I again was blog surfing this morning and came across a post about sharing items from your blog reader – at least if that blog reader is Google Reader.

Google Reader has some quirky features but one thing is does well is keep your blog reading in check across multiple machines. I tend to have at least three different computers I use regularly and when traveling on short 1 or 2 day trips I try to go without a computer and use what every I can get my hands on if I need to send a quick email or check the news. For these reasons, Google Reader is great.

I collaborate with a number of like minded groups. Mind you, each group is “like minded” but there is not much overlap between the groups. Within each group, we have common topics of interest but very few common sources of information. Sharing blog entries that are informative or of interest has been relegated to either emailing links or cut/paste links into chat windows. Both of these methods escalates blogs to a higher priority which is precisely what we don’t want to do. Blogs and blog reading is a low priority task that should be set aside for prescribed amounts of time and not serve as an interrupt – but I am way off topic at this point so back to Google Reader and sharing information. Let me pull all the important info together now …

1. Google Reader lets you tag entries and you can tag an entry with more than one tag
2. Google Reader lets you see a page with all entries of a given tag
3. Google Reader lets you give any tag-page public address
4. You get to choose who gets the public address
5. Recipients of the public address get a “feed” they can add to their blog reader (Google reader not required)

Google has seen the light and written up the instructions here.

I would love to find a similar solution that was “reader independent” because not everyone I collaborate with uses Google Reader.

WOW that was FAST !!!!

It took all of 6 hours for the Internet to catch up with my new Service provider and host. It took me all of 15 minutes to restore my blog ! This is cool – and totally unexpected <sigh>

I had envisioned troubles lots of troubles here in river city … with a capital “T”. The hardest part was shutting off my old provider and getting control of my WHOIS registration. The switch over happened much faster than I expected and the reload of my blog was a bit of a concern.

Well, back to work !

Cartoon by Gary Varvel

I’ve had some less than pleasant experiences over the past week with my web site. First my blog got temporarily trashed by a service error on the MySQL instance on the server. I tried their email support but that didn’t get a response in a reasonable amount of time so I decided to hang on their 888 number until I finally got a real person. Fortunately, within 3 minutes of getting a real person, it was resolved.

Next, all mail started to bounce. The bad part was that outbound mail worked but inbound messages got rejected so people trying to reach any of the mail users on my site got the impression we had closed up shop.

It turns out my ISP actually knew this was happening to “some number of their customers” as an “unfortunate situation as they migrated to new hardware and software”. Rather than warn customers, they chose to stay quiet and avoid “unnecessary concern”. Not good. Not good at all.

I’m currently stuck in the first year of a 2yr contract but these two problems are not the first I’ve ever had. So, I am considering jumping ship and eating the loss. My requirements are pretty simple, MySQL, PHP, email, FTP, etc. These are the basics when hosting on Linux.

Who should I switch to ?

I asked an old friend for some helpful ideas on a logo for this site. The logo that has been up for most of the past 10 months was a mashup of some text and clip-art from Microsoft Office so I felt it needed to change. Also, I wanted something simple so it would work very big *and* very small.

The new logo uses a green accent so that precipitated some style sheet changes for the site as well to remove some of the blue elements.

I’m including a screen clip for posterity because I don’t know how long this look with persist <grin> I am no 100% satisfied with the results but it is close. I think the font needs to change but I’ve been through 8 or 10 different ones and none have been right. I didn’t try the Ubuntu font yet so perhaps that will do the trick !

I was reviewing the link-backs to my bloc and found one to a site called “Loadn Consultancy”. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what the heck that blog is. My best guess is it is an exercise in software programming and random phase concatenation. At first, I thought it was designed to generate blog traffic and push the company’s name up on search engines. But I discounted that because the site would generate a negative presence and the “contact” and “about” links say nothing. If it were not for the some of the word choices, it would almost past for a bad language translation.

To demonstrate what I mean about the blog content, read this abbreviated post:

This, of bad credit equity home loan refinancing, may win debilitating to impractical bonus.

The bad credit equity home loan refinancing that slide investigate geard for rate mortgage rhinoceros is unfairly the circle of the explanation. Bad credit equity home loan refinancing – Interest profits are and contest walk based on caps to the director or libor argue. Both of them tailor visual drag s. Bad credit equity home loan refinancing – On the bad credit equity home loan refinancing designer lanyard the flak is great way project concurrent cancellation, trustworthy high rates is stipulation to execute hope vegetable mess desire swiss rebateing more interior rut requisition.
Source: Loan Consultancy

Any idea what this site represents ? Are there others out there like it ? With all skepticism, I have to ask, “is it some new scam?”