PHSChemGuy's Protopage

iGoogle is fully and officially dead, and I'm a little late to the party.

Sure, Google posted something sixteen months ago saying that iGoogle would be heading into the sunset. So I, of course, waited until the day after iGoogle went belly up to really do anything about the impending doom. On Thursday, I saw the note saying 'iGoogle will not be available after November 1' and assumed I had until the end of the day on November 1 to make my desperate, eleventh-hour decision to choose a replacement. Instead, when I woke up on Friday, November 1, my homepage of iGoogle was no longer available, and I was forced to switch.

After skimming through a few other the recommended options, I've gone with Protopage as my replacement.

 
Reasons I picked protopage...

• Visual similarity to iGoogle - Each widget shows the seven (default number) newest items from any RSS feed in an individual 'window' with a simple title bar with clickable links for each story/entry. A single page can be set up to include individual tabs of different rss feeds.
• Ease of use - Adding a widget is easy as can be: click Add Widget up top and type in the name of the page. Occasionally Protopage can't find the appropriate rss feed, but the correct link is usually just a click or two away on the blog's site.
• Customizability - Individual RSS feed windows can be colored differently. The background of the various pages can be changed to any color, a couple dozen built-in backgrounds, or any image on the web. (I went with this image of bokeh for now.) The widgets can also be resized to any width (as with the calendar that I've spread to three columns wide.) Individual widgets and tabs can also be renamed as you choosen.
• Link management - I'm a right-click-open-in-new-tab guy, but that caused an initial problem because links opened that way don't appear in Protopage to have been visited, leaving them looking identical to any un-visited links. Protopage does, however, grey out (with strikethru, also) any pages clicked to via Protopage. I don't know yet whether links visited from outside Protopage would also grey out. Gotta check on that.
• Google integration - Protopage has a number of widgets built in including Gmail and Google Calendar, both of which are kinda important to my organizing on the web.
• Sharing - It's possible to make your protopage public and share it with anyone on the web for view-only privileges or editing privileges. I haven't chosen to take advantage of that yet, but I may in the future.

Drawbacks I've seen so far...

• I can't customize each page's background uniquely. It seems that changing one changes them all.
• The Google calendar widget doesn't seem willing to sync multiple calendars. I have The Girl and Calen's calendars visible on my Google calendar when I go directly there, but the widget will only show my calendar entries. They're clearly the most important ones, but I'd like to be able to see the others, too.
• Visiting an blog's page (for example, neatorama.com) doesn't grey out the various links that I've seen because I didn't visit each individual story's link. That was an issue with iGoogle, too, though.
• Yeah, that's about it.

If you were an iGoogle user, what've you chosen as your replacement, and why is it better (or worse) than Protopage.

Googling the Grand Canyon

Google just Street-Viewed (is that a word?) the Grand Canyon, and you can take their tour through Google Maps.

That's awesome.

On their blog, they also shared video about how they did this, with a team of hikers carrying down forty-pound, backpack-mounted cameras. (More photos of the hikers here) They went down Bright Angel Trail and South Kaibab Trail, out to Plateau Point, and eventually all the way to Phantom Ranch.

They have been to the North Rim but only on the roads, no hiking down from there. Maybe that's for next summer.

iGoogle...sadness

iGoogle (and Google Reader - which I don't use) is going away at the beginning of November this year, about which I am terrifically sad because I've come to love the heck out of it.

I start my web browsing on iGoogle every stinking time that I open up Fireworks (at work) or Chrome (at home).

I check most every site I visit regularly - every personal blog, every webcomic, every personal blog, every news site - via the RSS feeds that I have stored on my iGoogle page. I don't want to manually check every blog and comic on a daily basis, so I'm going to have to find something - some RSS or similar reader - to replace iGoogle.

I'm not alone in my love of and reliance on iGoogle by any stretch, either. There's an entire website of people who want to save iGoogle. I doubt that's going to do much good as Google has made the impending retirement announcement pretty definite and official. Luckily I'm not the only person who needs an iGoogle replacement. Lots of people have been exploring alternatives for me (and probably for themselves, I guess).


iGoogle will be missed, but then again, a lot of Google products have their graves well marked.



Anybody out there have a particular non-iGoogle RSS reader that they like?

Typographical Images

Thanks to Neatorama and Google Type, I have a few new images to post today. The site takes your phrase and searches the web for images of each letter, putting them together at random.

Here's what I got...

Damn you, CoachSullivan

Thanks (I guess) to Coach Sullivan for pointing out that today's Google Doodle is a playable pop-a-shot game.

I've only played a few times, and I'm up to 39 points so far...

Suck it, Sullivan...

Blogger is back

This was the longest outage that I can remember from Blogger.

They've been good enough to me that I'm not going to complain, but it was especially frustrating as I tried to update the other blog.

Luckily I had all the posts on this blog lined up. Hopefully that post of Cake videos will show up again. For now, it's disappeared from the public side but still exists behind the scenes. I just can't get it public for the moment.

Word verification oddity

So, as I was commenting back to Katydid and Crimson Mirage, I had to hit the word verification because I hadn't logged in to the Google account just yet.

This time, however, the word verification was a word: verse.

Apparently you can go home now, google has run out of non-words.

Or, maybe it's time to revive this old thing.

Who are you?

I know.  I'm a shill for Google in just about any way possible.


And Picasa is a Google product that I use to manage all my photos at work and at home.

And yet, when I started playing around with the People feature and identifying a few faces, I wasn't particularly impressed.  Yeah, I could go through my one-hundred-eighty-thousand faces one at a time.  It would just take me forever.

Then I clicked a little lower to check out the individual on the list of names I'd been developing.  By then, Picasa had begun using my identification to make reasonable guesses as to the other faces that I'd not yet defined.

And it was right like 90% of the time - which is pretty darn impressive.

Blogger Buzz Brings It

In case you hadn't noticed, new theme on the blog.

Nice new Template Designer over on blogger, so I spent Friday night playing around.

This one may or may not stay; it may or may not have some color adjustment.

Update: Street View Trike vote

Check the released list and vote for your choices of where the Street View Trike should go wandering next.

Sadly, the only two I felt really strongly about (Central Park & the National Mall) were in the same category.

Street View improves...'cause it has to...

For a fair while now, Google maps has been the be all and end all of mapping on the web. Originally it was Mapquest, but Google long ago passed their functionality.

In fact, Google has been the default search map search engine for a long enough time that they might have been stagnating a bit.

That is, until Bing Maps came along.

A quick comparison...looking at Princeton High School using both services...

...from Google Maps...

...from Bing Maps...

All in all, not too different.  The Bing version is a bit newer (based on the new turf in their version verses the stadium during the turf instillation in the Google version), and the colors are a bit richer, but that last could be simply because the picture was taken during a different season.

But clicking on the Birds Eye view provides something that Google can't come anywhere near matching...

...Bing's birds eye view...

Now that's just cool.  I've checked through a bunch of the Cincinnati area - my current house, my old house, the apartment that The Girl and I first lived in - as well as some of the other places where I've lived - using the birds eye view, and it's consistently awesome...very, very awesome (at least in the areas where it's available - which means not yet Crawfordsville).

I don't know if it was this birds eye feature that has forced Google Maps to innovate, but they've clearly been fixing their googly eyes on improving their services.

...Google's Street View of PHS...

One of their recent bits of improvement is the Google Trike, through which they are adding to their Street View feature by way of taking their street view to places without streets.  They're using the Google Trike to add in hiking trails, national parks, international sights - and they've opened the idea up to suggestions from the world.



Apparently, a little competition has been good for the Google gods.

Ah, back to school time

Mapping the fallen

Google Earth is phenomenal and is much, much more than its online cousin, Google Maps.

The biggest advantage to Google Earth is that it allows people to create their own layers, gathering data and tying it to physical locations, allowing people to view information in it's geographical context. You can create tours for people to take, record images of your favorite places, or you can Map The Fallen.

Sean of the Google Outreach Team (?) has spent the past four years creating a comprehensive, self-updating layer for Google Maps showing every coalition casualty in Iraq and Afghanistan since the US began fighting there in 2001.

For each casualty, an icon appears, allowing you to click and open up the full information on the fallen soldier - the date and location of their passing, their hometown, and their picture. With another click then, you can head to that soldier's hometown to see others who grew up with the young man or woman and who also lost their lives.

When more than one soldier died in a location, their icons are displayed in a growing arc. It's frightening to see the huge spiral of icons surrounding places like Baghdad.

I'll admit, though, that I headed directly for Barwanah, Iraq to find Chris.

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Separately, I'd like to point out that this is an amazing piece of code writing and a phenomenal example of how data can be presented in revolutionary and affecting ways. The web has, yet again, blown my mind.

Newer news than the new news

Sorry, folks...busy day...no glimpses my way, though I did get the pictures taken...

Instead, enjoy the very cool new use of Google.

And you can check the Google service itself.

So very, very cool...

Because I know you've been wondering

Ok, it took a while to get everything figured out, but thanks to Google answers, I found how to export my entire iTunes library (minus "Handelbars" by the Flobots, 'cause I just bought it a few minutes ago) into an excel file which I then uploaded to Google Docs for everybody to see.

I tell ya, the cloud is the computer.

So, take a look at my music and tell me where my inexcusable gaps are.

Google, again...

Looks like Google's April Fools tradition is continuing...today, Gmail CustomTime...

As someone who posted this at 6:30 in the morning but has it stamped as though I did it at midnight tonight, I'm in favor of CustomTime.

Play well

If it weren't for Google, I wouldn't've had any idea that today is the 50th Anniversary of the Lego brick, but thanks to today's doodle, I am informed and so shall be you...

...plus this year's the 30th anniversary of the minifig.

How much cooler can that be?



I do digs me some Legos...in case you hadn't noticed...

Google analytics

Since November 6th, when I signed up for Google Analytics for this here blog, I've gotten 454 visits - with a single-day high this Sunday of 106 visits.

Those 454 visits have come from 313 unique visitors (though I know I count for a couple of those as I've checked in from home and school.)
The average visit has takenone minute, twenty-eight seconds.

Of those visits, 339 came from folks using US English, and 55 from general English. Twelve visits from Korea (hmmmmm.....) Weirdly, 6 using a language that Google lists as nl and appears to be Dutch standard. Then there's five more from German standard. Things get less frequent from there until we're down to solo visits in Turkish, Swedish, Japanese, Hungarian, Spanish, and something listed as gl.

Fifteen visits have come from Canada, twenty-nine from the UK, one each from Malaysia, Iran, the Phillipines, Ireland, Brunei, Hungary, Latvia, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lebanon, Turkey, the UAE, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and Austria. Seriously...

203 visits used Firefox. 189 on IE. 44 Safari. 16 Opera. 1 AvantGo (?). 1 Mozilla.

Of people who came via search engines, 114 came using Google, 3 using Yahoo, 2 AOL, 2 search (?), and 1 MSN. Rock, folks.

The most common search term that lead people to me was Joey Eger with twenty-one visits to the blog. One search for Brazilian men in speedos - though I have no idea why - blog lin brehmer, how many watts should my system be? dj, and loads of other weird search terms have brought people here. I really don't understand some of the choices.

I could throw out hundreds more cool facts that I now know about my blog because of Google Analytics. I wonder whether this is gonna turn out to be more useful than Google Webmaster Tools. Both seem pretty frickin' cool, but Analytics is much more pictorially presented. Better presentation of info = better, more useful info in the long run.

Get out and do something

I'm certainly not the fittest guy in the world, having not run on a regular basis since I was playing tennis in high school, but I know a number of running folks - including, sometimes, The Girl, herself. For those folks - and via a friend at work - I offer you MapMyRide.com, a service that lets ya map out any run / bike / walk in your area of the world via a Google Maps interface. It'll calculate elevation changes, total distances, and approximate times, and you can mark things along the route (water, bathroom, workouts, etc) and then share your maps with other folks - or search for maps for your area already made.

Kinda cool what people will do when presented with a single useful tool and a need.

Google strikes...nevermind, I've said it before...I'll say it again...

New neatness from Blogger/Google...

It's called Blogger Play, and it's a rolling slide show of photos/images being uploaded to blogs all the time. According to their documentation, it's in real-time and should have most of the inappropriate images removed.

You can speed 'em up, slow 'em down, and click 'em to see the blog that they came from.

Watching it has this weirdly hypnotic quality to it. You're getting a glimpse into the world of folks who have no clue you're there. It's not just reading about them; it's more like watching them.

Hard to explain but very cool to see.

Enjoy...