{"id":674,"date":"2006-12-03T02:08:57-05:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-03T07:08:57+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2006\/12\/03\/go-go-gadget-fingers\/"},"modified":"2006-12-14T18:58:22-05:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-14T23:58:22+00:00","slug":"go-go-gadget-fingers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2006\/12\/03\/go-go-gadget-fingers\/","title":{"rendered":"Go go gadget&nbsp;fingers!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='e-content'><p>Earlier this evening <cite class=\"name\">Jimmy<\/cite> <a href=\"http:\/\/hindle.blogspot.com\/2006\/12\/massed-gadgets-of-hercules.html\">listed<\/a> a bunch of non-search Google-icious things that he uses.  For various reasons (including temperament) I <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> use most of them:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Analytics.  Tried it, <a href=\"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2005\/11\/20\/easy-come-easy-go\/\">didn&#8217;t like it<\/a>.  Because this site is hosted on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dreamhost.com\/rewards.cgi?peterj2\">DreamHost<\/a> (sign up with that link and get 25% off; I also get a kickback), I get full logs that I can parse with whatever tool I like (currently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.analog.cx\/\">Analog<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mrunix.net\/webalizer\/\">Webalizer<\/a>) so it&#8217;s no big loss.<\/li>\r\n<li>Blogger.  As it says down at the bottom of the page, <q>Petroglyphs is powered by <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/\">WordPress<\/a>.<\/q>  I do have an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/10705408\">account<\/a>, but it&#8217;s only so I can comment on blogs that require it.<\/li>\r\n<li>Gmail.  All my mail goes through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dreamhost.com\/rewards.cgi?peterj2\" title=\"sign up with this link and get 25% off; I also get a kickback\">DreamHost<\/a>, on my own domain, so I can do with it as I wish.  As with Blogger, I do have an account; in this case it&#8217;s a side effect of using Talk to communicate with my sister and brother.  (An interesting fact is that despite having <em>never<\/em> used Gmail for any mail of any sort&#8212;no personal mail, no website signups, no mailing lists&#8212;and never allowing it to be advertised or added to things like user directories, it&#8217;s full of spam!  The account name isn&#8217;t something easily brute-forced, so <em>somehow<\/em> it&#8217;s been shared.  Sounds vaguely evil to me&#8230;.)<\/li>\r\n<li>Desktop.  Not available for my <a href=\"http:\/\/kernel.org\/\">platform of choice<\/a>, and I don&#8217;t use any other platform to an extent that it would be at all useful.  I&#8217;ve played a bit with <a href=\"http:\/\/beagle-project.org\/\">Beagle<\/a> but found I used it so little that it was hard to justify the resource hit it took to run.<\/li>\r\n<li>Google Alerts, Google Blog Search Atom feeds, and Google News Search Atom feeds.  (Jimmy mentioned Gmail Alerts; these are similar features.)  These I do use for a few <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=lenni%20jabour\">terms of interest<\/a>, although I&#8217;ve generally found (or created) most of the links that appear on it before it notifies me of them.  All three have a frustrating habit of <cite class=\"term\">alerting<\/cite> me multiple times of pages that have existed for years.  All in all I prefer <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/\">Technorati<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n<li>Calendar.  My calendar is private; when there are public events I&#8217;m planning to attend I add them to <a href=\"http:\/\/upcoming.org\/user\/7905\/\">my upcoming.org account<\/a>.  Everything work-related is in my PDA, and I wouldn&#8217;t publish it to a third party server in the first place.<\/li>\r\n<li>Page Creator.  <strong><cite class=\"term\">Shudder<\/cite><\/strong>.  Nothing but raw <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/xhtml1\/\">XHTML<\/a>, <a href=\"www.w3.org\/TR\/CSS21\/\">CSS<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ECMAScript\">ECMAScript<\/a> for this boy, all written by hand in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vim.org\/\">Vim<\/a> or WordPress&#8217;s <cite class=\"term\">markup view<\/cite>.<\/li>\r\n<li>Personalized Home.  My 100+ browser tabs and <a href=\"http:\/\/gregarius.org\/\">aggregator<\/a> are the closest things I have to a home page, and they have most everything I&#8217;m interested in.<\/li>\r\n<li>Talk.  As noted above, I&#8217;ve got an account that I use to chat with my siblings.  For most internal discussion at work I use our IRC server, and I use an MSN account (<em>ptui!<\/em>) for my other personal contacts.<\/li>\r\n<li>Google Maps.  I do use this one, although I primarily get to it with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/products\/firefox\/smart-keywords.html\">smart keyword<\/a> in Firefox.<\/li>\r\n<li>Google Video\/YouTube.  I&#8217;m a consumer of both&#8212;aren&#8217;t we all?&#8212;but have no need or desire to create or upload anything.<\/li>\r\n<li>Froogle.  Nope.<\/li>\r\n<li>Docs and Spreadsheets.  Nope.  It&#8217;s highly unlikely I&#8217;ll ever start creating and editing work files on a third-party server, and I use <a href=\"http:\/\/openoffice.org\/\">OpenOffice.org<\/a> for anything personal (which I wouldn&#8217;t be posting to a third-party service anyway).<\/li>\r\n<li>AdSense.  This site is an ad-free zone, with the exception of a very few personal endorsements like the DreamHost links above.  I did have AdSense on <a href=\"\/WhatsThatSong\"><cite class=\"title\">What&#8217;s That Song<\/cite><\/a> for a while, since it was advertising-based, but I think I only ever <cite class=\"term\">made<\/cite> a grand total of about fifty cents from it (which I never cashed out) before I killed off updates to the page a few years ago.<\/li>\r\n<li>Google Earth.  Used it a couple of times, and it&#8217;s sort of cool, but ultimately not of interest.<\/li>\r\n<li>Picasa.  I&#8217;ve got <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gimp.org\/\">The GIMP<\/a>, which does a whole lot more than Picasa, and <a href=\"http:\/\/gallery.menalto.com\/\">Gallery<\/a>, which does everything I need for publishing and sharing my pictures.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul><\/div><div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this evening Jimmy listed a bunch of non-search Google-icious things that he uses. For various reasons (including temperament) I don&#8217;t use most of them: Analytics. Tried it, didn&#8217;t like it. Because this site is hosted on DreamHost (sign up with that link and get 25% off; I also get a kickback), I get full&hellip;","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"venue_id":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}