Gerd’s Blog

I was using blogger since 2 months now and i have to admit that it is far no that usable as i thought. Today i decided to move my blog including the content to an other tool. I think i will shift to WordPress but i have not made the final decision. The domain http://blog.gerd-saurer.com and the RSS Fees for the Blog and the Comments will stay as they are.
I apologies for the troubles this will cause you. Until now i really was very satisfied with the Google Products but Bloggers is far not that i expected.

If you are interested what was the crucial factor for my decision:
A few hours ago i posted my Post Titled “Google Reader Feeds” which was original an older draft version about a month old. As i posted it i did not recognize that the publish date was set to the original date the draft was created. This is not what i expected because it was published today and not about a month ago. I tried to change the date but the only thing i go was an error that i should publish something at the bloggers google group. I searched there and found several entries already more than a year old - no comment when it will be solved.

On one of my last post i was writing about Meta RSS Feeds and that it would be nice if Google Reader would support a possibility to get feeds for special tags. I just step over a post by Niall Kennedy (already posted in December 2005) that describes how you can use the API of Google Reader and subscribe to special tags. Be aware that not all stuff posted there is still working. The API is similar to gdata.

After a short look into my Reader settings i found that you can share special tags also within the readers settings.

I must admit that i have not seen the settings as i was writing my last post.

I have posted that the company i am working for is searching for developers a few weeks ago. As mentioned we tried to use http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/ to find engineers that are searching for challenges as Christopher mentioned in his post. After the posting is not available any more i want to share our results with you.
We got 5 Replies - 3 of them where from Indian Consulting companies and just 2 where from interested candidates. I did not expect there would be much replies special if you take a closer look at postings form Europe (at the moment 14) but two is fare too few.

As several of you have already mentioned Skype is not working correct at the moment. I was not able to log into the service. A short look at the Heartbeat website of Skype shows the following screen.
So how can any of the above services work without the login / registration service which is broken?

I was playing around with OpenID for some time now and until now I am very satisfied with it. For this reason i also activated it on my blog as authentication mechanism but more on this later.

First of all for all of you who don’t know OpenId - what does it mean? OpenId is an decentralized Single sign on system for the web. In reality the user just have to know an URL. Instead of entering and User name and Password on every site the user just the URL into the filed that is provided. If you are interested how OpenId works exactly just visit the wikipedia article or openid.net.

At the moment there are not that much websites that provide an log in with OpenId but the protocol is becoming more and more accepted until the last time. Even Blogger is trying it out in their beta version (see my experiences with blogger in Finally I moved from blogger to wordpress).

So if you are interested in your own OpenId there are several ways to get one. If you are an WordPress user you can already use the url of your blog as your id. On the other hand there are several providers out there that offer free OpenId Services or you can set up an server on your own. I decided to use MyOpenId. On the other hand i wanted to be in control of my id’s and not to addicted to one provider. The good thing here is the designer already took this situation into account. You can simply link your own domain to an other OpenId provierd. I for example use www.gerd-saurer.com as my OpenId. I entered the following configuration to my default website which indicates every OpenId request for authentication to use my MyOpenId service. The nice thing here is if I want to change the service I just have to change the meta tags to my new Provider.

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server”/> <!– For delegating OpenID v1.x–>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://gerd.saurer.myopenid.com”/> <!– For delegating OpenID v1.x–>
<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://gerd.saurer.myopenid.com/xrds”/> <!– For delegating OpenID v2.x–>

After using my new OpenId on several sits now i wanted to inform you that you can use your own Id now on my blog to post Comments. I hope you enjoy the smooth way of loging into sits and don’t have to press the reset password button every two months because you forgot the user pass word again.

If you like to see some videos on OpenId, how it works and what you can do with it just check out the following presentations:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2288395847791059857
http://www.slideshare.net/daveman692/openid-bootcamp-tutorial

As already mentioned a few posts before i’m using Google Reader as my primary tool for reading news on the web. Fore some times now, i also use the sharing functionality to publish my Link blog on the web for friends, colleagues and every one who is interested in. Hopefully your are and will subscribe if you don’t have until now.

I deeply believe that the News providers in the Internet as we know them today (e.g websites of news papers, TV stations, ..) will change completely in the near future. Sites like them can only provide very abstract content because of the big differences in their customers. The problem here is that these providers have only very limited time to provide content dedicated to special needs.

I never liked or used features like digg, del.icio.us or Stumple. In my opinion they could not work because they need further investigation from the user. If we take a closer look to news i would argue that there is a much more intuitive way to let others now about your favorite news - sharing.

Take a little look a the figure below. Lets assume that the bigger cyan bullets are users and the smaller blue ones are communication channels for shared news items the base of course are several news feeds of the web. If such channels can be used as input channels the persons that provide them can be seen as filter units of information.
At the moment Google Reader supports one channel of every person (account) in my opinion this is not very practicable at all. Normally persons are not just interested in one area. Tagging is a very common method for organizing informations. I would like to see that Google provides a possibility to share also icons for specialize tags. An other type of categorization may be the importance of news. Information that is more important (maybe stared could be an indicator for the Google Reader) can be provided on an different channel too.
With such an infrastructure every user will be able to select the information channels he wants to subscribe much better. Of course every one can choose if he will be a content provider or not. In the picture above we don’t see if the information that flows over the channels is more generalized or specialized. This depends on the content providers and the subscribers.

In this first stage i was just taking about sharing content. Several days ago i came across the Website of share.opml.org which i think could be very useful. At the moment most of the readers do not have the possibility to publish the opml file of their current subscriptions.
The orange points are now the publishing channels of the opml file. As you can see there are several persons that are much more interested in the content that is read by others that they even use their subscriptions as input for their information unit which means that they subscribe to the same channels.
In this figure i have also removed the base of old news feeds because there is no base any more. It doesn’t make any difference if the content provider is a Blog a old school News website or an person filtering content for you.

At the moment the company i am working for (located in Vienna) is searching for new developers. It is not that easy to find qualified developers that fit in our team these days. As mentioned in the last post we are using Scrum as development process and our primary programming language is C#. So if you are interested feel free to write me.

Joel Spolsk wrote a book called “Smart and Gets Things Done” which addresses exactly the challenges hiring people.
In his book he describes how his company tries to find the best developers available. As he mentions in his book “top technical talent doesn’t look for employment” they look for so much more than only an employment with high salary, even in Europe. It’s highly recommended to read this book.

By the way this time we are trying to use http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/ to find new employees. At the moment most of the posts on the site are from the US or India but let’s see what the posting will bring us. Anyway i will report the results of the posting in a view days.

Lately i noticed some changes in the search results of google. More and more rss news feeds are returned as top results as you can see in the screenshot below. This is really a big problem becaus if you click on it immediately your configured RSS reader opens (in my case this is the Google Reader). So what to do now? First of all normally i don’t want to add the feed to my subscriptions and second i am sure that this post is too old to appear in the list of the latest RSS items.

Post located on Software Engeneering - Best Practice:

http://best-practice-software-engineering.blogspot.com/2007/02/tech-software-reusability.html