LookIt

Backing up a Blogger blog

A friend of mine has started a blog as part of her school work. Over the years, I have instilled in her the religion of backing everything up. Having learned well, she asked me "so, how do I back up my blog"? After we determined that it was a Blogger blog, I set up a test blog there so I could find the right part of the admin settings...

...and there are none. You can't back up your blog. Note to Google: let people do this easily. You are teaching people bad habits if you don't make offsite backup quick and easy. For many people, a blog is their creative outlet. We tell them to back up the writing on their computers; they should be able to back up their writing on the Internet.

After a bit of searching, I found Blogger Backup Utility. It only works on Windows, so my friend can't run it, but I could run it for her. I will remember to do so each month (along with all my other backups). It produces an Atom feed of her entire blog. The makers get extra points for the Atom validating. (Updated: I was wrong about the HTML content being borked. Thanks to Sam Ruby for explaining why.)

Blue Cross of California: how not to handle patient privacy

One would think that a major health organization like Blue Cross of California would care more about patient privacy. I went for a checkup today, and at the end they asked me to take a "brief online survey". I went to the URL they gave, http://www.bluecrossca.com/healthycheck, where there is a link for the survey. The survey is *not* run by Blue Cross, but the nice people at SurveyMonkey. The data, which would normally include my name and phone number, is not protected by HTTPS. This goes against their stated web privacy guidelines, but there is no place to report it to them. Pretty lame...

Talking to Facebook

One of the nice things about Facebook is that anyone can set up groups. One of the funny things is that people use the names of groups to communicate with Facebook itself. Today I just joined the oh-so-subtly named group "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!(Official petition to Facebook)". It's description starts out Recently, Facebook has started 'pulling a myspace' by not allowing people to post profile pictures of babies nursing. The pictures have been reported as 'obscene' and have been removed- their posters warned not to repost or fear being kicked off of Facebook.

Yep, that shows that the folks running Facebook have no idea how to police content. So, here's a clue for Facebook's management: no one over 13 finds breast-feeding obscene. You telling them that you find it obscene shows how little you have in common with your users; maybe that's not a good long-term strategy.

Love in the Ruins

People who have been in the SF Bay Area any time in the past 25 or so years may recognize the name Bonnie Hayes as a great rocker. I just got her latest CD, and she can still sing and play up a storm. Even better, her song writing is still quite snazzy. Every song on the CD has at least a couple of great lyrics and guitar hooks. It's good to hear that time has treated all parts of her music well, even if she never hit The Big Time.

Cell phone cost

Talking about how Apple could be on track to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of next year, John Gruber sez: "Apple is going to push the price down as fast as they can. At $599, the iPhone was better but more expensive than its competitors. At $399 it’s better and cost-competitive. Next year Apple will have iPhone models that are better and cheaper than its competitors."

That statement assumes that Apple is in charge of the overall price, but they're not: AT&T has a lot to do with the cost. One way a competitor with a kinda-good-as phone can compete on price with the iPhone is to partner with a service that is cheaper and better than AT&T (I hear the "better" part should be easy). Most cell phone users care about cost, and if the first year of this competing service (phone cost + subscription) looks better than Apple + AT&T, Apple loses a sale.

Of course, I could be completely wrong: the cell carriers might be as clueless as the record labels and Apple gets a free ride.

New math for iPods

There was a great phrase in today's announcement from Apple: "New iPod classic". In IM, Chuq says "anything named 'classic' by Apple really means 'going away soon'". No doubt. The classic has a moving part (the hard drive), while the nano doesn't: guess which causes more customer service headaches.

The other interesting part is that the new 8GB nano + $100 = the new iPod touch. There is likely to be a big difference between the two which makes me hope that the nano doesn't get axed next year, namely that the battery life for the nano is probably much longer than for the touch, even if you never use the video or WiFi features. While it turns out that massive storage capacity is only of interest to a small number of buyers, battery life is likely to be important to many.

Not coercing standards

Microsoft is not known for its subtlety in some standards organizations. Fortunately, not all such organizations take kindly to corporate pressure. In this case, ISO has rejected Microsoft's attempts to jam OOXML down their throats. Even the US delegation pointed out serious problems with the spec, such as examples that are not valid and a proprietary naming scheme. The fact that Microsoft let the ballot happen even though it knew that there were these (and a raft of other) problems shows a problem on the corporate level that will probably cause lost sales for Office, one of their stalwart cash cows.