Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Flock issues

Not surprisingly, that Flock browser I mentioned is still new enough to have a couple of kinks - two of which I discovered today. You have to understand that the attraction of Flock to me was the degree to which blog posting was built into the browser itself - a few less steps for me.

The first issue I discovered was that when I posted to my Blogger-based blog - this one, that is - the hyperlink didn't carry through. When I tried to fix the posting, which it seems the browser-based tool is supposed to facilitate, it wouldn't post it. I kept getting Blogger errors - said that I wasn't connected to the server. The blog tool built into Flock also suggested that I could add tags, though Blogger has no facility for tags/categories in its interface. I thought "oh cool, somehow they're integrating tag creation with Blogger postings!" I was completely mistaken. All that happened was that I hung up my browser.

The second issue was considerably more problematic & appeared when I tried to post to our WordPress blog (http://cslibweb.wordpress.com). The postings to this blog get incorporated into a webpage ("New & Noteworthy") via an ASP program. The moment I posted the latest New @ CSL entry (re: an online tutorial we just put up on how a bill becomes a law in CT), the new.asp page (New & Noteworthy) crashed with an ugly VBScript error. REALLY UGLY. I had to restart IIS to get things back in shape again.

So I decided that since I was having trouble with posting to either of the blogs via Flock's built-in blog capabilities (and yet, I'd done one posting successfully to this blog using it), I would remove and then redo the accounts - perhaps being more careful as to which API the auto-detection/setup tool seemed to think the blog was using (in the case of WordPress, it had registered as a Movable Type API, rather than the "WordPress blog" option and in the case of Blogger, it had registered as an "Atom API" instead of the other "Blogger API" option). I don't know it those are correct or not, of course, but worth a try?! but still, I went to readd the accounts & Flock won't let me. (claims I have the wrong uname & pwd, but won't allow me to change them - though it tells me to hit Cancel to do so... but doing that or anything else for that matter doesn't work)

Anyhow - point being - as cool as Web2.0 is, these products in the early phases of their dev are understandably a little squidgy.

BTW, did you all hear about the Google applications for business (officially known by the unmemorable Google Apps for Your Domain - at https://www.google.com/a/)? They're missing an online word processing program (though Writely might fill that need, from what I hear) and, of course, a spreadsheet. Still, Google Apps offers some features that would be useful for a small-time biz that doesn't want to shell out $$$$$ for the commercial Office suites. They offer Gmail, Talk (an IM client), Calendar (scheduling - can do groups, too), and Google Page Creator. More importantly (perhaps) than the price is that anything on Google isn't tied to a pc or a place, which = mobility & more options for personal computing devices.

There is also a Google applications for education program - https://www.google.com/a/edu/, but it only offers the first 3 of the business apps (Gmail, Talk, Calendar).

But all of this is just the beginning, folks, mark my words... a war is on (as so many have predicted) - between MS and Google!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Sharon,

Just forwarded your blog post to the head of our QA team and the owner of the blog module so they can help you.

Cheers,

Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock