I’m disappointed with how hard it is to get people to use feeds to track updates on websites. The idea is pretty simple. You start your online browsing experience from a special feed reader tool that collects updates from your favorite websites. It’s a real time-saver because you don’t have to visit the websites to [...]

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The folks at Google decided to re-invent e-mail.  What would e-mail look like if we could “start over” and re-create it? You might think, “e-mail isn’t THAT old is it?” Actually it is. Internet e-mail and the specifications that define how it works have been around since 1982 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821). In the last twenty-seven years we’ve [...]

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Google is winning because it works.  People like things that “just work”.  Let’s look at home computers.  They have become more complicated and error prone.  This has to do with Viruses, half-baked software, Microsoft engineering, and too many options on hardware.  Users get frustrated when their IT friend says, “Just buy a new PC from Best [...]

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Mashed up a few of the locations for missionaries from church and google maps (using GMaps from Firestorm Technologies) on the church website I’ve been developing. I was worried about finding some royalty free country flag icons that would work for markers but those were easily found. Wondering what is in the new “Pro” version [...]

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I’ve seen all these great applications of google maps, read a bit about the API, and think someday I’ll try that out. Well I got a key and started playing around with it. Quickly I was overwhelmed with JavaScript. I’m a Java programmer and we just don’t get along with JavaScript (well I don’t). I [...]

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Well after hearing a few people adding Google AdSense to web sites to pay for hosting fees, or even make some extra cash I decided to add it here to try it out. I’m also working on another website, http://lifeinnorthernmichigan.com to see if I can actually make some money with it. A co-workers neighbor that [...]

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