As you’ve probably noticed this site has been down for most of the day. Dreamhost had a major meltdown when they moved a server cluster, which affected all of my sites. I tried two alternative hosts and I’m now moving this site to Hostgator.com. Everything else will remain at Dreamhost for now.
Web
Steve Ballmer gives Jerry Yang a Bear Hug
Steve Ballmer lays it on thick in a letter sent to Jerry Yang of Yahoo before going public with the offer:
âTogether we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. We hope that you and your board share our enthusiasm.â?
This was no love letter. Mr. Ballmer was following a storied tradition on Wall Street: the bear hug letter. Before mounting a hostile bid and going in for the kill, suitors send a bear hug â named for a popular wrestling maneuver â to their targets.
One part Emily Post and two parts Machiavelli, these oh-so-cordial notes are sent by unwanted suitors in an attempt to broker a peaceful deal. But they always carry an implicit threat: Rebuff this advance and youâre in for a fight.
Of course, less than 24 hours after sending the letter to Yahoo, Microsoft made it public, just in case there was any confusion that it was a private correspondence among old friends. (At least Mr. Ballmer was kind enough to give Mr. Yang a courtesy call before going public with his $44.6 billion bid.)
Some bear hug letters are kept from public view and are sent in confidence, in hopes of bringing a company to the negotiating table. Those are known as teddy bear hugs. But others, like Mr. Ballmerâs, are written for public consumption. Those are known â less politely â as grizzly bear hugs.
Please get the nauseating image of the big sweaty ape of a man giving Jerry Yang an actual bear hug out of my head!
Nothing lasts forever
I’m sure everyone has heard about Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo.
Yahoo owns two sites I use regularly, Flickr and del.icio.us. It isn’t clear how they’d be affected if Microsoft does buy Yahoo.
When we trust our data to a site like Flickr, we trust that it will always be there. I’m not predicting that they’ll disappear, but if they do, our data will also be gone.
As an alternative to Flickr, I may switch to either Zooomr or Picassa. I’ve had Picassa for a while, but I never really used it until I got my Eye-Fi card and set it up as the default upload site.
For del.icio.us, the alternative seems to be be ma.gnolia, which I signed up for a long time ago but pretty much forgot about.
Instapaper
Instapaper is a new site that does one simple thing: it lets you save a URL to read later.
I still love del.icio.us for permanent bookmarks, but Instapaper is much simpler. No tags or description — simply use the Read Later bookmarklet to save the page. You can then go back to your Instapaper page to see the list of URLs you saved.
It’s so simple you don’t even create an account. Just enter your email address or make up a user name. It doesn’t even require a password, although you can set one if you prefer.
It can even be used for simple collaboration. If a few people use the same name, they can send pages to each other.
A new look for MacMegasite
I switched to a new theme & logo at MacMegasite, and I also de-cluttered the sidebars. I’m still looking at more themes and working on the logo, so I may still change it if I find something I like better.
The last few days I’ve looked at a lot of WordPress & Drupal themes. Almost none of them are truly ‘ready to go’. I always find little bugs such as misaligned list items or conflicts with various modules. I also found that many of the WordPress themes that claim to be widget-ready really aren’t.
Desktop vs. web-based RSS readers
Nick Bradbury compares the advantages of using a desktop RSS reader (such as NetNewsWire) vs. a web-based reader.
I have been using NetNewsWire for several years, but I recently tried using Google Reader for a few weeks, so I could use the sharing features. I found that I prefer using NetNewsWire and I was glad to come back to it. NewsGator online has improved a lot and now looks pretty good on an iPhone, but it’s still not as nice as Google Reader.
Sudden jump in subscribers
I noticed today that MacMegasite now has 34526 subscribers to the newsfeed, a sudden jump from the usual 18000-19000.
FeedBurner’s statistics page confirms the sudden jump.
This happened just after NewsGator announced that NetNewsWire is now free, and MacMegasite happens to be one of the default feeds. Thanks Brent! I owe you a beer.
Sharing between NetNewsWire and Google Reader
I’ve used NetNewsWire for a long time, but I recently started using Google Reader instead for the sharing & suggestion features. Unfortunately the two don’t sync, so switching between them is a bother.
In light of today’s announcement, and because I always found NetNewsWire faster & more convenient than reading news online, I switched back to NNW. I did one last read in Google Reader, and then marked everything read in NNW.
I still want to be able to share items in Google Reader, though, so I came up with a partial work-around.
When I add an item to my clippings in NetNewsWire, it’s shared publicly at NewsGator Online and made avaialble as an RSS feed. I subscribe to that feed in Google Reader and put it in its own folder which I made public. The results can be seen here.
Although Google Reader doesn’t provide a combined feed for all of my friend’s feeds, I can still subscribe to them individually.
New Macworld Category
I’ve added a Macworld tag to MacMegasite, which will list all articles tagged with that category. I will use it to post all Macworld related items.
Mysterious streaming problem fixed
For a long time I was unable to view ustream.tv on my MacBook Pro, even though I have the latest version of Flash player and other sites work OK.
I noticed that I had local storage disabled in the Flash Player settings. Enabling it fixed the problem.
