• I love Netvibes
• There are things about Netvibes that bother me
• Netvibes has been broken for two days so I’m writing a tool from scratch to replace its functionality

Before today, I have tweeted about Netvibes three times:
September 5, 2010 (permalink):

How many years has @netvibes been around? Still, when you change your password, you’ve got to delete your cookies on all other machines!

November 3, 2010 (permalink):

The @Digg RSS feed has been broken in @Netvibes for a week.

November 17, 2010 (permalink):

@Netvibes has been in beta for five years and my RSS feeds still update erratically. One day closer to switching to @GoogleReader .

(Side note: For several weeks after rolling out version 4 of its website, Digg’s RSS feed experienced varying degrees of dysfunction. However, when I tweeted about that particular feed being broken in Netvibes, I loaded it up in other aggregators (specifically, Google Reader) to verify that the feed itself was no longer the source of the problem.)

Around November 17, I began to use Google Reader to take the place of Netvibes’ RSS aggregation functionality, and I created a Firefox Sync account to take the place of Netvibes’ bookmarks functionality. Since then I exported my bookmarks from Netvibes, imported them to Firefox, and started the arduous process of re-tagging them all.

Today, I found myself actively avoiding Netvibes despite the fact that I have yet to organize my bookmarks in Firefox. Because of this, I wrote a new tweet on the subject. For some reason — perhaps the phrase “abandoned netvibes” — Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini replied. The exchange was brief, but I’ll present it as a conversation:

Me: Abandoned @netvibes in favor of @GoogleReader and #FirefoxSync . I think netvibes’ developers abandoned it first.
Freddy Mini: @DanielPremo why would you say that?
Me: @freddymini Consistent bugs in RSS widgets — widgets that don’t update, widgets that show the same one or two items over and over.
Me: @freddymini Also: every time I change my netvibes password, I must delete cookies on every other machine, or netvibes is just a blank page.
Freddy Mini: @DanielPremo fine. see you.

Part of my frustration with Netvibes stems with the fact that I know not only that its problems can be fixed, but also how to fix them. I ran into the password/cookie issue when I was working on fav.premo.biz — and that site’s just a hobby. Netvibes is a tool that has a mountain of potential. But in the ways I use it, it’s been slowly moving backwards. This leaves me with no choice but to find more effective solutions.

The ellipsis (Wikipedia) is three periods in a row often used to signify that content has been abbreviated or truncated.  In the world of automated (or automation-assisted) Tweet composition, it’s a common thing.  There’s also a premium on character count in the Twitter world, particularly when it comes to automation.

Well here’s an easy way to squeeze in two more characters:  The ellipsis character.  Rather than trimming an extra three characters (for three periods) from text that is too long, you can trim just one character (for an ellipsis).  Examples:

• This text is truncated without three periods ...
• This text is truncated with an ellipsis …

They look the same, but you can tell they’re different by trying to highlight each period separately on the second example.  And, in line with my rampant narcissism, I wrote a 140 character tweet about this very blog post which uses — you guessed it — the ellipsis character.  And finally (because I wanted to use Twitter’s Blackbird Pie tool), here’s a pretty representation of the same tweet:

With the exception of the main site (i.e., the page you’re reading), I’ve decided to change all of my sites from HTML4 or XHTML to HTML5.  In addition, I’ve decided that now is a good time to stop using Prototype and script.aculo.us and start using jQuery.

I’ve decided to move to HTML5 for two main reasons.  First, HTML5 is more elegant than HTML 4.x or XHTML 1.x.  I love elegance when it comes to programming.  I find that the criteria which determines what is and is not valid HTML5 code is less draconian than for HTML4.x and XHTML1.x.  Also, HTML5 introduces new features that allow developers to add greater functionality with hand-written markup.  Greater flexibility and greater functionality sound pretty elegant to me.  Second, due to these new features, HTML5 provides for greater use of open source technologies.  The long and short of my feelings in this area is that HTML5 gets us one step close to a world without Adobe Flash.  The <audio> and <video> tags allow developers to add rich content to sites without relying on a closed source, proprietary plugin that is a resource hog and a security risk.  Who couldn’t love code that’s more elegant combined with a better user experience?

I’ve decided to move to jQuery because jQuery is updated far more frequently than the JavaScript frameworks I’ve been using up until now — Prototype and script.aculo.us.  For example, jQuery 1.4 was released in January 2010 and jQuery 1.3 was released in January 2009.  When it comes to Prototype’s progression over that time, I can only estimate that it’s seen two bug releases (0.0.0.x) and one maintenance release (0.0.x).  Although putting out regular updates to a code base may be virtuous, it’s not the whole story.  Every time jQuery is updated, its release notes contain graphs showing speed improvements for all major browsers.  Speed improvements on an annual basis.  This just isn’t happening in Prototype or script.aculo.us.

I have a few public-facing sites that use JavaScript here and there, but only one makes heavy use of it: Fav.Premo.biz.  Since modifying code to use both HTML5 and jQuery would be painful at best, I’m going to rewrite Fav.Premo.biz using these new technologies.  It’ll be an undertaking, and it might not be finished soon, but it should be interesting.

The first is about Microsoft’s freshly-out-of-beta antivirus suite.  First look: Microsoft Security Essentials impresses.  In 2006, Microsoft released a retail antivirus program called Windows Live OneCare.  By the end of 2008, Microsoft had announced that it would discontinue this product in favor of a free replacement called Microsoft Security Essentials.

For years I’ve been using AVG Free, but today I uninstalled it (you don’t want two antivirus programs running at the same time) and installed MSE.  It looks like it’s a bit easier to use than AVG and I must say, it’s got some beautiful system tray icons.  I might write a post in the future with some expanded impressions of the product, especially with Windows 7 coming out this month.

Microsoft Security Essentials can be downloaded here.

The second article is about something I’ve known about for years but to which I’ve never committed.  Newegg reveals Windows 7 OEM prices.  I’ve known about OEM versions of Microsoft Windows since before Windows Vista was released.  From what I understand, an OEM copy of Windows is only supposed to be used on a newly built machine.  However, I believe that is more of a suggestion in line with the “Student and Teacher” edition of Microsoft Office (which has since been renamed to the “Home and Student” Edition.)  On Newegg’s listing page, the text appears to be cut off, but here’s the part that caught my eye:

software requires the assembler to provide end user support

That made me think:  Hell, I’m capable of that.  I’d prefer it that way, in fact.  If I were married with kids, I’d probably put an OEM copy of Windows on each of their machines, too.  I wouldn’t suggest it for my parents or my sisters, or even my best (nontechnical) friends, though.  But for me, why not?  Oh, and why is this a money saver?  Depending on the edition of Windows purchased, the OEM version is about 50% cheaper.  The greatest savings percentage-wise appears to be on the Professional Edition, which is the one I’ve got my eye on.

Newegg lists every version of Windows 7 it’s selling here.

So if you’re a technical person, take a look at both of these articles.  If you’re not, consider using Microsoft Security Essentials.  Because it’s free antivirus software.

The Behavior as I First Spotted it, in Firefox 3.5 Mac

Before asking anyone about it, I decided to check if the same phenomenon occurs in other browsers. My research:

Not Just a Firefox Thing

I thought, maybe this is a Mac OS X issue. I booted into Windows and fired up IE8:

Definitely not Limited to Mac OS X

Then I wondered, would Google let this slip through in Chrome, too?

Sure Enough

Finally I booted back into Mac OS X and loaded up Gmail in Opera:

Op ... Wah?

I’m not sure what to conclude about all this. Is this a bug from which all major browsers suffer? I can hardly believe the functionality got into all these browsers accidentally. So is it a Gmail bug? It does get in the way of the horizontal scrollbar.  I guess the moral of the story is this:  When viewing Gmail with Tasks, don’t make your browser window too narrow.

We’ve known each other a long time.  We started spending a lot of time together in college.  You’ve gone through several redesigns in that time.  Heck, I even blogged about some of them.  But lately, I’m not feeling it.

Here’s the thing.  Your article layout sucks.  Take a look at what I’m talking about:

Click to Embiggen

See the smallest column, over there on the left?  That’s the text of the article.  The second column is a sidebar.  The third column is a statbox.  The fourth column, which is empty, runs the length of the page but is only occupied near the top, with an advertisement.

Note that on several lines, only two words fit in the first column, and on one line, only a single word fits.  And this is just one screen’s worth of one article.  It’s so painful that it makes the article unreadable.

Here’s my suggestion:  Change the article layout so that it has two columns of equal width.  The first column contains the body of the article, and is untouchable.  Nothing may encroach upon it.  The second column can contain anything else — advertisements, sidebars, statboxes, whatever.

A second option might be to take inspiration from the iPhone version of ESPN.com.  Let’s take a look:

We’ve got an ad, the section header, the score header, then hey — what’s this?  It’s a pseudo-tabular nav header.  We could apply this to the main site!  Solve the layout problem by hiding elements (additional analysis, links, stats) until the reader wants to see them.  If we were to scroll down on the iPhone site, we’d see that for the entire length of the article, it occupies the full width of the browser window.  No element encroaches upon the article’s space.  In this respect, the article is easier to read on my phone than it is on my computer.  Not only that, but the layout of the article on my computer — at its narrowest point — is not as wide as the layout of the article on my iPhone.  That’s measured in characters or inches, take your pick.

So, ESPN.com, I still really like you, but you’ve got to work on this stuff.  Or what?  Or else, that’s what.

On the same day Netvibes responded to my email, I was laid off from my job.  After a few weeks of not writing any code, I got the itch, and decided to move forward with the bookmark manager.  For two or three weeks I spent up to five hours a day, five or six days a week, getting the thing up and running.  Once I got it to a feature-complete state, I stared at it for a few days, enabled user registration, and gave the URL to a couple friends.

I applied twice to Google AdSense, and got shot down both times.  I was waiting to blog about it until I incorporated ads, but now I don’t know if that’ll happen.

The site is fully functional.  Still, there may be bugs, and there may be some obvious features that I missed.  If you register, you’ll get an email, and I set up feedback at fav dot premo dot biz for, well, feedback.

If you sign up, remember: each link can have more than one tag.  For example, I might tag ajc.com with news and atlanta, I might tag espn.com with news and sports, and might tag atlantafalcons.com with sports and atlanta.

Oh — the URL: fav.premo.biz.

The conclusion here is that competition is good for the consumer, and developers aren’t often thought of as consumers.  It’s also interesting that Safari, which lacks Firefox’s robust extension architecture, now has built-in functionality similar to my favorite Firefox extension.  This reminds me of the progression of Mac OS (and perhaps Windows) — imitate popular third party applications, and include them with the OS.  Think of iTunes: MP3 player, CD ripper, podcast manager.  Many popular (free) third party applications have faded into obscurity because people don’t need them anymore.

Additionally, sometime in the near future all of our servers are set to be shut down.  So, the things I worked on over the last 22 months will either disappear completely or break.  I suppose for my resume as much as anything else, I’ve decided to post some photos of my last big project at SpringWidgets:  The SpringWidgets RSS Reader application is, at the time of this writing, still available on MySpace.  Here are the screenshots I uploaded to Flickr.