Updates…

Last week I upgraded my wp installation. Today I’ve been informed that my gallery plugin no longer works. (Thanks Michelle!) So if you wanted pictures, you’re going to have to wait for me to figure it out.

In other computer news, last week I installed suse9.3, which, if I were totally geeky, I probably would have written as SuSE. But the mix of caps and not caps makes me think of kids in the 6th grade, so I’m refusing to write it that way.

Since the reinstall, the following things have happened:

• My printer stopped working.
• I have yet to hear a sound other than a ‘beep’ come out of my fancy speakers. (Actually this beep sound comes from the computer itself and not sound comes from the speakers.)
• I’ve decided that I *still* don’t really like evolution.
• I think I’d like an iBook. Or an iMac. Or even maybe a Mac mini. And have you seen mighty mouse? It’s all a great marketing scheme that is doing wonders to sway me.

Of course aside from the expensive mac requests, all of these things can be remedied with some time from my husband who can make my computer do magical things. But it’s not like he has all the time in the world. I’m also thinking maybe I’ll just flip back to FCwhatever number it was.

I am sometimes very indecisive.

In other news I’ve recently found some internet-related things that I’m rather fond of. So fond that I think I should share them with you all.

Firefox has some nifty extensions that I’m finding useful. It’s always fun to go to the site and see what may be new and useful. For those of you who haven’t played around with the extensions, they’re at tools –> extensions –> get more extensions. If you aren’t already using firefox or mozilla, you should be.

While we’re on the topic of firefox extensions, let’s discuss first gmail notifier because it is the best thing in the world. Ever. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one affected by the gmail problem. I use pine for most of my mail. For the most part I hate webmail, but when I saw how efficient the threading system in gmail is, I decided that I can put it to use, if only for list traffic. The problem though, was that once I moved knitlist, my highest traffic list over to gmail, I forgot to check it. I’d check pine, which checks several accounts and filters it all nicely, and then I’d neglect the gmail account because it was such a pain to login to. Enter the gmail notifier. This thing sits down at the bottom of my firefox window, telling me how many emails are sitting in my inbox. It also updates every XnumberOfMinutes and if I hover over it, a pretty box pops up that tells me my exact gmail stats.

Also in the world of firefox extensions, we have sage. Sage is wonderful and my husband introduced me to it awhile back, before I got the hang of rss feeds. It’s this great tool that holds all my favorite online journal sites’ RSS/ATOM/XML feeds, kind of like a live bookmarking system. So these feeds – they are the content part of a website, that sites tend to spit out, so that you can use your feedreader of choice to suck in and regurgitate for you. Content only. See what I’m getting at? I have a thing that goes to, say, pamie.com, asks pamie if she’s written something new, grabs whatever she’s written, and then tells me that there’s new stuff to read. There’s a list that is several sites long that I keep track of, so I know when my favorites sites have updates, and no longer have to rely on notify lists, or click to each individual site to have a look-see. Then to make it even more exciting, sage displays all these entries nicely for me, allowing me to read the text from the sage layout, or even to click through to the actual site to see said entry in all its glory.

Glorified bookmarks, really. That’s all it is.

On the topic of glorified bookmarks, I’ve finally finally discovered del.icio.us, which allows me to keep an online list of bookmarks. This solves the problem I was having with multiple computers, and losing my cousin’s online journal, over and over again, forcing me to ask her, over and over again for the URL, making it look like I really don’t care, when I do care, and I’ve been reading that thing for years so why the heck can’t I make a proper bookmark of the site?!?

This del.icio.us is awesome. Not only does it let me keep track of what I like to read, but it also lets me categorize these bookmarks, AND it tells me how many other people have common bookmarks with me. Social bookmarking. Amazing.

What I want now is a combination of del.icio.us and sage, where you get the social snooping aspect, combined with the feedreading.

I think that’s it for this edition of “Useful Web Apps”. Tune in next time for “Camping Experience 2005″ or maybe “Jaime Makes Jam”. I don’t know what it will be. Living on the edge.

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