Originating in 1998, Web Routines are one of the first implementations of “tabbed” type browsing, but further addressed user browsing habits rather than just session window organization.
This idea lays the foundation for compelling feature sets and user reliance, while the host gains insight into user interests, allowing automated site suggestions, useful product and service endorsements and other value added services.
Web Routines are about organizing users’ web browsing habits into a natural flow. The resulting system is as sticky and personal as email, and frequently leaves the users feeling satisfied-as if they’ve just browsed the entire Internet.
“It’s like bookmarks on steroids” ... “Sometimes bookmarks and Favorites aren't enough. Sometimes you need a little guidance to keep track of your daily routine on the Web.” - Al Fasoldt (tech columnist/radio/tv)
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I just listened to this week's TWiT (fantastic podcast), where they were talking about Blogs, RSS, iPod, Twitter, Podcatchers, etc... That sent me back a few years with my initial experimentation with consuming podcasts. I didn't get an iPod at first, and had a Samsung YEPP YP-T7Z (1GB) mp3 player, which was nice, but I would soon find that it was rather bland.
It felt like the device needed to both be the bucket to hold the mp3 files, but also the mechanism to receive them. ITunes plays on the concept of your "home base," tying up, and tying you to your home computer to receive and update your iPod. It should be that plugging in your media player into ANY computer should auto start the appropriate software to look for and receive new content, for storage back on the device. When you disconnected, your device would be both power and content charged. This is similar to the Windows-on-a-thumbdrive virtualization concept, utilizing the host computers's (PC or Mac, why not?) cpu and bandwidth.
I tried putting some lightweight podcatchers on the device to varying degrees of success, but didn't get anything solid or compelling enough to believe I had it right. I even provided feedback to some of the authors that the software should be runnable from (and to) the player hardware's filesystem.
It ends up the the iPod was vastly superior for listening to podcasts with it's content switching and resume features. ITunes really isn't that bad since I have to charge the iPod each day or so anyway... now my thoughts have turned to trying to connect the iPod (while at work) back to the home PC via a virtual USB connection and LogMeIn.com (which would probably CRAWL so slowly as to be useless).
I wonder if putting a virtual machine (VMware or VPC) on my iPod to be the ITunes "home base" would work. I would want it to run on any PC box I connected it to, and ITunes would have to recognize the iPod as being "plugged in" when it would in fact, be the unmountable "C:" drive. Too bad ITunes is such a heavyweight program. In this scenario, ITunes would use 2x the diskspace necessary to store music/podcasts for consuming on the run. For example, ITunes would download a TWiT episode onto on the C: drive somewhere to have it available... then detecting the the iPod was connected, it would copy the TWiT episode to the iPod (C: drive remember?)... What a colossal waste of space and effort for what MIGHT work, and certainly would be burden/timewaste and disk corruption risk... but it would be fun to try :-)
Navigate through your favorite web sites with a natural flow. Let your web browser help.
I had this compelling idea back in 1998 and began to secretly pursue it. We were in the middle of the Dot-com Bubble and this new web browsing concept that had more potential than most of the products of the day that were getting millions of dollars from VCs and IPOs. I was more interested in product success than a quick sellout. Now, after almost 10 years I’d built a proof of concept, seen its addictiveness, acquired a patent (7 years after the initial filing), and approached Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, etc... about acquiring the technology.
Big companies have very strict (paranoid) rules about receiving unsolicited product ideas, due to concern over law suits, and would prefer to have an idea be public knowledge before give it any consideration. I, on the other hand, felt it was a golden opportunity for an Internet savvy corporation to benefit by offering unique features before their competitors.
Now that the key companies are aware of my pursuit, and they need the concepts to be more visible before further consideration, I am posting the ideas. I’ve committed a lot to this effort across the last 10 years, and before a large company can deny or dictate terms of public use, I will use this opportunity to spell out the terms at which the public may utilize my work without cost or fear of cease-and-desist retribution.
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IZArc is fantastic for handling virtually every possible file compression, but I'm sure you already knew that. Microsoft did well building zip into the operating system, but IZArc is better.
Anyway, when you install it, you can optionally specify a virus scanning program. I have McAfee / Network Associates VirusScan (v8.0.0), and it took me a moment to figure out reasonable values for the Virus Scanner options. I didn't see any settings on the web for what other people were using for scan32, so here is what I did.
Options / Configuration / Program Locations / Virus Scanner
Optional Virus Scanner: C:\Program Files\Network Associates\VirusScan\scan32.exe
Parameters: %d /AUTOEXIT /NOESTIMATE
If anyone has better settings, let me know.
As a tip to godaddy subscribers (such as myself), I post my experiences with google page hosting...
I have a host (example.org for this writeup) domain purchased through godaddy.com, and I wanted to host pages at Google. Google makes it easy to point http://www.example.org to their page hosting services, but there is no (or little) information about making http://example.org point to the same web site. The result was that if you people visited http://example.org, they would be greeted with a godaddy domain parked page.
The good people at godaddy.com lead me to forward the main domain to the subdomain.
