When I think about it, I do want to have conversations with people reading my blog regularly. I talk (type) with my fingers and you certainly talk with your eyes when you react to every thing I gotta say. I don’t mean they make somersaults, but somehow despite how snobbish it seems to be the only one speaking here, I do feel suddenly too irresponsible to have left the conversations without a word, but here’s the thing. It is one thing to be just be able to talk and its another to compose articles out of conversations. Gosh, this makes me think how hard its gonna be writing these kind of ‘oops i didn’t write for long time, where do i resume from?’ lines. But what the huck ever

I certainly like the idea of microblogging in a way that its easier for the quick blurb posting, but then all the times I’m thinking of compiling them for an article, but now I’m like “i’ve talked about em already”, but I know well, that I didn’t go into details as well as I could. Although it wouldn’t be so hard to just open my twitter page and pick out some interesting stuff out of it and expand on them.

So what took me so long to even open up my dark room and get back to writing stuff just for the sake of writing stuff rather than completing articles. Too many things and to be honest, things haven’t got back totally in line and so I still didn’t get back to my mind map and finish off the stale SFD article. First thing was that my routine went berserk when the my first job slipped out of my hands too soon. I just had to re-start my search and preparations for a new opportunity. It took time to realise what exactly happened in such a hurry. I was like so unforgivably still not out of that job security stupid relaxed mode. Sooner there were lots of questions…in my mind. What really went wrong? What was I not enjoying, what was I struggling against? Was I even applying or re-applying back for the right kind of openings? Was the company I was in just an odd case, coz I certainly had enjoyed and worked well to the satisfaction of my (what do you call the person who takes in interns…not employers exactly…in this context, are they?) boss during my internship. Like this confusing question often made me think that perhaps its not that just one company, maybe its a wrong choice of line of work that’d make me a misfit, at all such companies sooner or later. What else could I be applying for? What are the job requirements for them? How many of them do I possess? How many can I prepare myself with and in how much time?

Imagine all these questions like hitting your head like darts right after you wake up from that relaxed mode. You want to run away but you want to also use that energy, wound up to run away, to embark on a search for new opportunities despite also the current hopelessness of financial meltdown looming over almost every sector of industry and certainly the IT sector. “Man, I’ve so many things wrapping and crushing my mind within, I think I’ll take time out and blog about my presentation on LyX at BITS Pilani – Goa Campus during Software Freedom Day.” like yeah fuckin right! Well truth be said, I was a bit less worried about losing out on major points since I’d plotted them on a mind map right after the event and also thankfully FN’s had taken some videos that I could link to.

Right now, I’m thinking, gotta sleep early. Need to get the smartcard done soon with having my 4 wheeler license test passed (by me). Need to get some positive news hopefully from the place I currently got interviewed in. I just felt more naturally in place for the requirements…and I certainly hope to learn fast and scale up. Right now, I’m certainly thinking what you are thinking. This thing is getting cut off too soon and believe me, it certainly is more than you know it. Ideas keep coming too fast before I could get down to arrange into blog posts asap. But its just a phase of time where I’m not too certain about when exactly following posts would come up, but the sooner they come up, let’s hope its a sign that more and more things are falling back into place.

Here’s a random question: Is metal music derogatory? I find the current range of hip-hop and r&b or rap kinda quite derogatory. I mean you gotta try real hard to be dumb to avoid getting the almost direct indications of objectifying women. how just life goes on so well with having all the desires of life and more fulfilled. Its like living the lie. How about facing the music? How about speaking out? There is no particular genre to be blamed for derogatory lyrics, just some drunk artists with a lot of money. I do have my choices of songs, albums, artists, but you can never be sure what the next set of songs they come up with would sound like. hell, i didn’t used to catch the words before and I used to make up my own funny lines and get poems out of them. Artists could be blamed for lyrics, music videos (like the 18+ types) with so much exposure for the singer looking for a big break or i dunno what. Metal music artists have quite a few good points to learn from. They stick around for looong time. Learn to be good at your job and you might stick around for long time too. Skipping often is bad for your career health. They play real instruments. Listening to synth-pop is like working on a click-click-click code generation GUI rather than a programmer’s text editor. Metal lyrics, barring the unnecessarily filthy ones, have often stories to tell of the past, of the current, of some neverland. Its not just always 99 problems of the singer’s own self. Swearing isn’t as filthy as casually talking about ho’s in a gay pop song like singing a nursery rhyme. If people think that I haven’t heard metal music enough to not know how derogatory it can really be, all I’d say is “ain’t that a fuckin great thing? I’m just lucky sometimes y’know” Basically I think you need to worry about derogatoryness if you are the MTV programming head or something.

I like music as a whole across all genres, but metal music is what gets me going. just the type I feel my heart pumps in sync with…and I still don’t play any instrument except sing. you can’t deny that’s an instrument that’s not too easy to play well without a lot of practice.

Since the SFD programme was scheduled in the evening after 1700 IST, there was lot of time in the morning to check out ECAP alongwith getting some work done at the bank within the half-day schedule that I missed. Had this weird fancy of travelling all over on bus and walking a lot. ECAP was at the top floor of hotel Mandovi just like last few years. This is the 16th year, but I can’t tell how long its been held in the hotel. Some interesting products on display. Quite a few linux faces (nowadays read as Ubuntu hardy -> currently) and pretty aloof people. Y’know IT exhibitions? Your tour’s not complete if every store hasn’t stuffed your hands with oversized pamphlets. Here i got (n)one, like almost.

First up, I checked that the main area in the main hall, i dunno what’s it called, but its the stage like area, where one of the vendors, was having the biggest display area for the tiniest of gadgets, acer aspireOne. I say tiny, since there were large projection screens there last time, which looked perfect fit for that huge area. Anyways, the vendor’s the chairman of Computer Society of India – Goa Chapter (CSI – Goa). Although there were other acer laptops and desktops and acer ain’t a company that I like so much and feel sad for those who ‘paid’ to get one, Aspire One had got me interested for one unique but obvious reason, linux, and the latest ultramobile/netbook pc form factor, powered by Intel Atom.

The neat thing about the netbook is the extremely quick responsiveness. It comes with 120gb hdd and 1gb ram and compared to the prices i’d seen online for 4gb eee’s this machine at ~20k is an extremely good option, except that i don’t like acer, would like to see more of AMD products coming out too and hopefully have more distros turning out versions for this hardware. The site claims the machine gets in action within 15 seconds, now that is not so impossible, given that the hardware manufacturer is bundling the customised linux OS and totally tweaking it to be superfast. Openoffice 2.3 for example loads up almost as fast as a plain text editor. Real fast. Didn’t find any whatsoever way to get a shell. and its really interesting to know how does one disable the shell and how does one reactivate it, if no shell is available. I opened grub conf with openoffice writer and as per title field, deduced that the OS was a build of Linpus distro. According to Wikipedia, the version that comes with Acer Aspire One is called Linpus Lite. I just enjoyed going through the various menus and trying to find out what all’s possible. Given as it is, its certainly a damn useful gadget to carry around. Gives you a good reason to ‘move’ without losing connectivity. But I’d prefer not so much hdd, but neither as less as the EEE. additional storage space would be a choice and an extra cost if needed. I’d prefer a shell, peacefully dark terminal. but i guess we’re not the kind of audience this netbooks are meant for. atleast, laymen don’t need to buy really filled to the gills computer and say “i just use it for email, photos, music and surfing the web”. Their statements would be more justified from now on.
The disappointing thing was that some games like supertux, were their old versions.

Image by Rico Shen

Most other stalls, were not too interesting as they had usual form factor desktops or laptops and windows or some game going on. Fortunately this time it seems, quite a few vendors have gained confidence in ubuntu and were (implicitly but not explicitly) proud to show it off. LG, Acer and Lenovo were the main machines being sold with linux, dealer installed…not factory installed, though linpus lite on acer aspire one is an exception. But you had to see the reactions of the LG representative. The face that says “what-the-hell-am-i-doing-here-with-linux??” So totally confused and nervous. A vibe like “dammit these linux using customers know so much more than us dealers, hope they don’t get the upper hand on the deal”. He had a ubuntu laptop with nautilus open with a movie file showing up (rise of the silver surfer). i think the same filename as the one i watched So all i did was ask about whether as a dealer they are going out of their way and loading up all restricted drivers and codecs and stuff, and charging a little extra if necessary. But i asked simply, whether Linux could really play all video formats coz i was looking at a avi file being listed on the file manager. but the rep’s like “no! u gotta get legal versions of something something mutter mutter…it does not play by default” Before that I tried asking if the video drivers give good performance, coz in my experience, ati proprietory drivers, or for that matter my onboard 1250 just ain’t good enough to pump high fps with good visuals and when cpu scales down frequency on switching to battery, the video fps is substantially lagging. on a 1gb ram 1.8ghz dual core 64 bit machine with 64 bit OS. I was confused, whether I was talkin to someone just passing by and troubling, unnecessarily and I asked “Are you a visitor by any chance?” and the fella’s like “yes…no I am here to exhibit…this is our stall” pointing to the LG stall we were in.
Lenovo had also a hardy heron on display and I was told that it was the line of desktops that came with no OS by default. Nothing much to exhibit on the linux machines though. All other stalls were pretty ordinary, the computers looked better on the drab pamphlets kinda.

Time at ECAP passed by too fast, majorly coz no ILUG stuff was happening this year, and there were no familiar faces to meet, right when there were linux desktops being proudly/implicitly exhibited. I had still loads of time before starting for SFD@BITS, despite walking from bus stand till the hotel, walking up all the steps and taking 2-3 rounds of all the stalls with the curiousity of the first timer I spent a lot of time on the linpus lite machine though

Damn long post already, I think I’ll push the SFD part into a contd… post, coming up right after.

1. AGILE conference (quite a costly one, so no problem if you miss that). today…yes yes!! run run!
2. SFD (Software Freedom Day) at BITS (Birla Institute of Technology & Science) is being held on Friday 26th Sept. 2008. Software Freedom Day is the grassroots level efforts by common people to spread awareness about the benefits of free software and free-ing software among people not in the know and for lots other fun activities too. Free Software is a fun concept too. No scary license agreements.
3. ECAP (Exhibition of Computer & Allied Products). I’ve been blogging about it in the past, here and here. This time it seems ILUG’s not getting the Rampon Hall complimentarily and neither are they thinking their talks could be worth charging entry fees to sponssor the hall and presenting equipment…well even if they did, its too late to gather up enough interest to get paying audience at such short notice. So visit there for some hardware exhibition, but the real action happens on Friday, when I have a full working day :’(

UPDATE: According to a mail, that I received 3 hours ago from BITS OSUM the organisation that is making the SFD event a reality on the BITS campus, I am happy to update you on the event schedule, that it’s gonna be held on Saturday 27th with a “interactive session between the GOA-LUG and the students attending this session scheduled at 5:30 PM”…and not on a Friday as I was told before. Sorry if you already reached the venue in advance. Hope this blog finds you in good health
There’s more reason to be visiting the venue now that it is on Saturday

GTD, Project Management, To-do lists, Weekly Planner, Organizers, Reminders…no matter what way you like to address the concept, it always projects a no-doubt-about-it image of getting the most out of time. To keep your life on track to use time as efficiently as possible to be able to do as many more things as possible. But, do you think this is the only perspective that one should have from these tools? My ideas follow

First thing that I think of when trying out an organizer or a task reminder is to consider how much of my life’s activities do I want to maintain a routine on and how much do I want to execute without deadline or duration constraints. If you organize each and every breath of your life, what exactly are you saving up time for? Its like even forgetting to reading a story book or novel for an hour would make you as guilty as missing a lecture. “oh crap! i fell asleep again!”
Another thing that one needs to have before planning to use any of these planners is faith…faith that the change in lifestyle will take time, will see some failures (but don’t take that ‘some’ for a long ride), but will bring in some changes.

Now as I said before that I want to explore alternative uses of these task management or time management tools. So far I have used a pocket casio organizer, yahoo calendar (or whatever its called) then my nokia 6670, google calendar, remember the milk. I also occassionally explored a bit of korganizer. One of the reasons, I believe that I wasn’t using these tools too regularly was perhaps because I only thought I’d have to routinize my whole day to be ultra efficient and save time…but save time for what? Well,that’s what I thought about and that’s why this post is getting composed in the dark room.

Start with organizing or planning few of your daily activities. It is like encouraging yourself through small achievements. Set some due date and time for a task and see that you do finish that task on time. When you do a task a few times, try to set a duration lower than average to see if you could stay within the timeframe. This, as my friend Sagar suggests, builds up confidence by keeping you organized. You know your time needs for a few basic activities that you perform regularly and that helps you foresee how much time you got in hand for those ad-hoc activities.
One fun use of a calendar app would be to set reminders for all the birthdays and/or other anniversaries of your near and dear ones. I use Google Calendar for this. Online apps and services have more ways of reminding you than desktop software. Facebook’s got an app on it that exports all your friends’ birthdays to an iCal format (*.ics) file. Its called fbCal.

What about serious uses? How do you get good returns from these tools without making your life extra monotonous? Without really thinking of these tools as one extra botheration?
First of all, the most advantageous thing about these softwares is that the iCal file format is widely used, open source or screwed-tight-shut source. So you can always sync up your calendar data at multiple computers or access a single one over the internet using some online app. Secondly most calendaring software allows sharing of tasks or calendar events. Reminds you perhaps of meeting appointments and similar formal stuff. But think of things that you plan to do.

• Think of shows or movies that you want to watch…watch with your friends without either you or your friend backing out of the plan with a “i got some work” busy tone.
• Think of people that you do want to meet over the weekend
• Think of places that you want to go or maybe some new thing that you want to self-learn.
• Think of those one-time tasks like sending an email that someone asked you to, when you get some time, “Oops! I forgot about sending you that email about the article! I’ll surely do it tonight!”

…and it goes on and on.
Enter reminders. Not only does organizing your activities build up confidence, but they let you be able to actually have time for those suddenly scheduled one-time activities that are hard to remember since they are not part of your habit.

I find people’s initial reluctance comes from the fact that calendars are not so common with them, though a lot of them use their PDA’s or smartphone’s calendars almost on a daily basis.

Google Calendar

I have liked Google Calendar both on the desktop and my cell for the natural language event adding, as well as the quick responsiveness of the interface. What’s missing from a calendar app (which is as per standard) is the ability to mark a task as done or to view tasks as lists under user-defined headings, tags or searchlists. To people still unaware, I am talking about to-do list managers or task management software to be precise.

I had heard of Remember The Milk (RTM) for quite some time but having liked and settled with Google Calendar, I wasn’t ready to switch to another app until I actually signed up for and tried RTM for a few days. The reasons I love it demand a dedicated post for itself, but main thing is that besides being a calendar type reminder of sorts, its a task management tool. So you get to know your tasks for the day and also you could show the important ones on top by giving them higher priority. Without priority tasks with a due time alongwith the usual due date come up higher in the list.

RememberTheMilk

Google Calendar also has ready to import calendar files for festivals and holidays of various countries. Most often music artistes for example might put up their tour schedules as iCal files. You could set something up like that for your community events too. Software release timeline can be shown on calendar too.

Sometimes tools like Google Calendar or RTM does feel like only good to be used very very occassionally. Sometimes it feels a little tedious to keep dragging along with updating event times and schedules and never following up on them, but I believe, things take time and I need to start from managing most insignificant tasks and quickly move onto managing larger chunks of my time by prioritzing on important activities that I need to get done somehow.

Another observation is that “time management or task management tools can kill adaptability & risk handling skills”, but I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the management concept itself over here. Management is about being as adaptive and being able to account for and handle risks or undesired situations. A task/time management tool is after all still a tool and therefore its an aid to your management skills not a be-all-end-all solution provider. Adaptability and risk handling skills get sharpened by experience. It is not at all remotely usual to just strike the right balance between your planned and unplanned usage of time to account for all possible delays and deviations. This is the reason, why one should not lose heart with not being able to follow a schedule set by the person himself/herself for the first few times.

Some might feel like “I’ll do what I please, when I please.”, but if you need to be able to do ‘all’ that you please/have to do in the given time, so that you could do more things that you please later on, schedulers or to-do lists could definitely help you make each and every day more eventful. You would have some interesting stuff to say to “how was your day?” and you would feel proud inside that you could do a lot more things than you were used to…but it’s gonna take some time and possibly intermittent failures initially.

GTD, Project Management, To-do lists, Weekly Planner, Organizers, Reminders…no matter what way you like to address the concept, it always projects a no-doubt-about-it image of getting the most out of time. To keep your life on track to use time as efficiently as possible to be able to do as many more things as possible. But, do you think this is the only perspective that one should have from these tools? My ideas follow

First thing that I think of when trying out an organizer or a task reminder is to consider how much of my life’s activities do I want to maintain a routine on and how much do I want to execute without deadline or duration constraints. If you organize each and every breath of your life, what exactly are you saving up time for? Its like even forgetting to reading a story book or novel for an hour would make you as guilty as missing a lecture. “oh crap! i fell asleep again!”
Another thing that one needs to have before planning to use any of these planners is faith…faith that the change in lifestyle will take time, will see some failures (but don’t take that ‘some’ for a long ride), but will bring in some changes.

Now as I said before that I want to explore alternative uses of these task management or time management tools. So far I have used a pocket casio organizer, yahoo calendar (or whatever its called) then my nokia 6670, google calendar, remember the milk. I also occassionally explored a bit of korganizer. One of the reasons, I believe that I wasn’t using these tools too regularly was perhaps because I only thought I’d have to routinize my whole day to be ultra efficient and save time…but save time for what? Well,that’s what I thought about and that’s why this post is getting composed in the dark room.

Start with organizing or planning few of your daily activities. It is like encouraging yourself through small achievements. Set some due date and time for a task and see that you do finish that task on time. When you do a task a few times, try to set a duration lower than average to see if you could stay within the timeframe. This, as my friend Sagar suggests, builds up confidence by keeping you organized. You know your time needs for a few basic activities that you perform regularly and that helps you foresee how much time you got in hand for those ad-hoc activities.
One fun use of a calendar app would be to set reminders for all the birthdays and/or other anniversaries of your near and dear ones. I use Google Calendar for this. Online apps and services have more ways of reminding you than desktop software. Facebook’s got an app on it that exports all your friends’ birthdays to an iCal format (*.ics) file. Its called fbCal.

What about serious uses? How do you get good returns from these tools without making your life extra monotonous? Without really thinking of these tools as one extra botheration?
First of all, the most advantageous thing about these softwares is that the iCal file format is widely used, open source or screwed-tight-shut source. So you can always sync up your calendar data at multiple computers or access a single one over the internet using some online app. Secondly most calendaring software allows sharing of tasks or calendar events. Reminds you perhaps of meeting appointments and similar formal stuff. But think of things that you plan to do.

• Think of shows or movies that you want to watch…watch with your friends without either you or your friend backing out of the plan with a “i got some work” busy tone.
• Think of people that you do want to meet over the weekend
• Think of places that you want to go or maybe some new thing that you want to self-learn.
• Think of those one-time tasks like sending an email that someone asked you to, when you get some time, “Oops! I forgot about sending you that email about the article! I’ll surely do it tonight!”

…and it goes on and on.
Enter reminders. Not only does organizing your activities build up confidence, but they let you be able to actually have time for those suddenly scheduled one-time activities that are hard to remember since they are not part of your habit.

I find people’s initial reluctance comes from the fact that calendars are not so common with them, though a lot of them use their PDA’s or smartphone’s calendars almost on a daily basis.

Google Calendar

I have liked Google Calendar both on the desktop and my cell for the natural language event adding, as well as the quick responsiveness of the interface. What’s missing from a calendar app (which is as per standard) is the ability to mark a task as done or to view tasks as lists under user-defined headings, tags or searchlists. To people still unaware, I am talking about to-do list managers or task management software to be precise.

I had heard of Remember The Milk (RTM) for quite some time but having liked and settled with Google Calendar, I wasn’t ready to switch to another app until I actually signed up for and tried RTM for a few days. The reasons I love it demand a dedicated post for itself, but main thing is that besides being a calendar type reminder of sorts, its a task management tool. So you get to know your tasks for the day and also you could show the important ones on top by giving them higher priority. Without priority tasks with a due time alongwith the usual due date come up higher in the list.

RememberTheMilk

Google Calendar also has ready to import calendar files for festivals and holidays of various countries. Most often music artistes for example might put up their tour schedules as iCal files. You could set something up like that for your community events too. Software release timeline can be shown on calendar too.

Sometimes tools like Google Calendar or RTM does feel like only good to be used very very occassionally. Sometimes it feels a little tedious to keep dragging along with updating event times and schedules and never following up on them, but I believe, things take time and I need to start from managing most insignificant tasks and quickly move onto managing larger chunks of my time by prioritzing on important activities that I need to get done somehow.

Another observation is that “time management or task management tools can kill adaptability & risk handling skills”, but I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the management concept itself over here. Management is about being as adaptive and being able to account for and handle risks or undesired situations. A task/time management tool is after all still a tool and therefore its an aid to your management skills not a be-all-end-all solution provider. Adaptability and risk handling skills get sharpened by experience. It is not at all remotely usual to just strike the right balance between your planned and unplanned usage of time to account for all possible delays and deviations. This is the reason, why one should not lose heart with not being able to follow a schedule set by the person himself/herself for the first few times.

Some might feel like “I’ll do what I please, when I please.”, but if you need to be able to do ‘all’ that you please/have to do in the given time, so that you could do more things that you please later on, schedulers or to-do lists could definitely help you make each and every day more eventful. You would have some interesting stuff to say to “how was your day?” and you would feel proud inside that you could do a lot more things than you were used to…but it’s gonna take some time and possibly intermittent failures initially.

I enabled the following GMail labs features. reasons follow…

Mark as Read Button

speeds up the operation. though with better gmail2 i need to press only the comma key (,) to select unread mails in the current list and mark them all read.

Forgotten Attachment Detector

its said to be not fool-proof but i don’t write that bad english that gmail wont recognize

Navbar drag and drop

kinda useless since right now i only have the labels box, so nothing to rearrange it with

Quote selected text

speeds up the work of replying to an email and having to separately cut off all the part that is not required. select text and only that part is quoted from the original message

Right-side labels

my linbox is now a 3 column layout else the list of mails would extend right till the end of the right corner

Email Addict

i am trying to depend less on this and trying to avoid checking email too much. studies say it takes 64 seconds to get back your concentration to what you were doing, once you finish your email checking. so it helps too

Random signature

buggy doesn’t print out the entire quote…trails off with “…”

Signature tweaks

what exactly is this about?

Custom keyboard shortcuts

this is what i’ve been mainly using better gmail 2 for and there is keyboard shortcuts for just about all operations.

Superstars

i added this only after i read that you can search superstarred mails using the has: keyword, which makes it a really cool feature to find required mails quickly. its something like quick saved searches.

UPDATE: Finally figured out how wrong I was to add signature tweaks. Its the sure-shot way to easily top-post the reply, which makes reading replies in relation to their quoted context really difficult. since i am not at all in the habit of top posting it was a real PITA this new tweaks that i’d to copy paste the sig back down below.
Also check out this article on lifehacker, posted coincidentally around the same time.

Read It Later is a (who knows what type) award winning firefox extension that’s supposed to make the process of bookmarking pages for later reading as quick as a click of a tick(mark) icon in the address bar. Like foxmarks, it also lets you sync your list with other computers. so you know, usual scenario would be like find a bunch of cool links to read up on at workplace but you certainly don’t have the time to get into them. You sync the list with your home computer and you can continue there. So where lies the problem?

The extension is simply awesome in what it does, but for one serious blunder that anyone concerned with a bit of security and privacy would be really worked up about. As I installed it on the computer assigned to me at the workplace (and this ain’t a machine that’s exclusively mine, the browser can be accessed by anyone and everyone in the organization), I checked out the RSS Sync feature which being the first time led into the Options dialog to adjust the RSS/Syncing settings. The feed password is shown in plain text. In bold!!. What’s worse is that if you turn off syncing, the section showing the password is greyed out but the password is still easily readable. This extension isn’t supposed to be a social “read it later” list. Its for one person’s purpose. There isn’t a way to not save the password and have a ‘ask for password’ prompt. This particularly I find is the case with most extensions in firefox that connect to some password protected account, though I haven’t seen others that just display your password out there for all to see. Is XUL/chrome/Gecko, so retarded that there isn’t even a password (asterisks only) field that can be put in extensions?

I changed the password online and it started showing up in the extension in plain text and that was it. I got rid of the extension before anything else. Now I gotta try and see if re-installing creates a new list feed or the same feed with my password.

I want NO ONE to click on those ads!! unless your ad blocker hasn’t already removed them.

Although I’d known of RSS feeds, since there were only desktop aggregators, and I started with the Sage extension, I moved to Bloglines when I saw the example on one of the go_open series on DVD, a South African TV show on open source i guess wholly or majorly funded by Canonical. Bloglines been the predominant choice till around October 7, 2005 when Google Reader came out. The only good thing that happened since then was that Bloglines was made to rethink its lazy attitude towards its monotonous interface with manual refreshes needed and come up with almost a complete rewrite. In the meanwhile they even got bought by Ask Jeeves…or is it just Ask! ? Soon enough Bloglines came out with Bloglines Beta just in time when Google Reader users were rising close to Bloglines, which has been much higher compared to other aggregators as well. Only few stats check if its really Google Reader, because both iGoogle and Google Reader use the same Google Feedfetcher. The good thing that Google Reader caused was to give Bloglines a rude awakening to pull themselves together and totally re-design the aggregator.

Reasons, including both fancy and functional, that I don’t miss Google Reader much are :-

1. The color scheme is boring
2. Keyboard shortcuts aren’t as quicker as bloglines’
3. Bloglines Beta lets you set it to show only updated feeds and so does GReader but GReader needs one more setting to show all items or just updated items per feed. For viewing old read items, Bloglines Beta lets you choose between past 1 day, 1 week, 1month or most recent…if that was before any of the given preset durations
4. The upper left section showing aggregate collections like all items and starred and trends is useless ripoff from GMail interface. If you pin a message or just keep it unread, that should suffice. Because even as ‘starred’, each item would have their priority based on context/tags. GReader could do this better by showing how many or which feeds have starred items with a display like for e.g. FeedSite (8) (3*) where the asterisk could be the star graphic.
5. People make folders or tags to not just sort out related feeds but often to just narrow down on high-priority feeds first, so having an all items page is useless, when google search is so reliable. One way all items would’ve been a good feature was if GReader would’ve allowed to sort the feeds in a drag-drop fashion and also sorted the all unread items in a similar way.You can drag and drop the feeds…but the items under all items weren’t coming in the same way.
6. Adding a feed doesn’t directly let you choose a tag or folder to drop the feed into. There ain’t no feed preview before subscribing like Bloglines Beta. Feed preview helped when I wanted to add only those web-comics feeds that syndicated the comic image within the feed rather than just a link to open in a new tab and to read the strip there.
7. Ok, So where is the add folder/label link? Compared to that, Bloglines Beta lets you simply add a folder and drag and drop any existing unsorted feeds into the new folder or also from another folder. Labels and tags concept is crap. Try editing tags for an item and adding one more label than what you usually sort it in…it still does not show up in the other label that you added to it…and here’s the thing, its just one item that i’m editing tags for. Now you wanna say that I should treat labels and tags, now that is really confusing.
8. Both bloglines and Google Reader doesn’t have folder/label hierarchy. folders in folders. not that i’m having too many folders or feeds to need right now…but quite a desirable feature in the long run
9. Similar to the quick add folder icon missing there is the quick feed delete icon missing from GReader… If you dont have a preview you might as well let me quickly and easily get rid of the feed after I manually add and check it out. or do GReader users have butter fingers?
10. Shared Items, people’s most favorite feature has some +s as well as -s. its cool coz the shared items has a feed but then again its like the all items page…sorted by time but not by say custom tags or other conditions for example. On the other hand share with a note is what I’d say is similar to what was Bloglines’ original version Blog feature, which besides saving a feed item would also let you add a note and develop sort of a linkblog instantly. Bloglines Beta on the other hand lets you set which feeds to make private and which feeds to make public and the public url, although in the old bloglines model, lets you view all feeds of the user as organized by him/her and also lets you export all subscriptions to an opml file, which any feed aggregator would import and create the folders and sort the feeds likewise in it.
    Just curious if its possible to customize what labels are shared by default?
11. Where is the in-place website preview? The 3-pane viewing option in Bloglines Beta lets you view the list of items in a feed on the top, the syndicated content on one lower half and the actual site content for that permalink in the other half. Is there a way to do that in GReader
12. Bloglines Beta supports OpenID logins.

I could dig in for more rough edges or perceive more features as bugs but people like me who are considering switching over, don’t need much convincing or too many reasons, to not feel at home with a new aggregator and 12 points at that (ok lets make it 11…ignore the color rant) is not a small number of rough edges at all. Well besides complaining I tried my best to come up with workarounds and solutions here and there, except implementing them.
The fight between Google Reader and Bloglines Beta is a healthy one with each one bringing improvements to compete against the other and pushing each other to innovate more than just playing catch-up with each other and ripping off features…although that’s most likely here as well but not so much as the office suite competition

p.s. I haven’t used any browser extensions or plugins for either feed reader to avoid any bias. You surely wouldn’The t have thought I’d add Better GReader anyways.