I’ve pretty much been ignoring development of Windows Live writer to be honest. It was only today when I realized I hadn’t blogged in a while and that I realized I’d grown irritated with blogging from a browser directly. Firefox, I love you, but you tend to grown to a halt periodically. It made blogging a pain.

Also, the theme I have currently requires the use of “custom fields” (for the main page images) which, I realized, if I was blogging via WLW and then having to log in and update the custom fields I’d kinda be negating the whole point of having software to write and publish outside of a browser.

Anyway, lets hope this works. I really, really like the feel of this writer. If I never have to log into the WP CP again it will be too soon.

Problem #1: hmm… I’d hoped this would publish without issue but I’ve just encountered 1 big one. I need to be able to upload images to my blog but not have them automatically get placed in my post (i.e. they are only going to be used on the frontpage)

Update: Can’t find an easy way to upload images with a post, but not have them appear in the post itself. If anyone reading this has any clue on how to upload files to wordpress, without having to go in via a browser (FTP is out of the question) then leave a comment and let me know.

So first off, how do you find new music?

Music Discovery Sites:

Well there are quite a few music discovery sites out there that will link bands and music depending on their genre, so all you really need to do is start with a band you like and work from there. The difference with the ones I’m about to list is that they have used really intuitive visual environments to help you navigate through the recommended bands.

Top 5:

Musicmesh

This is usually my #1 stop when searching for new music as its interface pretty much has everything, apart from the ability to increase the amount of results displayed. Each node in the music map is an album recommendation. You navigate through the bands by clicking on the album, which will bring up track listings, allow you to access wikipedia info, play videos, read reviews and purchase from amazon.

Score:

TuneGlue

Next to Musicmesh, this site is really intuitive and fun to use. It doesn’t provide near as much info but it is still quite well designed. It is powered by Last.fm and Amazon data. My main gripe with it is its complete lack of ability to allow you to listen to the music. But if you matched this fairly simple and fast site with a music listening site it could work really well.

Score:

Liveplasma

Much the same as music-map but a little bit more graphical. As with music-map, the closer a node is to another the more related they are. Also, the larger a node, the more popular it is. Colours are also used to show which artists music is most similar. It’s worth registering with this site as it will allow you then to save your favourite artists and also share your saved maps with friends.

Score:

music-map

This was one of the first music discovery sites that I came across. It seems to be fairly widely known. Unlike Musicmesh it gives Artist recommendations rather than Album recommendations. The way it works is that when you search for an Artist, the closer the nodes in the map are the more likely those Artists will have a similar sound, thus giving a greater chance that you will also like their music. Use this site in conjuntion with a good music listening site as it doesn’t allow you to listen to any music.

Score:

Amaznode

This site is mainly used for exploring Amazon’s product catalog, thus the name mashup “Amaz” “node”. Just type in an Artists name and watch the map of that Artists and related Artists albums start filling the screen. It’s a neat tool for searching Amazon, but as it does not allow you to listen to music and it also can take a while, depending on your connection, to fill the map, it might be worth using either Tuneglue or music-map if you want a simpler interface.

Score:

Other Music Discovery sites you can check out:

Dimvision MusicMap

JSViz

Touchgraph

Music IP Playground

MyStrands Playlist Mapping

Burst Labs

Playola

Music Listening Sites:

Now that you’ve found your new music, you might want an easy way to listen to it, create playlists… etc. The following sites offer these features. I’m sure there are a load more of them out there but these are the best ones I’ve found so far.

Top 4:

Grooveshark Lite

This site, unlike songza, has a very extensive interface, reminding me of iTunes slightly. What’s great about it is that you can open it up in a winow and resize it and the webpage will resize accordingly, keeping all the relevant features in the window, allowing you to have it the size of your average desktop music player/library. It’s definitely my first stop when looking to queue up a few songs into a playlist and listen to whilst in work or at home browsing. The interface is also very intuitive so needs little explaining. Visit this site and wonder how you lived without it.

Score:

Songza

This is the first site I came across and seems to be widely used at the moment. It has a very simple, google-esque, homepage, although recently adverts seem to be taking over the top of it. You simply search for your desired artist/song to get a list of songs related to your search then click on it and choose to either share, rate, add to playlist or, of course, play. My only problem with it is that it can get flooded with poor quality songs, but I guess the older the site gets the better the rating system will be.

Score:

Mix Turtle

Like songza and grooveshark lite, but doesn’t really bring anything new to the table except for a great search box, which brings up recommendations from its library as you type. Its a good site and should be used it either of the previously mentioned sites are running a little slow.

Score:

Muxfind

A fairly interesting take on the music search engine. You search for a band you like and then are given a selection of “muxtapes” (i.e. playlists created by other users) to listen to that match closely the band you are looking for. View it more like an audible music discovery site rather than visual. But don’t use it if you specifically want to listen to a band as most of the time the playlists are anything but the band you are looking for.

Score:

Other Music Listening sites you can check out:

Afternoon Delight

Bedtime Tunes

Deezer

[ad#postdescription]

With a capital “A”. Seriously, since Web 2.0 started to really roll out and more and more sites started to adopt its philosophy I’ve noticed a complete paradigm shift in what the Internet means to me. I literally love the internet now whereas maybe 2 years ago I was becoming increasingly disillusioned as to its real world merits. It was becoming like TV, I was merely flicking through my favorite sites on a daily basis, reading my usual RSS feeds and then switching it off.

However things started to change a while back when a friend pointed me in the direction of this new toolbar called “Stumbleupon”. My whole life I have hated additional toolbars in browsers, all to often I’ve had to clean out a friends PC only to see the myriad of toolbars they have installed that are there due to a virus or are slowing down their computer because they are bloated and poorly coded. So when I was told about this “must have” toolbar, I took the advice with a pinch of salt.

I did my research and found nothing but praise for it, so I signed up and installed it. What got me first was its pure simplicity. You select your favorite topics then merely click the “Stumble” button and you’ll be given a page related to your interests that hundreds of people around the world have voted as being relevant. You can then give the page a thumbs up or down depending on how interesting you found the page.

This in itself was a “Wow!” moment for me. Sure it was superseded by the likes of Digg, Reddit or any of the other link sites, but in my opinion Stumbleupon is the first Web 2.0 app that has truly captured the essence of social networking. It was the first time that I felt I was interacting with the Internet in a “human” fashion. When I meet up with my friends, I do not have to always ask “What movies have you seen recently that are good”, a lot of the time they will nominate this information without me having to ask, and the more you think about it the more you realize this is how humanity progresses in reality. Search engines like Google or Yahoo assume the user already knows the question when they visit their site, humans don’t, humans wish to pass on information regardless of whether the individual they are passing it to has requested it.

This paradigm shift in internet browsing has changed everything for me. When I open my browser I know the internet is about to start a conversation with me on topics i’m interested in and maybe some it knows I should be interested in. When I click the stumble button hundreds of people start saying “Oh you have to see this site, it’s amazing”. Also, stumbleupon allows me to search all of its recommendations for ones that contain specific information to my inquiry. Now instead of having to rely on an internet robot to tell me which site is most relevant to my search I can find pages that I know actual humans have looked at, read and said “Yeah, this site would be perfect for you”. On a daily basis now I feel I am absorbing 10 times the amount of information I was previously, so much so that when I’m not reading about new world developments or checking out the latest memes my brain starts to feel “itchy” like it needs to be scratched with some new information. The brain is a muscle like any other and I liken this feeling to one a long distance runner must feel if they are made to sit still for long periods of time. We are at a point now where not only is the information of the world at our fingertips but we have the tools to consume, produce and share it. Previous to our generation, no humans in history had the ability of tapping into this amount of human thinking, knowledge and wisdom.

Below I have linked a great talk by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo this year in regards to what he calls “Cognitive Surplus”. His thoughts on it and its implications for the future of the internet and mankinds interaction with it are exciting to say the least. Cognitive Surplus is the thinking time we have that is not utilized by any organized means. For most of us 8 hours of cognisance is used for work every day but the rest is “surplus”. Previous to our generation this surplus was wasted on the consumer mediums of TV, radio, literature… etc. But now with the advent of social networking humans can use this surplus to create and share as well as consume information. What this utilizing of human cognisance will yield is yet to be seen, but if the internet at present is anything to go by, it looks like exciting times ahead.

.
[ad#postdescription]

The last year, however, has been slowly whittling away at my comfort level with IE and most other pay for software. It feels like the internet as a whole is turning on Microsoft and closed source, paid for software. Whenever I had a problem with MS Office I’d post it on a forum and be met with a cacophony of users replying “USE OPEN OFFICE f00!”, so eventually I caved and installed it, and, funnily enough, haven’t experienced a problem since. Then for photo editing I used to use Photoshop, I started to get irritated by how bloated it was and how slow it was to start, until someone recommended Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a breath of fresh air in comparison, it might not be as feature full as Photoshop but it has everything your average photo editor would want. Since then I’ve started replacing nearly all of the software I use frequently with its free alternative, 7-Zip instead of WinRAR, Thunderbird instead of Outlook… etc, the list goes on and the more I change the less problems I have with my PC.

The more I use the more I understand why Open Source just runs so much better. It comes down to something that is rarely applied to a paid for piece of software and that is community. If I have a problem with an Open Source program you can be guaranteed someone a lot smarter than me has read the code and patched a fix for it already. The speed at which software gets updated and patched in Open Source is phenomenal, and this is mainly due to the community that aplha and beta tests every revision released, reporting bugs and trying to fix them. The end result is a piece of software that is efficient, nearly bug free (well you can’t catch them all) and is the result of hundreds of free man hours of testing and development. Personally i’ve become an avid Beta tester myself. If I have the option of getting the latest stable version of a piece of software or getting the Beta I will always choose the Beta which leads me onto why I finally killed off Internet Explorer.

Recently in work and at home i’ve been having speed issues with IE. Loading forums and pictures was getting slower, also if I left IE open in work overnight when I came back in it would freeze while trying to refresh all my tabs. So I upgraded my home DSL from 3Mb/s to 8Mb/s and found that the added speed didn’t seem to be getting used by IE. I also use some free software in work and at home that has a Web GUI frontend (i.e. SABnzbd, utorrent, pfsense…etc) and I found that none of these seemed properly optimized for IE 7. I griped about this but still held fast to IE for a while. Posting my discontent about this on forums I was now receiving the plethora of replies saying “USE FIREFOX f00!”… it was only when someone said “USE FIREFOX BETA f00!” did things change. The current beta of Firefox, Firefox 3 Beta 5, is simply amazing. The speed at which it loads pages and refreshes tabs leaves IE 7 in the dust. Since making the move to firefox i’ve started getting used to the better bookmarking facilities, and the plethora of add-ons that allow you to completely customize the browser. I use Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks syncd between PC’s, greasemonkey to make all my favourite sites look better, chatzilla for an easy IRC interface, and of course stumbleupon for that web 2.0 experience.  Unfortunately, as its a beta there are still a lot of addons that are not yet compatible, but still, thus far my Firefox experience has exceeded IE 7 in every possible way.

The only piece of software left to change now is Windows. I work a lot in bash and am on a Linux machine at least once a day. Over time i’m starting to see why Linux is just better than Windows. As trends change so does it, as I change I can change the OS with me. The rigidity of Windows is starting to whittle away at my comfort with it. My problem is that I don’t only use my PC for media and browsing, I also use it for games and MS pretty much has a strangle hold over what standard developers use. For my next format I’ll be installing Ubuntu as the primary OS and then having Vista as the secondary OS purely for loading DirectX games. My hope then will be that either MS will port their graphics engine to linux (fat chance) or that a new/different standard (OpenGL?) is used that all game developers will adopt that is compatible with Linux. If this happens I will be saying goodbye to Windows forever.

I hope if you are reading this in IE on a Windows machine with all that paid for software installed that you can take something from this. If I can cause one person reading this to uninstall their boughten software and get its free alternative then i’ve succeeded a little at least.

To get you started, visit the site at the following link and type in the name of the software you use, then click on it to find the free alternative. Try at least one change a week and soon enough you’ll be using Linux and will have saved yourself 100′s on bloated software with features that you will never use.

http://www.osalt.com/