Kreblog

So at some point you’ll overgrow the feeds you’ve subscribed to on iGoogle and you need something with a little more organization to keep from drowning in blog posts. Luckily Google also has a great feed reader called Google Reader.

Google Reader gives you a lot more flexibility on the way you read and organize your feed subscriptions. It also gives you some great ways to share what you read with others.

Adding Feeds To Google Reader With IE

Luckily you can subscribe to feeds in Google Reader the same way you did with iGoogle using IE. Just this time click "Subscribe to this feed in Google Reader" instead.

You maybe first asked to log into Google Reader, and then you may have to click "Subscribe" again to actually add the feed.

You should now see your new feed in your "feed tree".

Sharing Your Stuff 

As you scroll through your unread stories (notice that scrolling also marks the item as read), If you find an item interesting, at the bottom of it you can share it with others by either clicking "Share", "Share with note", or "Email" (which integrates nicely with GMail).

It is sort of self-explanatory but clicking "Share" adds the item to your "Shared Items" list.

Right, but how do I really share it?

Google Reader gives you have a couple options, but first click "Settings" in the upper-right of the page.

Then click "Tags."

Here you can either email your "Shared Items" public page to someone (which they then can subscribe to) or display them on your blog’s sidebar.

Also don’t forget you can import it into your Facebook Mini-Feed as well.

Bonus Tip

Scrolling through items is nice in Google Reader but hitting the "J" key and/or "Spacebar" is a handy way to skip to the next item.

Let’s say you are downtown Portsmouth and you run into Richard Grieco who has heard that the NH Seacoast is an excellent place for ex-21 Jump Street stars to get away from the bright lights of Hollywood.

How do you tell everyone you know? Well if you setup your mobile phone on Facebook, you could do two things things.

TXT Your Facebook Status

If you go to Facebook Mobile, you can setup your mobile phone to TXT Facebook with your status updates by entering your mobile number in the “Mobile Texts” section.

Facebook will then TXT a short confirmation code to your phone which you then enter back into Facebook Mobile.

Once your confirmation code is verified, your phone is now linked with your Facebook account and you can update your status at anytime by sending a TXT to "32665" (which you can add to your phone’s contacts).

The upside to TXT’ing I have found is it is usually the easiest/quickest way to interact with services like Facebook. The downside of course is it costs money to TXT (unless you have some sort of plan with your phone company)

AND (for what ever reason) Facebook sends a confirmation TXT back to you telling you it received your TXT (which just cost you more money).

There are also a few other things you can do with Facebook via TXT.

Facebook Mobile Site

If you have Internet access on your phone, another option is to point your phone’s mobile browser to: m.facebook.com.

Once you log in you can see your current status, a form to set your status, and then all your friends’ statuses.

This will still probably cost you money depending on your phone company but it will probably be significantly less than sending a TXT message.

Controlling How You Get TXT’d

So if you go ahead and link your phone to your Facebook account, you’ll most definitely want to control what TXT’s Facebook sends you… if any.

Go to your mobile settings page.

Here you can turn on/off if you want Facebook to send you TXT’s (I have mine set to off), and if you want to be TXT’d, you can specify what to you TXT’d and when you don’t want to be disturbed.

Lastly, you can also remove your phone or add a new one… also don’t forget to scroll all the way to the bottom and click "Save Preferences" (I made that mistake myself).

I must say from my time on Twitter it was fun to get TXT updates during boring meetings, plus it makes you look important when you check your phone in meetings.

I had to do a double take when I heard Bud Light’s new Bud Light Lime commercial last night, and a check on the web site sort of confirms what I heard:

“Bud Light Lime is a premium light beer that combines the superior drinkability of Bud Light with a splash of 100% natural lime flavor.”

“Lime flavor?!?”

Now I swore I heard just “100% lime flavor” on the ad, but still, what’s “100% natural lime flavor?”

I’m afraid to ask how that’s different from 100% natural lime juice?

Lee Speedway was hit hard in overseas markets this morning which resulted in a drop in ticket prices to “Only” (the numbers were covered).

But in an apparent late afternoon rally, Lee Speedway ended the day back at “Only $10.”

You’re on Facebook, things are going good, connection with friends, setting your status, but you notice that your “Status Updates” are always being gummed up by that one “friend” who is on a mission to add every application. One day you finally say: “Enough! I don’t care what ‘Different Strokes’ character you are!”

Well I haven’t found a way to completely ignore people on Facebook but it does offer a way to hear less about them.

1. Log into Facebook.

2. Go to News Feed Preferences.

3. Here you can slide up/down the various story types you want to hear more or less off.

4. But you really rather not hear from a specific person, so look at the bottom right of the page and you’ll see “Less About These Friends”, just enter the name(s) of the person you want to tone down.

If only this was available in real life (I joke).

So your friend finally got you to sign up on Facebook and you’re like: “Fine, but I’m not logging into this damn thing all the time.” But there’s a tiny part of you that would like to stay a little up to date on what’s going on.

So you mastered subscribing to web sites with iGoogle and IE, well you can also subscribe to some things in Facebook as well.

1. Log into Facebook.

2. Click Notes. Notice on the right-hand sidebar “Subscribe to these Notes”, click “My Friends’ Notes” and use IE to add the feed to your iGoogle.

3. You can also subscribe to Posted Items:

4. Notifications:

5. And finally, Status Updates:

Your friend may have gotten you on Facebook but now you never have to log in.

Some people say that oil price are volatile, I say not as volatile as Lee Speedway ticket prices!

When the Lee Speedway opened their season this year, they hung a huge sign that said: “Only $10.”

But the market for watching cars race around a track must have gotten hot these past couple weeks because they suddenly hung a a “5” over the “0” and price went up to “Only $15.”

Then last week the sign was changed to “Only $20.”

Well just like the US demand for oil, ticket consumption must have went down because the sign just went back to “Only $10” the beginning of this week.

Can you “short” racing tickets?

You probably have a morning routine, you check out news, go through your blogroll looking for anything new, hit up Cheezburger for some LOLCats. But what if you instead of going to all those sites (one by one), the sites came to you and you just went to one place to see what was new?

With a little help from Google and IE, dreams really can come true.

1. First you need a Google Account (if you don’t already have one).

2. Then you need to setup your iGoogle page (I’ll get back to iGoogle in a bit).

3. Now you need to install the Google Toolbar for IE 7… actually I say live a little and install the BETA. (yes there is a purpose to installing this).

4. Ok, now that you are Googled out, time to subscribe to your favorite blog, go to http://kreblog.com/

5. Notice the orange “Feeds” icon “lights up”, click it.

6. Wait for page to entirely load and you should see this:

You now have the option to add this blog to your “Google Personalized Homepage” (iGoogle for short) or “Google Reader” (this is why we installed the Google Toolbar in order to get these options).

Now, if you are only subscribing to a few sites, iGoogle will probably be all you need, but if you want to go crazy subscribing to sites, Google Reader maybe a better choice. But for now click “Add this feed to your Google Personalized Homepage.”

7. Google will now ask you to confirm your add, click “Add to Google.” 

8. You should now see Kreblog on your iGoogle page:

Of course you can also go crazy adding things like weather or quotes of the day to your iGoogle page.

Also, don’t forget to bookmark iGoogle (up to you if you want to go as far as making it your homepage).

Now some might say, “But I can’t see comments!”, which is true but you can always use this just to get notified of what’s new and then click on the blog post title to go to the actual post.

Bonus Tip:

For those on the Seacoast you can subscribe to Fosters or Seacoast Online… otherwise there is always WMUR, Boston.Com, or Reuters.

Because M@ asked… I didn’t do anything fancy to create my weekend Facebook Tips but the following made it pretty easy (all for free):

Cropper

There are tons of screen capture programs, and I’m sure there are better ones, you may even have a favorite, but I love Cropper. It sits out of the way in your traybar until you double click it, which brings up a transparent window that you drag/resize to get just the shot you want, and finally you double click in the window to capture… easy as that.

I use Cropper at work all the time for emails (“You mean this?”) and it beats doing the whole “Print Screen/paste into Word thing.” I think I even had LNotes using this at one point at her last job.

Note that the default is to capture to BMP, but it supports PNG (and JPEG) out of the box so you’ll want to change that for uploading to the Net (I once read somewhere that JPEG is bad for screen captures). Cropper also has some cool plug-ins worth checking out as well.

Also note it does work with “Print Screen” and that’s the only way I found to capture menus (since menus obviously go away when you double click into another window).

Paint.NET

Again, I’m sure there are better image editors out there but Paint.NET is free and has about all the power a super lame graphic artist like myself needs (hey, I can draw red boxes around things).

If you can’t afford fancy Adobe software you might want to check this out Paint.NET for advanced photo editing.

Windows Live Writer

I’ve written about WIndows Live Writer in the past and how great it is for writing blog posts (seriously, bloggers don’t let bloggers blog in browsers). I only mention it here because it really has some great image features like helping you resize images (remember to keep “Lock Ratio” checked) as well as adding drop shadows… and if your blog provider supports it, it does all the image uploads for you.

Houston, we have a problem… who likes lettuce?

So some might complain that nothing grows in their garden but we have had two instances where things grew too well.

Stupid Farm Mistake #1: I knew we bought too much when we came back from the greenhouse (greenhouse sounds much cooler than garden center), and I knew when I planted the pumpkins that I was making a big mistake but I was tired and bleeding profusely from the black flies.

Fast forward a few weeks and the pumpkins, acorn, and butternut squash had taken over my little raised garden. I knew I would be taking a risk but I had to save everything else from being smothered so this weekend I dug them up and transplanted them to various places through out the yard.

Right now I have them filed under: "Lost cause (but will be pleasantly surprised if they come back to life)."

Who knows, I saw the pumpkin flowers open this morning… but it could be their last gasp of breath.

Stupid Farmer Mistake #2: I have no clue when to pick this stuff, so when the green leaf lettuce was coming in, I looked it up online and it say to cut the big leaves and save the small ones to grow… which I did (we ate a lot of green and red leaf that week).

I left it alone for a bit but then I noticed tonight that it was start get slimy and brown so I salvaged what I could and went the other extreme and started cutting all the romaine and red leaf that looked remotely edible.

Looks like we’ll be eating Caesar salads for breakfast, lunch , and dinners all week… and there is still more I left in the garden.

(I wonder if I can pay someone to come in and make a proper table side Caesar salad?)

I don’t even know what to do with the monster flat parsley… that’s up to LNotes but I’m eying the mint, might have to buy some more Makers.

The one downside to the garden is the peppers… the plants are green and look healthy but have just stopped growing and are not really producing anything… they are like the slackers of the garden world.

I probably shouldn’t laugh but K got so frustrated/tired this week that she slammed her little toy foam fish onto the couch.

Funny, we’ve never slammed anything in frustration down in front of her before so this is I guess this is just one of those things our brains come pre-wired for.

Sorry babe that things weren’t going your way but your little baby frustrations were pretty cute… good thing she is too young to yell "Don’t laugh at me!"

Arguable the hottest thing on the Net right now is publishing your “status” to the world (or as Twitter would ask: “What are you doing?”).

Unfortunately there are a dozen sites to set your status on and getting everyone to use Twitter over Facebook over Pownce is a losing battle. All is not lost, fortunately the company that brought us the Movable Type blogging platform has also brought us the “Switzerland” of status updating Facebook applications called Blog It that allows you to publish your status to multiple sites with one click.

1. Log in to Facebook.

2. Go to the Blog It application page and click “Add Application.”

4. Facebook will ask you if you want to add Blog It to your Facebook account, click “Add Blog It.”

5. Now Blog It will ask you to setup your first account, choose “Facebook Status” and click “Add Account.”

6. Facebook will then ask if you want to grant Blog It the ability update your Facebook status, check “Allow Blog It to update my status without notifying me” and click “Authorize Blog It.”

7. Blog It will then show you your “Manage Accounts” page where you can click “Add Account” to continue to enter all your other accounts (including your blog… yes as it’s name suggests you can use it to blog as well).

Later when you want to update your status:

1. Log in to Facebook.

2. Click Blog It in the left-hand Applications box.

3. On the “Update Status” page, enter your status, click “Post”, and watch Blog It magically do the rest.

We’ve all been there, surfing the Net, you find a interesting/funny article/video, you don’t really want to make a blog post about it, and you don’t want to spam your friends with an email either.

Another unobtrusive option is to share the link on your Facebook profile.

1. Turn on your IE 7 “Links” toolbar (if it isn’t on already).

2. Go to Facebook’s “Share Bookmarklet“ page and follow the instructions on how to add the bookmarklet to your “Links” toolbar. Note: You’ll get a “Security Alert” pop-up when during the process, you can just click “Yes” to it.

3. Now when you are on a site, and you want to share the link to your Facebook profile, just click “Share on Facebook” in your “Links” toolbar.

4. Now you can it and your friend’s links under “Posted Items” in the left-hand sidebar.

It is pretty smart about what you are sharing so if you click the bookmarklet on a YouTube video page, it will embed the video clip with the link.

It is funny how certain friends will only interact with you on certain sites.

You have a blog, you tell someone about it, but then never go to it and only interact with you on social sites like MySpace or Facebook. So sometimes you need to bring your content to them instead of relying on them to come to you.

1. Login to Facebook.

2.  Click “Notes” in the Applications box to the left.

3. Over in the right-hand sidebar, click “Import a blog” in the Notes Settings box.

4. Now bring up another IE 7 window (or tab) and go to your blog homepage.

5. Click the orange “Feed” icon in the IE 7 toolbar.

6. Grab your blog’s feed URL from the Address bar. Go back to your other Facebook window (or tab).

7. Paste in your blog’s feed URL and click “Start Importing.”

Your blog posts will now appear as notes.

Now you might also want to lock down who can see your Notes afterwards.

NOTE: For whatever reason, when you do this, Facebook adds your blog to your Mini-Feed and I can’t find a way to lock down your Mini-Feed privacy yet so you might want to go into your Mini-Feed and remove your blog afterwards.

Normally by default, all your Facebook content in viewable by only your friends (people you have a connection with).

Most of the time this is ok, but sometimes you get asked to connect to a person that is more of a aquatintance and not someone you want to see things like family photos.

So to give yourself the ability to control your Facebook content you might want to change some of the default privacy settings on some of your applications and contact settings.

1. Log in.

2. Click Friends in the top header.

3. In the right-hand sidebar you have some default lists under Friend Lists and you can create new ones by clicking “Make a New List” (I created one called “Work” for example).

4. Once you have your lists setup, click a list you want to add someone to and then add them by typing their name and select them.

NOTE: At this point I recommend clicking through your lists one more time to make sure everyone is where you expect them be.

5. Once you get your lists setup, you can then go into your applications and start locking things down. Click “edit” in the Applications box.

6. Click “Edit Settings” for the application you want to lock down (for example Notes).

7. Then select “Custom” and click “Edit Custom Settings.”

8. Now you can specify only certain “friends” can view the application you are editing (or open up to everyone if you’re like that).

Again, just because Facebook says you are a “friend” to someone you might not really be that close of friends.

I also strongly recommend clicking “Privacy” in the top upper right of the page. Then clicking “Profile” and viewing who can see what under both “Basic” and “Contact Information”.

Lastly there has been some controversy about Facebook’s “Social Ads” functionality as it sometimes makes it looks like you are endorsing something to your friends without you really knowing.

To turn it off, click “Privacy”, then “News Feed and Mini-feed”, and then “Social Ads”. I recommend setting “Appearance in Social Ads” to “No one”.

It is pretty easy to setup Facebook to pull in and display your content from other sites. The benefit is your Facebook connections can see all your content (like your new favorite kitten video on YouTube) in one place instead of visiting each site individually.

1. Log in.

2. Click “Profile” in the top menu bar.

3. In the “Mini-Feed” box, click “Import.”

4. Click the service you want to import.

5. Enter your account info, click “Import”, and then “Close.”

So far Facebook supports:

• Flickr (your “public” photos only).
• Digg (stories you voted on).
• Picasa (your public photos).
• del.icio.us (sites that you have bookmarked).
• yelp (your reviews).
• Google Reader (your “shared” items).
• YouTube (videos you mark as your “Favorite”).
• last.fm (your listening activity).
• Pandora (your listening activity).
• hulu (your viewing activity).
• StumbleUpon.
• Your blog.

Again Facebook only pulls in things that are publicly available on each of the services anyway, it doesn’t pull in things you have marked non-public.

I used to think that blue jays were the most annoying birds but they are like song birds to the flock of crows that have taken up residence in our neighborhood.

They squawk all day, from tree to tree, and yard to yard… nonstop… with one sounding frighteningly “not right.”

I picture them like that family that all buy homes on the same street they grew up on and there is always some sort of drama that spills into the street at all hours of the day/night.

Please, someone make them stop!

K got a little swing/slide set for her birthday.

At first I thought nothing of it as I walked away after assembling it, but then when I caught a glance of it through the window later, I had to stop and smile.

For seven years our yard has just been a area of grass with little purpose, now its purpose is officially for playing.

I think in general K likes the swings, but because for her entire life so far she’s been strapped in and confined for her safety, she just thinks it is another seat that moves: “Cool, it’s like a car seat/bouncer/exersaucer/high chair/supermarket cart that goes back and forth.”

Not that it was a difficult decision but I think that the Mint Julep is my official drink of this Summer.

Every thing about it is slow and cool… from slowly watching the water boil to make the simple syrup, to carefully muddling the mint, to the crushed ice that makes the rocks glass almost too cool to touch, to slowly sipping the julep on your front porch as the warm summer night breeze rustles the leaves.

The Mint Julep is definitely underrated.

You know what is highly overrated for Summer, the Margarita… nothing good comes from all that acid. Plus I now associate Margaritas with loud chaotic Mexican themed family restaurants which is not my picture of Summer night relaxation.

What has happened to cable news?

When I get home from work I like to watch the news. I can usually get home and watch ABC World News but for whatever reason the other night I was only able to get to the TV after 7pm. I figured I’d just catch some cable news instead.

• MSNBC: Talking heads (I didn’t stick around to see what it was about).
• CNN: Lou Dobbs ranting about something (didn’t he used to do business news?).
• FOX: Talking heads disguised as reporters delivering the news (when the video part is under a minute and the reporter talks for five minutes, this is not news).

I know, I’ll check Headline News, they always had that same no-frills news format… nope, some dude grilling the governor of Louisiana for ten minutes about the news (when did they start doing “shows”?).

Where do people tune to get news anymore on TV… Who are these people that like this news format of non-stop “experts”… Since when does news need so much commentary from people not actually involved in the stories?

In my dream world there would be something like ABC World News at 7:00pm (just tell me what happed today) and then a “Marketplace for TV” at 7:30pm (tell me what happed today in business and tell me a interesting story about something).

Ever since I lived in this house, the only gardening I have done is cutting, snipping, pulling, pruning of all the various growth in our yard trying to claim what we have for open land. It is non-stop, week after week, month after month, year after year. People who say that they have hobbies obviously don’t have a yard (or they have enough money to pay someone else).

99.999% of the time I can’t identify what I’m fighting back but it always looks:

1. Like a nasty alien species.
2. Poisonous if eaten.
3. Like it would make you break out in a fully body rash if touched.

This is why it was strangely odd last night to look at a bowl of fresh green and red leaf lettuce I picked fresh from our square foot garden yesterday morning, strange in that I would have never dreamed in a million years of being able to (or wanting to for that matter) eat anything that grew in our yard.

I mean how weird is it to walk out your door and walk back in with a salad?

The investment has so far paid off though, the lettuce was great, very fresh and tender (and hopefully salmonella free).

Looks like we’re going to have to eat it faster though because the bugs look like they are quite fond of it too.

Reiterating my conclusion from experience of “Never buy a house where the homeowner did all the construction him/herself”, one of the wooden supports under my crappy back deck came completely off its cement base and was just hanging freely in midair.

The deck itself is just an extension of the main floor support beams running under the house so it wasn’t a dire emergency to fix it but it was bugging me and I didn’t want to let it go into winter when snow would weigh it down.

The problem I had was there was no way I could lift the deck myself to get the support fixed… if only I had some sort of jack… like a car jack.

That did the trick, just put down some cinder blocks I had lying around, but my Civic’s car jack on that, cranked it up until I could get the wooden support back in place, cranked it back down… done.

I love multitaskers.

• I hate crows. I thought blue jays were the most annoying birds but crows now have that title. They just squawk non-stop ALL FRIG’N DAY.
• I went to the outdoor Dover pool for the first time yesterday, not bad for $5/person (get there early before the “School Bus of Chaos” shows up). K loved the pool but got sleepy towards the end and started sucking thumbs… I wonder if that’s what Jenny Thompson does when she gets tired in the pool? I also wonder if they make baby LZR Racers?
• Carpoolguy had some Kate The Great this Wednesday. Overall consensus, good but not the “Best Beer in America” or "Second Best on Planet Earth” (that would be Smuttynose IPA).
• We went to the new Dover Margaritas, don’t know what to say other than it is exactly the same as the Portsmouth one (maybe with more room). Is it me or do all the waitresses look exactly the same at Margaritas?… same face structure, same proportions, it’s like they are clones of some mad scientist.
• I noticed that entire first season of Mad Men is ON DEMAND. I haven’t seen it myself but I plan too. I also plan to check out Burn Notice.

The Eighties live again!

Let’s just say I have a very strong unwavering opinion that “grunge” was the second worst thing that happened to college radio in the Nineties when it killed off the synthesizer (the first being “rap rock”… and don’t get me start on “emo” or the five thousand “Blink 182” copycats).

I picked up another iTunes gift card for Father’s Day (thanks K).

Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours (entire album)

I originally started just picking a few songs from the album but realized I was close to the $10 anyway so I bought the entire thing. New old “synthpop” at its finest?… it might just be. It is easy to say that this album has a very Eighties sound to it, but it actually reminds me more of Nineties Cause & Effect.

I listened to the entire album today a couple times and it held up pretty good after a few go rounds.

M83 - Saturdays = Youth (various)

While I did like the album when I listened to it the other week for free on last.fm, the songs towards the end kind of became too long and dreamy to plunk money down for so I ended up just buying the WOXY play list of:

• Kim & Jessie
• Skin of the Night
• Graveyard Girl.

Again a very late Eighties lush “synthpop” sound and I can understand why it is getting so much positive buzz lately. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up going back and completing the album a month from now.

Fleet Foxes

And from left field White Winter Hymnal just hooked me from the first time I heard it (it was either the a cappella or the “oohs”). Also too, I don’t know if it has a name, but love that minimalist/big room sound lately, sort of like PBJ.

If you have ever seen something on the Net that you’d like to share with your Facebook buddies, the “Share on Facebook” bookmarklet might be just the thing to adorn your “Links” toolbar.