One of the comments in the page includes some useful examples, I quote:

You simply iab your most common typographical misteaks with the correct spelung and Robert’s yer father’s brother.
eg
iab teh the
iab seperate separate
iab shit Microsoft

Gosh, haven’t thought about that last one.

Now that I upgraded from Fedora Core 4 to 5 and also moved to Firefox 2 RC1 the neat extension stopped work.

I fixed the problem unzipping Andy’s .xpi of the 0.8 version and changing these lines in install.rdf:

<em:version>0.8b</em>
<em:maxVersion>2.1</em>

You can grab the modified version, which I called 0.8b, here.

There are occasional crashes in some web pages but that also happened in the original 0.8 and I’m sure Andy will have it fixed by version 1.0.

This should work with other extensions as well, I’ll try with another of my favorites: the one for del.icio.us.

Update: Yep, it worked with del.icio.us too, here my version 1.1b.

And of course I love the upcoming Firefox 2, already in release candidate 1 stage.

So it was disappointing not to find Rojo in the list of feed readers that Firefox supports. There comes the question: what’s a mozillorojoish guy’s got to do?

How To Add Rojo in Firefox With Just Three Lines

These steps are based on what Ben Goodger wrote some months ago in his Inside Firefox blog. Thanks Ben!

I assume you already have a Rojo account, you’ve logged in and you have Firefox 2 running.

• Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. You will see a list of preferences.
• Type browser.contentHandlers in the filter box and press Enter. Now you see a smaller list.
• Each preference is of the form: browser.contentHandlers.types.#.something where # is a number, which goes from 0 to 5 in my Firefox, and something is title, type or uri.
• You clever quick guy already got the pattern here and know what to do, good for you! For the rest of us let’s elaborate: you have to create an additional set of preferences, three additional lines. We will base our new lines in the 0 numbered lines and will use number 6.
• Right-click on the first line, browser.contentHandlers.types.0.title and select Copy Name.
• Right-click, select New, String, paste the name you copied and change the number from 0 to 6, or another corresponding number if you have more than five sets of lines.
• Enter the name of the feed reader you are adding, in our case: Rojo. You won’t see your new line automatically in the list, just press Enter in the filter box on top if you need to.
• Create a new instance of the second line, browser.contentHandlers.types.0.type, following the same procedure and also changing 0 to 6. You can also right-click and copy the value here, application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed, for that won’t change.
• Create the third line based on browser.contentHandlers.types.0.uri and use the following value for Rojo: http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription/?resource=%s. I got it from the bookmarklet, you can find a similar url for any other feed reader. Use %s as a placeholder for the feed url.
• Restart Firefox and you are set!

Too Many Clicks?

Ok, just open your prefs.js file (in my Fedora box I found it at /home/my-user-name/.mozilla/firefox/uk3kd43k.default/prefs.js) and add these lines:


user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.title", “Rojo");
user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.type", “application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed");
user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.uri", “http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription/?resource=%s");


Set your default feed reader the first time you subscribe to any feed or using the feeds tab in Firefox’s preferences menu.

Now you can click on any feed link, including the icon appearing in the address bar, and you are already set. One click subscription to any feed.

Ready?, why not testing it here?

It’s working just with Wordpress based sites for now but Patrick Gavin and company have already promised many other platforms being supported soon. There are many guys asking for Drupal already, I’m one of those.

I guess Feedvertising will work better for those offering full articles instead of teasers in their feeds, one more reason for offering full content to your subscribers.

I’ll let you know how it works for me when I have them working for a while in my sites.

Bart was kind enough to point me to cocomment (that’s the name, I’m not stammering), a nice service that makes life easier for commenters and bloggers alike.

Commenters just have to install a Firefox extension and a small bar will appear at the bottom of the text area where they write their comments. cocomment works with Internet Explorer using a bookmarklet but I didn’t test it, who needs that browser anyway?

Once you post a comment, it’s tracked by cocomment. There’s a little icon at the status bar of your browser that alerts you whenever somebody adds a new comment to the discussions you are following. It’s small and non distractive but even so you have to keep yourself under control. Highly commented posts could consume your whole day if you try to read them too often.

Clicking the cocomment icon takes you to the cocomment site and there you’ll find a simple but usable table with the latest comments from the posts you’re tracking.

Everything is quite simple to use.

And bloggers don’t need to worry, most blogging systems are supported by cocomment. If yours is not, integration consists of playing with a few lines of Javascript and the code of your content management system or blog platform.

I spent a few minutes with my Drupal templates before finding out that Olav had already written a cocomment module. Great work, thanks dude. A couple of clicks later and both mumobo and Telework People were cocomment-enabled.

cocomment’s Firefox extension also installed a bookmarklet where you can enable tracking of a discussion even if you are not commenting. A good idea for blog-voyeurs.

So, pay a visit to cocomment, it can save some minutes a day and help you find lots of interesting discussions where you can waste your whole day once again. Nothing is perfect, uh?

Then the what if appeared. What if we could have the ability to comment in every blog or website without visiting it? Imagine a universal method for comments. Something like RSS is becoming for easily reading your favorite sites.

I resisted the temptation to google this before posting, maybe there’s somebody already working in some kind of reverse-syndication system and I’m just another silly guy with a dumb idea. It doesn’t matter, there are millions of us already.

Ideally feed reader and comment writer should work under the same user interface. Going one step forward we could ask for having our content management systems or blog tools integrated with these features. Imagine writing your content, reading feeds and posting comments from one single location.

In fact, we already have the writing and commenting part, we call it a trackback.

There is, of course, the big problem of spammers using a commenting tool like this, but I think captcha-like or validation features would help.

We already have the technologies for such a platform, would it work? What ya think?

Windows users are used to pressing the print screen key and then pasting into their favorite graphics application. There are also some commercial applications available for this apparently easy task.

I’ve been using using KSnapshot under Fedora Linux for a few years and was enough for most of my needs.

But there are times when you need a snapshot of a complete web page, including parts below the fold, parts that aren’t in your browser’s viewport. What’s a clever guy got to do?

Vertically scrolling, taking two or more snapshots and putting them together in your graphics application is the obvious solution but takes a little more time and soon becomes tiresome, specially when many snapshots are needed.

Some commercial applications include the feature but come on! there are smart and free solutions for almost everything.

I was thinking about that when I found ScreenGrab!, a neat Firefox extension. ScreenGrab is the solution for the long web pages snapshot problem and, as every Firefox extension, can be installed with just a click and a restart. Then you just have to visit a web page and right click to capture it.

ScreenGrab offers three options for capturing a web page: document, viewport and window.

Choose document is you want the complete web page saved as an image, including parts below the fold. Viewport captures just what’s visible and window includes your browser in the picture. The images are saved in PNG format.

Here’s a capture I just made from my music, movies and books reviews site. The image was later scaled with Gimp. Nice, uh?

It’s a project I’m quite fond of, includes my most complete PHPTemplate to date and my first fixed 1024 x 768 layout.

Completely developed with open source tools: Freemind for IA, Inkscape and Gimp for design, vi for editing and, of course, Drupal for content management.

It’s all Drupal 4.7. I started working with HEAD first (pre 4.8) but then decided to go with the stable 4.7, many modules and some details were not working yet a couple of months ago.

I wanted to create an easy to use and different, kinda retro, design this time, but my focus is on content, writing with a very personal voice and sharing my comments about the stuff that fills most of my days.

Writing the articles took almost as many hours as design and programming, but I think it was worth the effort. Now I plan to add fresh content on a weekly basis.

What do you think?

Take a look at mumobo and publish some comments, would you?

• The Truth about Islam published just a few posts but they are still an interesting reading.
• The No God Blog includes well written articles for clever atheists, and theists too.
• Clientcopia. Can’t live without them, can’t live with them. Wait. I could try living without them! At least without the ones this site mentions.
• The Long Tail. If you were living in a Hussein-style cave for some months then you should read Anderson’s blog to get back on track.
• Change This. Well thought manifestos. Worth taking the time to read many of them.

Enjoy.

I like Salon and A.V. Club. Great writing style and always updated. They have a little of everything.

For music I often go to Pitchfork or Drowned in Sound.

There are many bloggers commenting on these things but I like focus. A site where I can read just what I want.

Your comments?

I know I’ve written about the subject two years ago, but this time I avoided the use of techie words as much as I could, made use of an easy-to-grasp analogy and included a little tutorial about Rojo, my favorite web based feed reader at this time.

If you already use feed readers you will find some ideas on how to explain the technology to others without being seen as a wacko.

If you don’t care much about technology take a look anyway, you may save many precious minutes in your busy days.

Sites such as Buy.com, Timberland.com, Jockey.com, Starbucks.com and Levis.com are already offering their clients the altenative to use the new system to make their purchases.

Citibank has co-partnered with Google and it’s offering rewards to their credit card clients signing up to the system.

Google Checkout allows you keep your credit card information with them and just use a password to pay in sites using the system. You can link to Gmail account with your Checkout account.

If you run a website you can create Google Checkout buttons and start receiving payments from visitors that don’t want to reveal their credit card data.

Google Checkout charges merchants US$ 0.20 and 2% per transaction (compared to Paypal’s US$ 0.30 and 1.9%) and has some added benefits for those using their Adwords pay per click program:

• You can have free transactions for sales up to ten times your monthly Adwords bill. If you are already an Adwords client and spend, for example, US$ 500 a month in ads, you can process US$ 5000 with Google Checkout and pay no comissions. A nice way of linking both services.
• Adwords ads of sites using Google Checkout will show an icon that could increase exposure and improve CTR.

I signed up for an account just a few hours ago and I’m waiting for a microdeposit from Google, similar to Paypal or Google Adsense when using ACH, to start my testing.

I’m currently using a United States based account and can’t confirm if Checkout is available to other countries, I’d like to know if some of you can tell us about it.

I’ll have more comments in a few days.

A great parody of those long, repetitive and… well… long, one page sites promising you to make lots of cash without the minimum effort. You losers.

And I’ve just read at Fortune that Warren Buffett, the famous investor and world’s second richest man, will give a big chunk of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is working hard to to fight diseases as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis.

You see? Money if nothing. Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates are proving us that there are better way to spend it than just sport cars and weapons.

You will find information about my book, discussion forums for teleworkers and articles about many subjects for all of you living, and making businesses, online.

There’s an Spanish version available at Teletrabajo Hoy.

Cheers.

If you don’t use width and height for all your images in HTML your design could break on the first load in Firefox (tested with 1.5.0.2 on Windows and Linux, I know this also happened in 1.0.x), if you refresh the page, the problem goes away.

Fixing this issue is simple, include width and height for all your images in HTML.

This problem only happens in Firefox, as far as I know.

Well, ISBN are already registered, all the contracts signed and proofs revised. Telework People is on its way to Ingram.

What does this mean?

It means that soon, during the next two or three weeks, my first book will be available in many bookstores around the world: Amazon, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Diesel Books and a lot more.

The new web site design is almost ready and I hope to have it running when the book is launched worldwide. For now, you can register to be notified when the day comes.

Meanwhile, in my headquarters, May is now officially named the teleworking month.

advantages of teleworking

Learn about how working away from the office, at home, a coffee shop or telecenter, can increase your productivity and make your life a healthier and happier one.

Get the free download now. I’m sure you’ll find quite interesting ideas.

A couple of years ago, I had written about using two monitors with one PC, and the article is still receiving many hits. Many people are looking the way to do this. I decided to give it another try yesterday and got it right this time.

Working with just one screen, when you’ve been using two during a long time, is almost unbearable. My ATI x700 graphics card didn’t worked with Fedora Core 4 dual head. I later discovered the problem was me, I haven’t looked in the right places.

This is a problem with most recent ATI cards, which use their own drivers, not included in Fedora.

I started making changes in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, backing up the current copy first, and using the control panel provided by ATI’s driver, but I couldn’t see if it was working because X died, my screens were getting blank, and I couldn’t see what was happening when restarting X.

My solution?

In the computer with the two screens I opened a terminal window, as root, made my change for dual head in ATI control panel, clicked apply, and run init 3 to restart in text based mode.

Then I used my other computer, also running Fedora (but it could have been using any operating system, I just needed SSH access) and SSHed, as root again, to the one with two screens, and run init 5 to restart X. Halleluyah! It worked, but the images were in the wrong side.

I played a little more with ATI’s control panel, repeated the init 3 and init 5 steps above and got it right. Although, I could have just changed cables.

Now my desktop is looking great!

I can continue writing the spanish version of my book about telecommuting, with my word processor in one screen while I have reference material in the other.

If you are going to work with two screens, you better get some of these spectacular screen savers. Enjoy.

Puedes leer este artículo en español

Technorati tags: dual-head | fedora | two-monitors | multiple-screens

Quite useful for those users not familiar with a feed reader.

Want to know how to use the Internet and your current skills to work away from the office and spend more time with your family?

In Telework People I’ll tell you how to do it.

Teleworking, or telecommuting, means doing your job away from the conventional office. It means working online. From anywhere.

You can earn much more money than you’re currently making by teleworking, but to do so you need to know a few tips and techniques I’ll share with you.

Get the book today for only US$ 22.22:

Update: You can now get the printed edition at Lulu.

disponible en español

Who’s This Book For?

Everybody can telework! No matter if you are an employee, busy manager or entrepreneur. You can start teleworking today.

You will find useful advice and ideas in this book.

Forget about rush hour, endless meetings with a stressed boss or the annoying chit chat of the guys in the next cube.

You can telework from home, a coffee shop, a bench in the park and even from a plane 35,000 feet up!

Teleworking is about people, and that’s why I’ve included cases from people I know. Friends and colleagues all over the world.

You’ll also know what I’ve learned in the last eight years, while working happily from home, including my mistakes, so you won’t repeat them.

Grab a free sample of the book

What Does The Book Contain?

In this 140 page downloadable PDF book you’ll find:

• The benefits of teleworking
• Ideas for convincing your boss to let you work from home
• What you need to telework
• Jobs suitable for teleworking
• How to start
• How to manage an online team
• How to spend more time with your family
• How to avoid becoming a workaholic
• Real cases from my friends and colleagues in many countries
• Useful resources for teleworkers

Unconditional 60 Day Money Back Guarantee

If for any reason you think this book is not for you, you can get an immediate refund. No questions asked, just contact me and let me know.

How To Buy?

Telework People costs only US$ 22.22. You can buy using any major credit card or Paypal.

You will receive an email with a link to download the PDF once you complete your order.

Get the book and start teleworking, and changing the way you live and work, today.

Update: You can now get the printed edition at Lulu.

disponible en español

Imagine a radio station playing just the songs you like, and giving you the ability to tell when a song doesn’t fit your tastes and not playing it anymore. That is what Pandora does.

Pandora is a web based service that allows you to create your own music stations. Stations that “learn” what kind of music you prefer based on the choices you make. Pandora only needs a web browser with the Flash player plugin installed, that is almost any computer in the world.

Pandora rewards our curiosity, hence the name. It’s a great way of finding new music. No matter if it’s the latest hit by a mainstream artist or an unknown local band from Biloxi, Mississippi.

I signed up to Pandora a couple of months ago and I instantly loved it; thus, when I got a newsletter written by Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora and who started the Music Genome Project in 1999, I decided to ask him for an interview.

Tim replied quickly and we had a talk over the phone yesterday.

Here you have it, Tim Westergren from Pandora, at Ventanazul.

AB: How did you come with the concept of Pandora and the Music Genome Project? Now it sounds logical to think of the characteristics of music as genes, music as DNA. How did you come with this idea of using the word genome for the project?

TW: Let’s see. Our idea behind the music genome … our idea behind the company, was to find a way to create a universal template, some kind of a universal set of attributes, that could describe a really broad range of music, as much like primary colors, that you can make any color from three colors, that was really the whole idea behind the genome idea.

The idea was to create some baseline that could describe everything That’s the same thing the Human Genome Project did. The Human Genome Project is meant to identify all of the elements that define, for example, if a person is 7′ 2” or 3′ 4”; black, brown or white; has green eyes or blue eyes; runs fast or run slow; etc. It’s just the same idea. These are the building blocks.

AB: The human genome, if I’m right, uses four basic elements, and you have around four hundred basic elements to catalog your music. Am I right?

TW: That’s correct.

AB: I’ve been reading about this “music buyer” you have at Pandora, Michael Zapruder …

TW: Sure.

AB: I laughed when I read he was formerly known as Analyst #26.

TW: That’s right.

AB: How many analysts do you have right now at Pandora?

TW: Thirty-six.

AB: How is one day at Pandora? I know all your analysts have a background in music theory, most of them have bands, are musicians … Do they work full time listening to music? How is a day at Pandora analyzing music?

TW: The typical analyst would spend four to five hours in one shot listening to music. That’s about how long you can do it before your ears start to itch. So, it’s not a full time job, and in fact they don’t really want full time jobs because they are all working on their music careers.

AB: I see. I understand you play the piano, you are a musician and you’ve been producing music for films too.

TW: Yeah, that’s right.

AB: What do you think about providing music that empathizes with different kind of people?. Let’s say, when I am working in graphics designing there is some kind of music that I have to listen to get into a “creative mood”, for example, I love the music of Sigur Ros, these guys from Iceland.

TW: Yes, I like Sigur Ros too. They are great.

AB: And I listen to a different kind music when I’m doing something else, like programming. With the Music Genome Project you are reaching many kinds of people, people that don’t know they may have something in common with others listening to the same music. You mentioned an example of a guy listening, and enjoying, the same music as his dad’s. What can you tell me about your experience with people finding music for the good of music, and not because of the artist or how popular it is or any other stuff?

TW: Definitely I’ve seen a lot of that. Because Pandora is explicitly just about the sound of the music, it challenges people to think a little bit different about what they are listening.

A lot of musical taste hearing is driven by popularity, what a band looks like, what certain people say about them, who they are seen with, and that sort of public image. Pandora kind of ignores all that, and when we recommend a musician, a song, we have no idea how popular the artist is, or how old they are, or how they look like, or whether they are cool or not. So I do think that it causes people to think twice about what is driving their musical taste.

AB: Do you use in anyway the information that you get from the music your users are listening at Pandora?

TW: We don’t yet, but we certainly plan to use anything that will make stations better. I think there is value in looking at how large audiences react to the songs being played. I know it makes sense that if everytime someone launches a station based on Sigur Ros, and when they get played a song by Moby they thumb it down we can probably say: “maybe we were wrong about that one”, and let that one become a kind of a feedback loop into the system. So, we don’t use any of that feedback information right now but I think it makes sense to eventually do it.

AB: I read something that I really liked in Pandora’s blog, it was written by Tom Conrad, who I understand worked with Apple in the Mac OS interface. Tom wrote: “we created something that lets you use your ears, not your mouse, to discover new music.” The user experience of your site is great, I think one good thing about usability is when you don’t notice it is there, you just use the thing, and Pandora is good at this. Pandora is about listening and not clicking or finding or searching. How did you come with the interface for Pandora?

TW: Well, there are several people that have been instrumental in the user experience. Tom Conrad certainly has overseen the whole process. That’s the real expertise of his. He has also worked with two other folks: Dan Lythcott-Haims, who is the Creative Director, and Neil Mix, another engineer and user interface designer. The three of them collectively have created this experience and I’d say that Dan has certainly a big part in the look of the site.

They did a bunch of tests to small audiences, kind of usability tests. We had a dozen people use the service and then we watched them. We did that a number of times before putting it out to a lot of people, and then of course, once it went out to a lot of people, we had tons of feedback.

AB: Tell me a little about your tour around the United States, I’ve read that you have been in Mississippi and you have been witness to the Katrina effects. How is your trip going, what kind of people are you meeting with, how much music are you discovering for Pandora?

TW: There are a lot of things that are happening with that trip. Certainly I’m finding lots of music, tons and tons of music. I come home with bags full of music, as well as long lists of artists that we should be looking at. I am also meeting many people in the many many music scenes that I visit, who are kind of long standing members of the music community, those could be local DJ’s, people who own small local record stores, managers or bookers.

What is really happening is that we are connecting to a whole network of music lovers and music aficionados, who can help us, on an ongoing basis, to stay in touch with the local music that is being created from all these different places.

Anyway, it’s really a trip that is helping to inform us as we look at building the genome as much as we can.

AB: Have you noticed an explosion of users since you launched Pandora in November 2005?

TW: We launched the version we have right now in November, and yes, it’s exploded. We’ve had in just four and a half months over fifteen million stations that have been created.

AB: I read an article at the NY Times about Pandora, and also about this gizmo that I really liked: the Squeezebox, to listen to your music away from your computer. What are your plans regarding Squeezebox and other mobile devices connected to Pandora?

TW: Mobility is a big priority for us. We definitely want to make Pandora available when you’re not sitting at your computer. Whether is on a device from a home network, or it’s on a phone or an MP3 player. That’s a big priority for us and we are doing a lot of work there.

AB: What do record companies are thinking about you? I understand you are having good conversations with them and they are not perceived as the “evil empire” by you. What do they think about your service? Do they want to contribute in any way with the idea or just providing with music from their catalogs? How are they working with you?

TW: Oh, they are very supportive. We get a lot of music from record companies sent directly to us now. They want us to have all their music on Pandora. They are very supportive.

AB: You have a very restrict policy regarding skipping songs to avoid providing music on demand. Could you talk about that?

TW: We have to abide by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is the DMCA, a law that was passed to provide an structure to web casters. It allows us to play any music that we want and pay a fixed per royalty rate provided that we don’t do certain things.

AB: You link songs to Amazon and iTunes, how well are you selling music through them?

TW: Oh yeah, we are selling a huge amount. Ten percent of the sessions will result in somebody buying something.

AB: That’s great to know. I know this is a long term plan, you started with the project in 1999, it’s almost seven years now. I guess you have a plan for several years ahead, can you tell me a little about the future at Pandora?

TW: Our long term objective as a company is to build a radio service that is the best listening experience anytime and anywhere, and that includes mobility and also includes around the world, so that is available in every country and with music from every language and that the genome is a really comprehensive collection that covers all genres and all the languages and cultures. It’s really a life long pursuit that it will really never end. So, I hope that some years from now, people will look back and people will be using Pandora whenever they want to listen to music.

It will be a source of music discovery and music enjoyment that will transform the relationship people have with music.

AB: Discovering a new band and music is a fantastic experience. When I discovered Sigur Ros some years ago, it was like “wow!”, who would think that a band from Iceland, so far away, would be so great.

Are you going to be on tour all this year? When is it going to end?

TW: You never end! I’ll keep going to different places. I won’t be out on tour all the time, but I’ll never stop these visits.

AB: Nice, that sounds like a wonderful job!

TW: It’s great fun. It’s exhausting, but it’s really inspiring.

AB: I’m going to translate this interview to Spanish too. Do you have any message for our Spanish speaking readers?

TW: We are about to push out into Pandora in the next couple of months a big catalog of Spanish speaking music, that’s a big priority for us and something that we are really excited about. So, we welcome suggestions for music that we should be adding, Spanish speaking music from all over, whether it’s salsa, bosanova, tejana. You name it.

AB: I listened to Shakira in Pandora. But only her songs in English.

TW: That’s about to change!

AB: Okay! Well, thank you very much for your time Tim, it’s been a pleasure talking with you. All the best to you and everybody at the Pandora team.

TW: Thank you very much. I appreciate your interest.

Technorati tags: pandora | music | interview

A regular day at the studio:

“Gee, I’m thirsty man!”

“So I am dude, so I am”

“What you have in the fridge?”

“Dunno, let’s see … great!, I’ve got a couple of bottles of Google Gulp“

“Cool, give me the Beta Carroty”

Google. These guys are nuts or they are just too smart for the rest of us. What do you think?

This is my review about the new guy in the web based mail arena.

Yahoo Mail uses the familiar three pane interface of desktop based clients, like Outlook or Thunderbird, and runs quite fast in my DSL connection after an initial loading process, like most Ajax based applications.

Besides the email related panes, Yahoo’s system has two additional panes, one on the right containing a skycrapper and another on the bottom left with three smaller ads. Both areas are clearly separated from the content and email management interface but only the skycrapper is clearly labeled as advertisement.

I have only run the new Yahoo Mail using Firefox 1.5 on my Linux box but I have read that it works quite the same on Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, good to know.

Yahoo Mail is one of the most desktopish (is that a real word?) web applications I’ve recently used: it has complete drag and drop support for moving folders and messages; shift click and control click for selection of messages; right click access to contextual menus; double clicking for opening one message in its own tab and intuitive keyboard shortcuts, also, all the icons and buttons are what most of us would expect. Quite usable.

I liked the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds but it would be nice having a bookmarklet or any other method for easier adding of feeds and, even if most bloggers know what a feed is, a link to a page explaining the concept would be useful for many.

Searching messages did not work for me. I tried using words that I knew were in the subject and body of many of the messages in my inbox but Yahoo did not show them in the results pane.

HTML messages previewing is quite accurate and Yahoo makes a great use of the iframe tag, however, I still found some hardcoded appearance related attributes in the code, such as bgcolor and inline styles, and they are triggering Javascript events from HTML attributes, I tend to prefer using pure Javascript for that, establishing a clearer separation between behavior and content.

It is possible to compose a message in a new tab, which can be detached from the interface and turned into a floating window, useful feature for those window-changer-alt-tabbers among us.

Other Yahoo applications, like Calendar and Notepad, are listed along with RSS and message folders, but I think our Yahoo friends could have put these links in a better place, like one of the top navigation bars for instance. Calendar and Notepad will open a new window, or tab if using a tab enabled browser (you are, right?), with the corresponding service. I guess Yahoo will offer better integration later.

Anyway, so far so good, I will be leave my Gmail hat in the closet for a few days, become a Yahoo guy to continue testing and will let you know how it goes. Of course, I hope to know your comments too.

Technorati tags: yahoo | webmail | yahoo-mail | ajax

I will be launching a web site dedicated to the book, and all things teleworking. I already registered the domain name, and I think is a good one. My writing is progressing and I already started thinking about the best way to distribute the ebook online.

To begin with, I will use some pay per click campaigns to attract targetted traffic to the new web site, then I plan on maybe making the book available in other sites. That is why I am writing this post, I would like to know your suggestions and experiences with ebook distribution services.

I have reviewed Lulu, I like their community and the possibility of print on demand publishing and ebook distribution. They allow me to distribute a book through well known stores such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble, although it seems this is only for the printed editions.

I have also found ebook stores like eBookMall and Mobipocket that offer distribution of ebooks but I am still searching for testimonials of their customers to see how well they work.

Most of the sites I have reviewed have a non exclusive agreement, which is good, but royalties are sometimes too low and some charge additional fees.

What are your ideas on ebook publishing and distribution? Should I just sell it on my site? Will it be worth selling my ebook through other sites?

Technorati tags: ebooks | telework | telecommuting | publishing

Recently Freepay has imposed a time limit for all its sites. For the iPod Shuffle contest I have until May 30, 2006. They want people to complete the offers faster, but this could be a problem if you don’t get it quick.

Well, I still have some time and hope to get there soon. I’ll let you know.

Update: My new book is already available for purchase. Get your copy of Telework People now.

I’ve started working in a book about teleworking. I already told some friends and got many nice messages from all over the world offering help with feedback and translations, thank you all! It will be a really challenging project, a global book, and I’m sure it will be fun.

I would like to ask for your help; I’d like to know a little more about your teleworking experiences. I am including my own and a basic list of questions that you could use as guidelines.

Plese feel free to let the Shakespeare in you go wild and tell us all of what you think is relevant about your life as a teleworker.

The Questions

• When did you start teleworking?
• Why did you start teleworking?
• What do you do? Tell us a little about your work
• Was it hard?
• What were your first steps?
• What do your friends, family and co-workers think about you as a teleworker?
• What do you think is the best part of teleworking?
• Do you miss the human “physical” contact?
• Where are you going? What are your future plans as a teleworker?
• Where do you think the world is going? (this is kind of hard to tell but I’m just curious)

My Experiences As A Teleworker

I’ve been connected since the middle 80’s, of course we didn’t have the Internet, as we know it today, in those days. We had these things called BBS’s (bulletin board systems) and most of us were just having fun.

I met the real Internet on 1991 and logged in from my some old mainframe terminals at my university. I was just another user online until 1998, when I started thinking of Internet as a new way to run my business, that is the year I started teleworking.

I was an independent IT consultant for around 7 years. I specialized in networking and things were going ok, however, I got tired of spending all my time in my clients’s offices, struggling all the time with their computers and having lunch (if I could) at weird times.

I also wanted to keep learning new things and avoid getting stuck in the same routine. I just wanted to be at home. When my daughter was born, a few years later, I realized that becoming a teleworker was the correct choice. Now I can’t imagine my life spending 8, or more, hours a day away from my wife and daughter.

When I started teleworking I had a very different idea of what I wanted to do. My first attempt was trying to create a technology oriented content web site and make profits from selling advertisement space (silly me, I know). It was a really bad idea between 1998 and 1999, and living in Peru where Internet usage was very low at the time.

Then a friend of mine told me:

“You have learned a lot trying to make your own web site, why don’t you try making web sites for other people?”

I discarded the idea at once, no way!, I wanted to be the next Jeff Bezos and not just another guy making web sites, but when the lack of money became a bigger problem and somebody asked:

“Alexis, could you design our web site?”

“Hell yeah!” was an almost automatic response.

Now I’m a still a guy making web sites. I’ve learned a lot since 1998. Now I focus on helping people and small businesses in many countries to be successful online and I feel very proud of it.

In the beginning, however, the change was quite difficult, the first 6 months I still visited my old job clients because teleworking didn’t produce any income. At some time I had to decide that this had to be an all or nothing change, I referred most of my clients to my ex-partner and even stopped answering the phone for a while.

I spent almost one year learning some new skills until I got my first client. Those were difficult days but I survived.

When I decided to make the jump, and add the tele to my worker title, the first thing I did was creating a business plan, a very rough one. I had a list of services I wanted to sell and based on that I decided the new skills I had to learn. Being a self-taught person helped a lot with that.

Most of my friends think that working at home is great, however, they just laugh at me when I tell them that they can also do it. I think maybe they would miss their regular jobs.

My wife, who works with me now, and my daughter, are very happy to have daddy always at home, although they hate me sometimes for being a workaholic.

(Note to myself: wife looking at me right now, I have to stop writing this soon, it’s almost 10pm and we have a movie waiting for us)

I think other members in my family don’t have an idea of what I do. My mother just can’t understand it and my father in law doesn’t care as long as his daugther and granddaughter are fine. I could be mistaken but, anyway, I don’t think they will read this. (Just in case: hi mom!, love you too)

I think the best part of teleworking is being free. You can decide what you want to do with your life, if you are a self-employeed teleworker the better, and how to manage your time. Freedom is a human basic need.

Being at home with my family, watching my daugther growing, is another great thing of being a teleworker. I wouldn’t change that for anything.

I don’t really miss the human contact, now I talk with more people than I used to when I had a regular job. Thinking that a teleworker is a lonely and isolated person is a big misconception. Now we have so many tools available and we can be in touch with everybody at anytime.

I don’t know where I’m going. Of course I have goals and plans, and I like to be organized, but I don’t want to miss the fun of new challenges, like this book I’m currently writing. I want to know new places, learn new things, meet new people. I can be everywhere and do what I like from there. I just want to be free and have a good life, nothing fancy really, but that’s just me.

It’s even more difficult guessing where our world is going; I just know the world is changing and I’m sure, as Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge have reminded us many times, that the Singularity is coming, yes, in our lifetime, and the world as we know it (if the bad guys don’t get us all killed before) will be a very different place to live 30 years from now.

The Teleworking Book

Well, that’s it! Now you know a little more about me and have some ideas about what I’d like to know of most teleworkers.

I’m sure sharing our experiences will be a great excercise and I’ll try to get the best of it included in the book.

Share the fun, let us know about your life as a teleworker.