One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site.

Almost a year ago I wrote about the fact that blogging was ready for disruption. (I still think it is.) And that the new “pro blog recipe” was a blog without comments.

Lately this topic seems to have risen its head again yet not in the same way as it has in the past. In fact, rather than there being a debate for or against a blog having comments it appears that most independent bloggers have resolved that a blog without comments is simply much more enjoyable and manageable while larger outfits still see the need to engage the community.

Matt Gemmell, who recently shut off comments on his personal blog, added a few reasons to the fray. Here is one of his reasons that I have also enjoyed since turning comments off on my personal blog.

I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.

When I had comments on I wouldn’t publish anything that I thought may not start a conversation. Which ended up leading me in a direction I simply didn’t want to go in – I was starting conversations for the sake of starting conversations. That isn’t why I have my personal blog and I don’t want it to be. So, off went the comments. And it isn’t because I don’t want to hear the opinions of those that read my blog. It is because I don’t want to write simply for the gratification of receiving comments. It has been very liberating.

There is still a place for comments on blogs. Even personal blogs. Some blogs have very good reasons to have comments on them. In fact, even Jason Kottke turns on comments from time-to-time when they are needed. But there are better examples like Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He has made it plainly clear that he runs Asymco in order to work with his community on figuring out a problem. He wants feedback, questions, answers, rebuttals to his hypothesis and blog comments is his primary way of accomplishing that.

So while the debate rages on – and all debates are good when they furnish constructive conversation – unlike Gemmell I firmly believe it is a matter of choice by the publisher rather than a cut-and-dry answer. There are pros and cons to having comments on or off and, once weighed, the publisher can then make a decision on how he or she would like to run their own blog.

“And lots of DF readers on Twitter are telling me they use Apple TV just for AirPlay and Netflix streaming.”

That is exactly what I use the Apple TV for. I do not buy or rent TV shows or movies from the iTunes store. Ever. Although the Apple TV integrates with the iTunes Store, Home sharing (for sharing files from a computer), the NBA and MLB (and others), Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, etc. etc. the two features I use on my Apple TV are Netflix with Airplay.

I use Airplay to put videos I find via my iPad on the TV. I do this a lot. (Thanks Devour) Even if the source of these videos is from YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and other outlets – the integration with any of those platforms goes unused by me since I simply use Airplay. I suppose if I didn’t own an iPad my use of Airplay wouldn’t be nearly as significant. It is just so easy. I’ll also, on occasion, use Airplay to play some music via my Apple TV (this replaced my Airport Express’ purpose) and very, very rarely put some vacation photos on-screen.

Another note about Airplay; if you, like me (and obviously Jason Kottke), sometimes acquire a few TV shows you couldn’t get otherwise by grabbing them via Bittorrent you may be interested in Erica Sadun’s Airflick. Airflick is an application that lets you stream video, audio, or photos from your Mac to your Apple TV. Very handy application.

But all-in-all my Apple TV might as well just be a Netflix box. I’ve used Netflix on the computer, on an Xbox 360, on iPad and iPhone and on Apple TV. By far the very best Netflix application exists on the Apple TV. It is easy to use, looks great, and works nearly every single time without hiccup. I don’t know if I’d even be subscribed to Netflix if I didn’t own an Apple TV.

Today it changes again. I’ve decided that my personal blog being ‘named’ my name just wasn’t working. I’ve known this for a long time but I didn’t do anything about it because I wasn’t sure what to do. Finally I got sick and tired of thinking about it and just decided to name it after what it has already become, rather than naming it something I’d like it to become. If that makes any sense.

As of today this blog, which is still going to be my personal Web site in all of the glory that it has come to be, is known as First Initial, Last Name – The official Web site of Colin Devroe.

For several years I have admired the ‘blogs’ that have been branded with their own names yet are run by one or very few people. If you read this blog with any regularity you can probably guess the forthcoming list, but here it is anyway: Daring Fireball run by John Gruber, Waxy.org by Andy Baio, Avalonstar by Bryan Veloso, Waking Ideas by Daniel Nicolas, Monday by Noon by Jon Christopher – and many, many others. I’m listing my friends who are good examples because, well, they are my friends and this is my blog and I can do that sort of thing.

This doesn’t mean that I put my own personal blog in this same line up. I don’t. It isn’t worthy. Also, some of these examples shouldn’t be classified as blogs. Daring Fireball is a business. It is the way John feeds his family. It just so happens that John’s business is “blogging”. This site will never be a Daring Fireball.

So First Initial, Last Name it is. I may grab an appropriate domain name for it, at some point, but I’ve always done more than fine with cdevroe.com so I don’t see that happening any time soon. Who types in domain names more than once or twice anyway, really? You should have subscribed to this site by now.

Side note: I’ve recently added the Share This button to my site (come to this post to see it). If you feel that anything I share on this site is worthy of letting others know about, please consider using this button to make it quick and easy to share the post, photo, or video on your service of choice.

Thanks to all of you that subscribe, read, and participate on my site. I really do appreciate it.

These facts are nothing new and, I’ll bet, do not allude those that built these services. But, they see a general use and purpose for these services and decided to provide their own solution to the problem.

The problem is that, in some cases, you need a shorter URL than the one provided by a particular Web site. Web sites with incredibly long URLs (like Amazon, Google Maps, or search results on a site) can be cumbersome to deal with in situations like writing email, Twittering (I’m cdevroe by the way), and sending SMS messages. URL shorteners attempt to solve this problem by creating links to these pages much easier by providing a significantly shorter URL that simply redirects to the URL that you chose.

Seems innocent enough. Seems simple enough. However, by creating a shorter URL that represents a longer one you’re, as Joshua states, adding unneeded layers that could potentially fail overtime. If the URL shortening service manages 1,000,000 redirects, and suddenly goes down, those redirects no longer work. This is a big problem.

For services like Twitter, which benefit greatly from these URL shortening services due to their short message limit, they stand to have millions and millions of dead links. Right now, by default, Twitter uses TinyURL to automatically shorten URLs to help them fit into the 140 character limit for SMS messages. Jason Kottke suggested that Twitter create its own URL shortening service so that they can guarantee it be around forever and to replace all of the short URLs it had created in the past. I’m going to go one step further and suggest that they buy Bit.ly.

While Twitter has chosen to use TinyURL I believe this was because Bit.ly wasn’t around when they added the TinyURL functionality. Bit.ly is more on par with Twitter’s real-time efforts. Twitter would immediately get their own URL shortening service that has, on top of it, a very good statistics package to show how those links are being used, where they are clicked on from, how many people clicked them, and a service that has a good API.

The above sentence isn’t even close to what could have been written if I had just followed the directions.

Source: Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace.

As we’re finishing up the second-to-last season of LOST, I’m guessing that the accuracy of theories may rise. We’ll see. But I suggest that if you do not want anything spoiled, do not read this theory either.

The Time Loop Theory suggests that there are several iterations of time at work on The Island. That Richard and Ben have both lived more than full lifetimes on the island in an effort to change an ultimate future demise of the island. That The Orchid, combined with The Swan, was able to keep the island in a continuous 108 minute loop. And much, much more…

You’d really have to read the entire thing to get the scope. And a lot of sounds pretty darned convincing – but then again – so did so many other theories that ended up not panning out. I’d be ok with this theory being the official story of LOST. But being that the theory is open ended – I’d like to see how it all ends anyway.

Source: The Time Loop Theory.
Via: Jason Kottke.

Jason Kottke recently linked to a photo essay on the making of these authentic Japanese blades. After looking through the photo essay, while my jaw progressively lowered itself to the carpet, I strolled over to the Web site for CHROMA Cutlery’s Haiku Knives.

Eliza, you have my permission to buy me an entire set of these knives.

Photo essay: Japanese Bladesmiths.
The knives: Haiku Knives.
Via: Jason Kottke.

In no particular order I present – the best of the Web 2008.

The Best Blog: Daring Fireball

John Gruber’s blog will, it seems, always win this award from me. I toyed with the idea of awarding Daring Fireball with Best Journalism but I don’t want to take anything away from the writers that are writing about much more important topics than the goings-on of the Apple community and marketplace.

The Best New Blog: The Big Picture

Boston.com’s The Big Picture is easily the best new blog of 2008. Jason Kottke agrees with me, or I agree with him maybe. The photos are always stunning and the topics always seem perfectly aligned with my particular interests at the time of publishing. Even though I’ve read Andy Baio’s interview with the author, Alan Taylor, I still don’t know how this blog is as consistently awesome as it is.

The Best Blog Redesign: Jason Santa Maria

Jason’s latest redesign for his personal site is inspiring. Each of his posts, as he so choses, are designed specifically to empower the content he is posting. Example. Example. Example. His site has made me rethink my random headers on this site and I’ve now begun development of a much more intelligent way to allow my site to choose the headers. And that is just a start. Jason’s blog is also one of the only blogs that I purposefully leave the Google Reader interface to read the article as he intends, on his site. Brilliant.

The Best Blogging Platform: WordPress

My love for WordPress isn’t a secret. But Automattic’s effort to continue the momentum of this open source project has certainly been a big win for it. Regular, scheduled, feature and bug fix rich updates to an already industry-standard-setting piece of software is refreshing in every way possible. Kudos to every single developer that works on WordPress.

The Best Feed Reader: Google Reader

I’ve wrote about Google Reader a few times. I know that this is a touchy subject for some – because we all have very different ways of keeping up-to-date with our subscriptions – but I feel that Google deserves the recognition of building what has quickly become the most popular feed reader on any platform. NetNewswire held that title for a very long time, and deservedly so, but I believe the throne was usurped this year.

Side note: Boy do I miss Ranchero in its original form.

The Best Company: Apple, Inc.

I’m sorry but I have to give this award to Apple for their apparent take-over of the entire mobile, computing, and music industries. Regardless of relative size and market-share as of this moment, I believe that we’ve all seen what it looks like to rip these things out from other holders. In a few years Apple will be on top of every single list not just the “this year’s top” lists. I’m not sure how this will effect Apple overall but right now I’m happy that it is happening. Check back in 5 years to see if Apple makes my Worst Of 2013 list when I hate Apple for being like Microsoft, or something.

The Best Mobile Twitter Client: Hahlo

For me this is a no brainer. Being an iPhone-owner means that I have many, many applications at my disposal for posting and keeping up-to-date on Twitter. Whether we’re talking about iPhone applications or web applications built for the iPhone – Hahlo is far and away the best mobile Twitter client.

The Best Twitter Account: @MarsPhoenix

Duh. The Mars Phoenix Twitter account is the only somewhat-non-human account on Twitter that I follow that I’m not directly related with in some way. I’m sure there are other great Twitter accounts that are out of my own echo-chamber but this just strikes me as the obvious choice because of the way it has fundamentally changed the way that NASA delivers its news about their programs.

The Best iPhone application: Handshake & Ocarina

Two bests? Yes. These two are tied for very different reasons. Handshake is probably the iPhone application that I feel should have been part of the iPhone all-along more than any other application that I have installed. Being able to share contacts with other iPhone users through the air is awesome. Ocarina just simply makes me happy in a way that no other iPhone application has done. I can’t play a lick of music with the thing. But the ability to listen to other people who are equally horrible Ocarina players makes this application get a dedicated spot on my iPhone’s home screen.

How’s that for subjective!

The Best Application: Coda

I don’t do near the same amount of programming as I once did. However, the one application that completely changed the way that I do programming has got to be Coda. It’s single-window environment has made working much more enjoyable, less frustrating, and much more focused than ever before. The latest update which allows other developers to extend its text-editing functionality will, I think, improve the built-in text editor at a much quicker pace. I’m really happy about that.

The Best Browser: Fluid

I don’t know what else to call Fluid and it needs to be on my list somewhere.  My normal browser of choice (that is, the browser that I use to ‘surf’ the Web) is Safari. But as far as creating a single site browser for my favorite applications; Hahlo, Brighkite, Gmail, Google Docs, and Basecamp – Fluid is the best choice.

The Best Preference Pane: Connect 360

This selection could also be categorized as The Best Way To Save Money By Not Buying An AppleTV. If you have an Xbox 360 and a Macintosh – I suggest purchasing a copy of Connect 360. You can use your Xbox 360 to view photos and videos and listen to music on the television in your living room. Painless. Perfect.

The Best Email Client: GMail

I switched to GMail this year, using the aforementioned Fluid, and haven’t looked back. My main reason for switching was because Mail.app was slowing down a lot. On my first-generation black Macbook, using Mail.app with IMAP for 3 email accounts, Mail.app was incredibly sluggish.  I’m fairly certain I could have done something to improve the performance of Mail.app – and I do appreciate its synergy with the Mac OS – but GMail has won me over with its speed and operator searches. To be specific, I use Gmail for domains and so does Viddler.

The Best Messaging Client: iChat

I do not know why people on the Macintosh use anything else besides iChat. Not mentioning any names, most of the other clients do far too much or suck up too much memory or have features that just do not work. iChat works, is simple, has small foot print, and has generally every feature I could ever want in a messaging client.

The Best Keyboard: Apple’s wired keyboard.

How did a keyboard make this list of obviously Internet-related things? If you don’t ask, I don’t have to come up with an answer. My Macbook’s keyboard is crazy-fantastic. Since I connect to an external monitor while working in my office, I needed a keyboard that would offer the same level of crazy-fantasticness. Apple’s new wired keyboard does that. It has not only reduced the noise of typing – which I appreciate – but it has done it in a way that has not taken away from the tactile response that I have come to love.

 

In an effort to get this list out the door – this is not an exhaustive list. I didn’t keep a list throughout the year so this is an off-the-top-of-my-head list.  I fully plan to add a few more ‘categories’ to this list, especially if you care to suggest any in the comments, and will hopefully have a much more revised list for 2009.  I will do one of these every year.

Thanks to everyone who made the list this year because, in some way, you made my technology experience much more enjoyable. You probably already have my money – but now you have my public applause too.

Suggestions, comments? Add them below!

Eliza and I do this too so it is nice to see that we’re not alone. One example would be the word ‘mitta’ for miss. Like; “mitta you”.

Do you say any words wrong on purpose?

Source: Fun little article by Grant Barrett about people saying words… (kottke.org).

“While my assailant’s actions were frightening, they resulted in part from what he interpreted as provocation: that is, my taking pictures after he had explicitly warned me not to. He did not take my wallet, cash or briefcase; something he could easily have done while I was on the ground. Nor do I recall him using much more force than was needed to wrest the camera from me. He didn’t kick me gratuitously when I was down. He did what he threatened to do, but no more.

In the greater scheme of things, my quarrel isn’t with him, anyway. It’s with the suits who made the decision in the first place to undertake an illegal marketing campaign.”

This sort of “looking at the situation from 100-feet” type of thinking from someone who was assaulted and had their camera broken is somewhat inspiring to me. It seems lately our society is really quick to get law, a judge, or “their friends” involved.

(Source: Illegal Signs and a Reporters Broken Camera – City Room – Metro – New York Times Blog)
[Via: Jason Kottke]

My precious!

Ok. So what do I think of the iPhone? As you might have already guessed, I love it. For the entire weekend I rarely got onto my Macbook to do anything except sync my latest settings of my iPhone to the computer. The iPhone is a great mini-computer for getting most of your core Internet activities done like checking/responding to email, surfing the web for information, or other simple daily tasks like this.

I won’t get into the speed of the EDGE network or how the virtual keyboard is. To me these are non-issues thus far and I don’t have much to compare these two things to since I have never had a cell phone that used the Internet, nor a full sized hard keyboard. I can type pretty fast on the keyboard and the Internet is nearly as fast as being home on Wifi. So again, both are non-issues.

Again, it is the little things

One of my fellow line-waiters John Gruber did a fantastic job giving his general overview of each feature of the iPhone the other day. My impressions are on par with John’s except that I’ve found myself typing just fine. Be sure to read his thoughts if you’d like to catch some of the nice things about each “feature” of the iPhone.

However, I’d like to extend his list a little bit to remark on some of the little things I’ve noticed while using the iPhone that I think make the experience all the more enjoyable.

The weight of the iPhone came as a surprise to some. Yes, it feels heavier than it looks. To me this make the iPhone feel tough and rugged when compared to the way it looks. I think the fact that we’re seeing people surprised at how tough the iPhone actually is, is because it doesn’t look very rugged. It looks elegant, which doesn’t usually mean tough. However the weight of the iPhone makes it feel very rugged to me.

The speed of the interface is something that I was very skeptical about. The commercials led me to believe that the interface was just as fast, if not faster, than switching windows on my computer. In my relatively little experience with mobile phones – the interfaces on these things have never been described by me as “snappy” or “fast”. However the iPhone’s interface, in general, is incredibly fast. When speaking with John Gruber in line, he remarked how the iPhone’s “one app at a time” focus really lent itself to being able to be very fast. The iPhone doesn’t need to show windows inside of windows or multiple layers or even windows on top of windows. The application that you are currently looking at is obviously getting the priority in the Operating System which makes the iPhone blaze.

The sleep, volume, silent, and home buttons are the perfect combination of buttons that were decided to be “hard buttons”. Although one can easily adjust the volume in most applications within the iPhone’s interface, you can also use the hard volume control on the side of the iPhone. The same goes for the silent and sleep buttons – I never have to “turn on” the iPhone to use these options. And the home button is definitely far better than keeping the “doc” visible and having a “desktop” button or something. I’m really glad the iPhone has a home button.

Within each application on the iPhone there are small, hidden gems that you will only find through experimentation or someone telling you that they are there. Like the ability to turn on the caps lock key, or tapping the top bar to auto-scroll to the top of the page in Safari (both tips came from John Gruber’s site), etc. None of these small interface features are handed over, but once you find them you love them.

Of course, I want more

Keeping in mine that, technically, this is iPhone 1.0 which includes all the hardware and software that came in those beautiful black bags on Friday, I have a few things that I’d like to see improved. I’m sure that, internally, this is build 10,000+ of the iPhone’s OS and its applications, but from my perspective it is still 1.0. Being such, I fully expected to have the wish list that follows.

• Better integration with Gmail. Right now Gmail marks things as “being downloaded” when I look at them either via Mail.app on my Macbook or on my iPhone. This causes some frustration since I’d like all of my email to be “everywhere”. To fix this, I think either Google or Apple will have to update it so that it marks it as being read on the iPhone or not. Either way, the email “works” – but it could work a little bit better. (Side note: On the first day of release, the Gmail integration was wrought with problems ranging from getting duplicate messages to simply not working with Google App’s hosted domain email. These issues have been fixed, presumably by Google, over the weekend. So ++ to them.)
• Though I haven’t used the “Notes” feature yet, I could see a huge amount of improvement being done here, which might make me want to use Notes on the iPhone. Simply saving the notes saved as RTF files that are synced to your computer into ~/Documents/iPhone Notes/ would suffice for me. Why create notes that you can’t really use? A work around is taking a notes contents and creating an email out of it, which can be done fairly easily.
• iCal integration seems to work “ok” but I have the same complaints as others. If I have separate calendars within iCal they should also be separate within iPhone’s calendar application. And, when syncing with my Macbook, I shouldn’t have to choose only one calendar that the iPhone can write to. I am not sure why there is this limitation. Something else I noticed is that if I setup an iCal alert on the iPhone it works perfectly but it doesn’t work within iCal. It shows up in the application but iCal never shows me the the alert when I asked it to. Not sure why, perhaps this is a bug.
• The camera feature should allow a photo to be taken by tapping anywhere on the screen. I think some people would hate this because it would cause a lot of accidental photos to be taken, but taking photos of yourself and someone else with the iPhone is very hard with only a small button to push. Perhaps this could be a setting? Can has Photobooth for the camera? I don’t care about the crazy bulging eyes and stretching chins stuff, but it’d be nice to have the ability to take black and white photos or something simple. Obviously this is a minor, minor update that I’d enjoy seeing to the Camera feature.
• Small browser cache? From what I’ve been able to tell Safari on the iPhone only caches the current page you are looking at. Reloading a page is fairly quick but the second you navigate away from a URL the cached version is lost. I have an 8Gb iPhone, I wouldn’t mind dedicating even a few hundred megabytes to Safari’s caching if it would mean that hitting the back button wouldn’t reload the page.
• Normal headphone jacks “don’t work” with the iPhone because the iPhone’s input jack is sunken so low into the casing of the iPhone. Jason Kottke resolved this by actually cutting his headphones a little bit to allow the jack to sink in deeper. There are several add-ons being offered to make this easier, but I am unsure why this was done in the first place?
• The iPod allows you to update your set of icons on the button of its menu. I think this should be an option in all applications on the iPhone including the home screen. There are a few web applications that are being released for the iPhone that I’d love to create a shortcut to from my home screen. The first button I’d get rid of from the home screen? YouTube followed by Stocks. I simply won’t use those things on my iPhone too often.
• Google Maps on the iPhone is amazing! But I feel this application will probably receive the greatest number of updates over time. It is perhaps one of the most “complex” applications on the iPhone and using it is a delight most of the time. However, there are a few usability problems when you switch from searching for a location to getting directions to that same location. (I’ve found that it is easier to save locations in your Google Maps bookmarks.) I’m sure these little things will be improved soon and that integration with the rest of the phone’s applications will happen in the future. One of the first things that comes to mind is to tell the camera application where you are using the Maps feature, which would in turn write the Latitude and Longitude to the photos.

I’m going to cut this list short because, as I said, this is a 1.0 release and one that I’m overwhelmingly happy with. I’ve found the iPhone becoming an extension of my laptop in ways I hadn’t considered before. I knew that I’d find the iPhone useful, I didn’t expect to want to use it more than my laptop.

What are your thoughts on the iPhone? Any wishes that I didn’t cover?