Are Seven

Nutshell: Create groups of your own to segregate out who sees different parts of your Facebook profile.

One of the most common reasons given for not joining Facebook is feeling skittish about who gets to see your all-too-personal pictures and comments. Facebook knows that this is an issue and is even moving (I’m told) towards becoming a place where people can make more professional contacts. And you don’t really want those people seeing your pictures of you obviously drunk on the couch, holding two drinks towards the camera. Not that there’s any pictures of me like that on Facebook.

Anyway, the purportedly-good people at Facebook are constantly tweaking their privacy settings, and just this week pushed out a useful feature to control who sees what. So if, say, your boss or parents were on your friends list, you can now put them in a list that will limit what they see, while continuing to let the rest of your friends see all the sordid details.

To do this: Read the rest of this entry »

I began the day thinking about passwords. And believe it or not, I’m keeping this story short.

Lately, I’ve been a fan of features like the “friend finder” in Facebook: applications within social websites that allow you to add friends by putting in the user and password of your email account and automatically adding in all the people it finds by their email. Once I got over the jitters about putting in my info, I got to love it. It lets you kick off any site use quickly and easily.  I figured that as long as I kept on sites I knew were reputable, I’d be okay.

Then I read this article this morning on Techcrunch about a useful external application that was actually a scam.  Purporting to archive your email messages from gmail on your harddrive, it actually sent your username and password to the guy who built it.  Pretty smart of this guy, but pretty scary for the rest of us.

It’s one of these issues that pops up every now and then, reminding us that the web isn’t nearly as safe as we think.  Sure, we never forget about viruses and spyware, but we still get complacent.  Then again, where does it stop?  The web is damn useful (you heard it here first), but it’s stories like the one today on Techcrunch, or ones where people get their usernames and passwords stolen from them and then end up getting domains stolen or having their email addresses used for scams that make me think that we’re still a long way off from total security on the web.

Coming soon: my write-up of online financial service Mint, which has you put in the username and password of every financial service you use.  Incredibly useful or idiotic move?  A little of each!

A lot of the people that I talk to have plenty of ideas for the web. We all sit around and talk about it, comparing ideas for brilliant web services and sites. For all of us, our ideas usually come from the experiences of our lives, naturally.

But for me, while I would love to implement one of my ideas and make a ton of money, I mostly just want someone else to make my features reality, for my convenience, which I think we can all agree is priority one. This happened today, with Google’s announcement that Analytics will now have a benchmarking feature, where other Analytics users can choose to share their numbers anonymously, creating a way for us all to compare our numbers to the numbers of similar sites. I’ve wanted this for a long time, and while it takes one of my Great Ideas off of the table, I’m glad to have it.

The second announcement from Google is small, but fun. In Google Reader, you can apparently now “easily check” the number of subscribers that a feed has by looking in the right-hand corner. The number of subscribers (which isn’t the total number; only the number subscribed through Google services) has been available for a while, but you have to search in the Add Subscription box, so this is a nice addition.

Homer: You can’t enjoy money when you’re dead, so why not have fun now?
Marge: Don’t you think you’ve had enough fun? Last year you spent five thousand dollars on donuts, two thousand on scalp massages, five hundred on body glitter.
Homer: Hey, I earned that money! While you lounge around here doing laundry and putting up drywall, I’m at work busting my hump.
Marge: Oh, please! From what I hear, you waltz in there at ten thirty, take a nap on the toilet, then sit around “Googling” your own name until lunch!
Homer: Who told you that?!
Marge: You shouted it while we were making love!

While I can’t recommend spending the whole afternoon Googling your own name, Homer’s on to something. I was reminded by this great article in Lifehacker that you really should meet your online persona, because you may not really know your online persona like you think you do.

At the very least, Google your own name in quotes (so that you get your name exactly) and just go through the first 4-5 pages of search results. Are you satisfied with what you’re finding? Does it represent you? This is what people see about you. “People” could be as benign as an old friend who wants to see what you’re up to, but it could be a future employer or coworker, or–worst of all–an ex.

Just a friendly reminder and/or tip that there are steps that you can and should take to control what’s ending up in the world, and to make sure that what’s out there is what you want out there.

Update: Welcome to folks coming from DC blogs! I try to write about tech stuff (”Tech for the Technophobic” as it’s unofficially titled) a few times a week, giving tips from what I learn. If you’re interested, there’s piping hot RSS feeds, one specifically for tech. There’s also music and everything else. Don’t be a stranger, stranger.

Nutshell: Using the rating function in iTunes may seem excessive and pointless, but it can be extremely helpful in organizing your music and optimizing your listening.

When I first got iTunes once upon a time, I turned up my nose at the ability to rate things one-to-five stars. I’m only putting my music in there, I figured. I like it all, so why rank them?

I first started rating songs when I figured that I could make mixes that were immediate decade best-ofs, and it grew from there. I started finding that rating songs in iTunes was a fantastic way to:

• Mark songs that I liked as I stumbled across them while shuffling. When I’m shuffling my “Never Played” playlist (play count=0) or my 2007 Radio playlist, there’s songs that I come across that I like, so I mark it with three stars, and then when I return to that album or artist later, wondering “what was that one song I liked?”, I’m immediately reminded.
• Easily keep my iPod healthy. When I ran out of room on my iPod, I knew that I wanted to keep music on there that was recently added or never played, but what else? Simple: everything rated three stars and higher.
• Have a constant go-to playlist. I always had my five-star and four-star playlists, but when I made one that had everything three-and-up, I found that ultimate decider. When I can’t decide what I’m in the mood for, I just put that on shuffle and let it go, and I’m treated not only to my favorites, but songs that I don’t know very well but had tagged with three songs.

I can understand why someone might object to rating. But I highly recommend it. In my rating system, much of my library remains unrated, but the stars start for these songs:

• Three stars for songs to mark songs that I like on first listen as well as songs that I want on my iPod, but don’t necessarily love. This last part is especially for those songs that bring out nostalgia in me, but aren’t exactly good. Lots of early ’80’s stuff there.
• Four stars for, “Oh, this is such a great song.”
• Five stars for, “I will not be able to do anything at all until this song has finished playing.”

Do you rate your library? What system do you use? If you don’t, is it a contentious objection or just nothing you’ve ever really considered?

Just a few unsorted broadcasts on the tech tip…

First off is that, now that the areseven.com feeds are working, those of you who are subscribed to both the Are Seven feed and the Tech feed are going to be getting tech posts twice: one in each feed. If you’re an Are Seven glutton and like it this way, you’re welcome to keep it that way. Just sayin’ you don’t need to, so you can unsub from the Tech feed and still get all of the tech posts with no problem. Those of you who want only the tech posts don’t need to do nothin’.

Second is a thought: while this site remains ad free, I thought I’d point something out to you. You know those “sponsored ads” on Google searches? They’re actually worth clicking on. They show up based on your search terms and Google does a great job at making sure that they’re going to the sites and services they say they are. It’s natural to brush them off as just advertising, but you can really find some good stuff that way. Let your eyes wander right on your search results and you just might find some good stuff.

Where you really should be clicking is on people’s blogs. Bloggers and site owners make money off of those ads, and the easiest way to financially tip the people who give the content that so entertains you is to take a look at these ads when you visit the site and click on the ones you see. As always, click sincerely. Don’t just click an ad that doesn’t interest you at all. But if something looks even mildly interesting, go ahead and click, knowing that it’s essentially a small donation to your favorite sites that costs you nothing.

Finally, there’s something you may not know about email newsletters you get.  You know how email programs will now ask you if you want to load images?  The reason that they do this is that the only way that the sender of an email can know that you opened an email is if the images are loaded.  Even “plain text” messages have a tiny image in them that sends open information.

The reason that the email programs have made it standard to not load images is obviously because of spammers.  But there are a lot of legitimate companies out there that gauge interest in the content of their newsletters by the open rate, and if you’re not loading the images, your opens aren’t being counted as a vote in favor of that newsletter.  So the next time you get a newsletter from an online magazine or nonprofit you support, load those images on up.

You’re done now.  Great job.  Go ahead and take the rest of the day off.

Nutshell: Get your own domain cheaply and easily with Google Apps, and use it for email, websites, or just good old fashioned hoarding.

I know. You’re giving me that “you’re crazy” look, thinking that only businesses and geeks own their own domains. In fact, owning your own domain has benefits that you may have overlooked. It’s never been cheaper to buy your own domain, and never been easier to turn it into your personal email and/or add it to your blog. In short: everyone should have one.  What do I have to do to put you in a domain today?

If you’re already convinced and have a domain in mind, go to Google Apps and plunk down ten dollars (ten dollars for a year! Bring your lunch instead of going out twice a year and you have the money!) and start now. If you still need convincing, here’s reasons why you should own your own domain:

• To hoard your brilliant idea for a domain name. Had a great domain name idea that isn’t taken? Go register it and then just let it sit until the day someone offers you $10,000 dollars for whippets4whippits.org.
• To provide email and services for you family. This was easier for me because I have an unusual last name, but I was able to register lastname.com and then make email addresses for everyone in my family that forward to their regular email address. Some of them use it, some don’t, but it’s a nice thing to be able to give to them, and it keeps me from having to remember their email addresses. Google Apps also offers you the ability to have shared documents
• To attach to your blog/site. Most free blogging softwares like Blogger and Wordpress.com and a number of services like Feedburner offer the ability to attach a domain or subdomain to your blog. You still do everything as you did before, except now it has the name on it. Plus, if you ever move, you can take your domain with you, and anyone linking to it will still get to your site.
• To give yourself a professional identity. Sure, we’re all used to seeing gmail and hotmail addresses on resumes. But it looks so much better if you can direct people to joe@yourchosendomain.com.
• To be immature. Because it’s fun to tell your friends to write to jerkface@yourchosendomain.com

If you still need convincing, the comments are open and standing by.

As you can see by the rash and sudden paint job of the blog, things are different. Squirreliness is still afoot, but slightly less manic. Hopefully.

I’ve now gone to Wordpress from Blogger, and I’m still pretty unsure about it. I’m now my own personal one-man IT department, which has the silver lining of teaching me some stuff I need to know about domain and server configuration, but the big dark cloud is that I now, when things go wrong, I have to figure what’s going on.  The Wordpress geeks are exactly the sorts of IT folks that drive me nuts.  Everything is sponsored by that sick, overused word of the tech word: “simply”.  You simply upgrade the software when a security patch comes out, and you simply backup your SQL database, and you simply figure out what’s going wrong when it goes wrong.  It all sounds so goddamn simple, but it adds up and eats into the time that I could spend actually writing.

So why did I do it?  Well, partly for the experience, but mostly because it seemed as though the Wordpress platform was more capable of doing exactly the sorts of things that I wanted to do with categories; that I could write in one place and let the software sort it out.  There’s still a number of challenges to be dealt with here, not in the least of which is the search engine gunk, but, to quote the Pixies, it’s educational.

Let me know if anything isn’t working right.  If you’re RSS reader or blog link is still pointing to a blogspot address, you’ll need to update it, because that’s not going to be updated anymore.  I’ll take you on a tour of the new digs once the boxes are unpacked. It’ll be a housewarming party.  BYO moonshine.

As my friend Alphonse would always say: onwards and upwards.

Alright, I give. I’m not going to write on the tech blog anymore. The reasons for that are numbered below, like terms of surrender:

1. My life was too fragmented. I was tired of thinking what to write where, instead of just plugging it all into the same place.
2. It wasn’t fun to write. I like the voice I write with here; the snarky, obnoxious, vaguely-insulting voice. I was basically writing documentation over there, and I do enough of that at work.
3. It wasn’t reaching its intended audience. I wanted to make it a place where I could convince people who were a’feared of computer to pet their computers and finally be friendly with them. For the kid’s sake.

Then there’s the bad news, much like the news of surrender is followed by the listing of the dead. The first bit of bad news is that whatever tech I want to write about is going to be written about here, and there’s going to be a lot of it. It’s a force-feeding. Sorry.

The second bit is that this site might go a little squirrely at some point if I switch blogging platforms. You won’t need to change your feeds or bookmarks unless they include the word “blogspot” in the URL, but there may be moments where the site won’t come up. It’ll be back up eventually, so don’t run out into the street in a blind panic, throwing bricks through the first windows you see. Again.

Just before I started this blog, I had a dilemma: I didn’t really want to start an entirely new blog, per se. I just wanted to split off the tech part of my current blog. Though I partly wanted to keep it separate from the rest of the stuff that I was writing about, I mostly wanted a place with it’s own subdomain so that I could practice promotion and search engine optimization. I didn’t want to heavily promote my “buncha crap” blog, because I don’t think there’s an audience for it beyond my friends, but this one…there’s an audience for.

But I’ve gotten a little frustrated already with having to keep two separate blogs through blogger. I want to write as inspiration strikes and let the system sort out what goes on what blog without having to think about it myself. On the other end, I want one basic template for any blog that I choose to write, but that will allow me to customize the sidebars for each one.

The simple answer is to go through Wordpress. There’s apparently a plugin that will allow me to assign subdomains (tech.areseven.com, blog.areseven.com) to categories. But this raises the main issue that I have with Wordpress (besides the cost, I mean): I don’t want to be a one-person IT staff. And plugins and open source software is great, but what happens when Wordpress upgrades and that plugin doesn’t work anymore and the person who made the plugin is too busy/bored to upgrade it? I’m S.O.L.

At this point, this is just a rambling. But it may mean a dramatic reworking of the pages, maybe meaning that the site will go down for a while.

If anyone knows about Wordpress and configuring subdomains so that they point to category pages without using a plugin, please let me know. Thanks.