching through the stories that I have dugg. And even if such a feature did exist, I’m not sure if it would be as useful as it could be. I find that when searching for stories from Digg’s main page, the search results consist mostly of stories that get very few diggs, and are unlikely to receive many more diggs than the few they have. Finding the articles I would like to find often requires the use of advanced searches, and thus often requires extra mouse clicks and page loads. There had to be a better way for me to find what myself and others find interesting on Digg.

When bringing up Digg, one is, by default, taken to the section that lists stories that are consider “popular” and have already received many diggs. This is one reason that I, for one, often digg stories that have already received many diggs. However, when searching through Digg stories, it does not list only the most popular stories in search results by default. As a result, the majority of search results consist of stories that are highly unlikely to be what I would like to find.

It might be best for me to illustrate the point that I am making with an example. A while ago, I was looking for an article on Digg about Firefox extensions. And since I viewed it quite a while ago, I did not remember the exact title of the article. So when searching for it from Digg’s main page, I entered “firefox extensions” as the search string. As one might imagine, although there may have been some interesting search results listed, I was not going to find what I wanted on the first page of results. Below is a screen shot of what I found on that first page.

I knew there had to be a better way to find what I wanted. What I want to find on Digg and what gets dugg by the community of users on Digg are rarely mutually exclusive, and this case was not an exception. I knew the article that I wanted to find received many diggs, so it would have been better for results to be listed with stories receiving more diggs listed first. And so by using the advanced search feature that appears on the page with search results, I chose to sort the results in order of which stories received the most diggs. And below is a screen shot of the result of this search.

In the results that came up, I found what I wanted to find on the first page of search results. However, I would like to be able to find what I want on the first page of results without having to enter advanced settings. And I have found that it has been more the rule than the exception that I would like to sort search results in order of which stories have received the most diggs. And so how could I make it so that, by default, search results would consist of stories that have been dugg most often? Well, that’s where the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox comes in. I decided to write a Greasemonkey script that would make it so that when searching for stories from Digg’s main page, results would be listed in order of which stories received the most diggs.

You can click here to download and install this Greasemonkey script if you’re using Firefox and you have the Greasemonkey extension installed. This script is a very simple one, but I have found it as useful as it is simple. With so many stories on Digg that can be found, there should be a way of being able to search through the many stories there in a quick and efficient way. And although there is more that could be done to improve searching for stories on Digg, I have found that using this script has made it easier to find what I want there. There might be others who will find this to be the case as well, which is why I have made this script available. It can be good to find what the community of users on Digg finds interesting. Therefore, you will also find this script useful if you want to avoid seeing my blog posts in the search results on Digg.

Filed in Digg, Firefox, Greasemonkey | | Comments (4)

Can I Choose My Side Projects?

Friday, August 24, 2007

I would like to begin this blog post with an apology. I certainly do believe that I owe one to David Hansmann and the users of his file transfer client software named JFtp. A while ago, I volunteered to make some contributions to this software. And I did so by adding features to it (and other general improvements to its code) and by answering questions that end users and developers had about it. However, gradually over time, the support that I gave for it decreased. Features that I considered adding to it were not added, and less attention was paid to the places on the web where questions and comments on it were posted. I still do plan on supporting this project in some ways, and I do not believe I ever said how much support I would provide for this project. However, I do apologize to those who might have expected more contributions to the project from me. The time came for me to move on and find something else to focus on.

After graduating from the University of Waterloo with a degree in computer science, I was relieved to finally have the time to work on what I wanted to work on. Unfortunately, I could not figure out exactly what it was that I wanted to work on. I spent some time learning new and different things on my own, and in doing so, tried to decide on what it was I wanted to do. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the idea of specializing in anything, as it seemed as if I was limiting myself the more I specialized. However, I knew that I needed to focus on something, and needed to find out what was right for me. And after spending some time working on that Java-based file transfer client named JFtp, it seemed that I needed to look elsewhere to find out who exactly I was. And judging from the content here on this blog, one may have found find that writing software for the web and Mozilla Firefox is what I am now choosing to do. Will I continue writing this kind of software in the future? Well, I know that I certainly will in the near future. I might have more to learn, but something I seemed to have learned is that I do not seem to choose my side projects. They seem to choose me. And with the way I am now finding time to write about what I code, I just might have found out who I am.

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Simplifying Searching Specific Sites

Sunday, August 19, 2007

With Google being the one of the most useful websites there are, and with the way it tends to be the place people tend to go to when looking for information online, many people set it to being the home page of their browsers. After opening a web browser, it is best to have it open to the page that one would most often need to have open, and that is likely why I haven’t found that many have had a problem with the default Mozilla Firefox home page being not much different from Google’s main page. There might be those who would prefer to use Google’s advanced search page and there are those who may prefer using iGoogle to use a more personalized version of Google. However, I wanted to personalize Google’s main page by adding some advanced search features to it. And that sounded like something that could be done with Firefox’s Greasemonkey extension.

One of the advanced features of Google that I use most often is the one for searching within specific domains or websites, as Google can be better for searching through sites than the search features included in some sites. I have often found that I like to search for YouTube videos once I get Firefox started up, and YouTube-specific searches are not going to be included on Google’s main page despite Google owning YouTube. And I did not want to use the search plugin for YouTube, which you can find and download if you click here, as I preferred to simply work with what was on the web page. So I wanted to add some functionality to the Google’s main page that would allow YouTube-specific searches, as I was getting tired of having to type in “site:www.youtube.com” after entering search terms. And I still wanted to be able to do these searches from the main Google page, rather than set my browser’s home page to the advanced search page. (And even if I did have it set to this advanced search page, I would still need to type in the domain name in the place where it needed to be entered, which I wanted to avoid.)

I am fairly new to using Greasemonkey, as it has been somewhat recently that I have found out how useful it can be. What I have liked the most about it is its ability to add the kind of functionality to web pages that I, but not necessarily others, would like to see on them. And so I decided to use Greasemonkey to make it so that I could use some of Google’s advanced search capabilities on the simple and uncluttered main Google page. I quickly wrote a Greasemonkey script that adds a button for YouTube-specific searches to Google’s main page, and to Google’s pages that display search results. After entering the search string and clicking this button, it displays search results from within youtube.com. I have found this script useful so far, as it has saved me keystrokes, mouse clicks, and time it takes to load pages. In fact, I found it very useful after I time I walked by the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Toronto, where I saw a sidewalk chalk artist suggest doing a search on YouTube for “chalk this way.” With this script, the result that he would want me to see was the first in the list of the results, and I was able to get there without having to go through YouTube.

You can click here to download this Greasemonkey script. I don’t expect many others to be very interested in using the script at this time, but I’m making it available for those who might want to use it. I should also note that this script may be something I’ll continue to work on. And as is the case with anything else I write, any feedback would be appreciated. Also worth mentioning is that this script only requires a few slight modifications for making it so it can search other sites. I’m not sure how many members of Greasemonkey’s userbase might be willing to make these slight modifications to the source code, even though in the source, it is documented where changes need to be made to make it search different sites. It is quite possible that those who use Greasemonkey can often be expected to make those kinds of changes, as Greasemonkey users may tend to be advanced Firefox users. However, I am not quite sure of this, but the topic of the level of knowledge of Greasemonkey users can be a topic for another blog entry.

Filed in Firefox, Google, Greasemonkey, YouTube | | Comments (2)

I Blog, Therefore I Am? (Or, I Am, Therefore I Blog?)

Monday, August 13, 2007

As someone who considers himself an individual who tries to keep up with the times in the online world, it may come as a surprise that it is only now that I have started a weblog. I have been familiar with them, but I have never found it necessary for me to have a blog of my own. Very many other people may blog, but I was certainly not interested in blogging simply because it was something that many other people do. In addition, I did not think anything that I would blog would be of interest to many people. Anything that I would have to share may not be considered interesting enough, or “blogworthy” as I believe the appropriate term for it is here in the blogosphere.

However, the idea for starting one occurred to me when I decided that, as a coder who enjoys working on various side projects, I could post what I find and create in a blog. I could also share my work and ideas among any others who might be interested in them. And starting a blog appeared to be a very good, if not ideal, way of going about sharing my ideas, products, and anything else I could put online.

My idea for starting a blog perhaps should have occurred to me sooner, when I could have published thoughts on other work I was doing at the time. After taking some time to come up with the idea, I knew it would take much time for me to finally start blogging. I have a tendency to spend much time thinking of what I should be doing, when I should spend more time doing what I should be doing. And in that time that I thought about how I should do this, many questions came to mind about how I should do this. I spent much time thinking about questions such as those that would come to mind when reading sections of the WordPress documentation, such as this section. I have also spent some time reading sections of books on blogging, and have visited blogs to get an idea of how I should go about blogging. But I eventually decided to try to make this blog a reflection of who I am, and not try to make it an imitation of another blog. I am sure that I will learn more about blogging as I continue doing so, and I look forward to finding out what happens during this time.

Although I consider this particular blog entry somewhat egocentric, I expect this blog to not be so much about me. I’m not sure if initial entries to blogs typically are introductory, or if they contain some information that would be in the “about” section of them. But as I mentioned earlier, I have decided to try doing this in a way that seems right to me, and to not try to “borrow” ideas from other blogs. I think that if I do, this will be easier for me, and blog entries here will practically write themselves. My lack of experience in doing this may likely become apparent, but I expect to enjoy blogging. Sharing the thoughts and ideas I have is something I would like to do, and I am already beginning to see why so many other people blog.

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