Okay, I just spent a few minutes dissing Google for their lame implementation of a Calendar App. Now to something that doesn't suck: SmugMug's incredible photo sharing site. For years, I've been trying to find a way to take my pro and not-so-pro images from my own archive to a more publicly accessible format. Mostly, I've cranked out slideshows or galleries with tools like Slideshow Pro for Joomla or from within Lightroom with various 3rd party widgets. And while it worked, it didn't work well at all. it was cumbersome and gave very mixed results, particularly when it came time to disseminate images widely.

So I finally decided that the way to go might be one of the online outfits. Yes, I've known about Picassa and Flikr and all the others for years, but the one that leapt out at me early on was SmugMug. It seemed really friendly, somehow, professional yet unpretentious, efficient yet fun. After a recent trip to Europe, I opened up an account and starting playing around. I was blown away by the whole thing -- it's by far the best application I've seen in a long, long time. Add to that Jeffrey Friedl's totally amazing Adobe Lightroom plugin that makes it ridiculously easy to move images from your archive to the web with granular control, and you've got a winning package. No, SmugMug is not free. Nor is Jeff's widget. But, really. They are *so* worth the price of admission if you do anything even remotely serious with images. If you've just got a couple of snaps to drop on friends now and then? Don't bother, obviously. Go with Facebook or one of the big freebie sites. But for the real deal, SmugMug is the best deal. Thanks, guys.

So, I've been migrating to Google Calendar over the course of the past couple of months, particularly for use in connection with my work running part of the Ford Sayre Nordic Racing program here in my neck of the woods. Now, I've been a Google fan since waay back when, but lately I've been less than impressed. First of all, their disaster of a login system is putting me off big time (I've got a domain account, a separate gmail account, a regular google apps account -- and no way of consolidating them, so I spend forever logging in and out and up and down in order to get anything done. It's ridiculous that Google can't find a way to help user consolidate this stuff, so we have one master login with access to all our Google toys).

And then there are the quirks within apps like the calendar. Hey, it's a great tool -- and it's free, so you can't really knock it. But, seriously. I enter an event and fill in the description field -- and then I discover that there's absolutely no way in hell of displaying the info in the description field anywhere? I mean, WTF? Apparently, that field can only be printed out on an agenda or something irrelevant like that. But, c'mon, this is pathetic, Google. And what's really pathetic is the fact that users have been begging for this obvious feature for well over a year now, with no -- absolutely no -- response from the Google developers. Posting after posting on the official Google calendar help forum with no response at all.

At this point, I'm tempted to find a workaround, but it's really irritating -- and a discredit to the Google reputation as a provider of near flawless services -- that the calendar app is out there with such an obvious shortcoming. At very best a C+ for this effort, Google. Next time, show your work and do it right.

You're looking at this week's winner of the Parent Prize: Todd Marcum from Salem, Oregon thought terrorizing his four kids with an electric dog collar was the way to go. Really makes you wonder: if your idea of parenting is repeatedly driving a three year old to tears, maybe you should have stuck to jerking off instead of four repeats of that whole "hey-honey-let's-get-pregnant-that'll-be-fun" thing?

(Satesmanjournal.com via Gizmodo)

A client of mine wants to set up a blog on the joomla 1.5 site I recently built for them. They would like this, that, and the other feature that are precisely the reasons why a lot of people over the past years have slammed Joomla as a bad blogging platform. I blog on Joomla, but I don't need all the bells and whistles, so up until now I've been fine with the limitations. It's easy enough to run Wordpress on Joomla -- the guys over at corePHP make a highly acclaimed (pay-to-play) widget that'll do just that, and since my client's blog is brand new, there's no existing content to worry about.

But. Perhaps it's time for me to move to Wordpress -- and I have a couple of clients with large existing blogs that might want to make the move as well. So I looked for a migration tool, and found very little until I came across this site, that seems to offer exactly what I'm after. I've got some old 1.0.15 sites to move, as well as some 1.5.9 sites, all of it into (preferably) WP 2.7.1 installs so I don't have to futz with subsequent upgrades just to get current. Nice to see that the Open Source community still delivers -- both Joomla and WordPress are phenomenal tools, and between them I believe they can cover pretty much any and all online communications needs.

What a weird way to try to make a living. Some bozo called shawnwilson54[at]googlemail.com just emailed me:

Hi,

I wondered if you would be interested in buying the .COM version of your domain name willowschool.us for $195 ?

Let me know.

Shawn.

Now, here's the thing. That domain name is publicly available. I just registered it thru my usual registrar for a whopping ten bucks. As I wrote to Shawn:

Hi Shawn,

The answer is "no": I would not be interested in buying the name for $195. But thx so much for the reminder. I totally forgot to lock that domain down the last time I was out shopping. Just got it for $9.99 -- almost 95 percent off the rather exorbitant "asking price". Wat a bargain, and what a great and interesting service you offer!

How this pays his bills I have no idea. Reminds me of the Underpants Gnomes.