Archive for: July 2007

I cut my RSS feeds way down.  Now, I find myself reading more posts and thinking about what I am reading, as opposed to seeing how fast I can scan hundreds of posts.

For now, I am finding it is better to read several posts than to scan many posts.

I cleaned up my RSS Feed subscriptions tonight. I do not like the River of News approach. I like my feeds in groups by general topic. I made sure each feed was assigned to the appropriate group. It looks good so far. I took the time to delete many of the subscriptions that are no longer interesting.

I love the new feature on Google Local Search.  When you get directions from one place to another it shows as the blue line on the map.

The new feature allows you to drag and drop that blue line to change the directions to take a back road, avoid traffic, or to go by the coffee shop.  It is very cool.

Gadgets and Widgets are light-weight single-purpose applications that can sit on the user’s computer desktop, or are hosted on a web page.   The two words describe the same thing.  That seems redundant.

We should have one word – maybe Gidgets or Wadgets.

Shopping Carts vs. Stores is a blog entry written by James S. Huggins.  James has posted this in Yahoo groups and perhaps other places.  It is an astute description of the differences between Shopping Carts and Stores.  It is helpful to think about when picking software in these categories.

I use this information when I talk to clients, so I am happy to give James some credit.

I add two things.  I separate the checkout from the shopping cart.  So in the analogy, I talk to clients about the grocery store and what the store does, the shopping cart and what the shopping cart does, and the checkout and what it does.

And just to make it more interesting, I also have girl scouts sitting outside at a table selling cookies to give a contrasting transaction.  The transaction at the girl scout table blends everything into one transaction.