A long time ago, I blogged elsewhere about Flock’s shelf feature and how it made my life easier. The feature is a little drag-and-drop area where you can dump images and snippets from web pages for later use in blog posts (or, I suppose, just as reminders).  I never used it much for assembling blog posts, but as a quickie spot to take notes, it actually helped me out. When I just wanted to jot down a quick thought that I wasn’t ready to flesh out into a blog post yet, I’d add a note to the shelf. I found that doing this actually prompted me to blog more because it reduced friction; I felt like I could write a quick note without committing to trying to write a whole blog post just yet. Not too long after I developed this workflow, the shelf changed, and the ability to add a typed note was removed (you could only drag things).

This week, wanting to take some notes about a book I’ve been reading, I found myself missing the feature again. Now that we’ve released 1.0, I think the feature has probably reached something close to its final form, so I felt comfortable writing a little addon to include the functionality I wanted. It adds menu items under the Tools menu and to the main context (right-click) menu inviting you to create a note. Selecting the item pops up a simple two-field dialog box that includes the note text and an optional title (the first 30 characters of your note are used if you specify no title). This gets added to the shelf (we call it the web clipboard now, though), and you can get to it later when needed. The web clipboard doesn’t allow you to edit notes once you’ve added them, but you can otherwise use these notes as you would any other web clipboard item (blog them, stick them in folders, delete them, reorder them). You can enter HTML if inclined, and it’ll render in the preview and in blog posts, though if you do this and don’t specify a title, the item itself in the web clipboard sidebar gets some weird formatting.

So there. Friction-free note-taking right there in your browser. Hope somebody besides me finds this useful. This won’t work in Firefox, unfortunately, as Firefox doesn’t have the web clipboard feature.

Blogged with Flock

This weekend, I conquered my fear of the circular saw. I tried using two different saws to help cut lap joints for a compost bin I started work on. The first is a little battery-powered deal that’s light-weight and easy on the wrist but that loses juice pretty fast and won’t cut very many boards. When it wore out, I decided to try my dad’s old circular saw, which I’ve had for a couple of years now but have never tried using because it’s huge and old and seemed maybe a little dangerous. But I had 32 lap joints to cut and was darned if I was going to do it all the old-fashioned way (which after a couple of hours wrangling various tools I figured out would have been easier anyway, at least for the part I was using the circular saws for). So anyway, as I got my dad’s saw out, I took a minute to think about what I’d do if I happened to chop a finger off. I’ve seen on TV or read that you can transport small amputated appendages to the hospital for reattachment in milk (why milk and not just ice I’m not sure). But this actually represented something of a dilemma for me, as we have two sorts of milk these days, the cheap skim stuff that keeps me from cultivating big floppy man boobs and the 2% creamy organic stuff that we think is probably less likely to make Lennie bear children with extra limbs and radioactive teeth. Which milk should I stick my amputated (and as I pictured it, still twitching) finger in once I picked it up from where it lay partially buried in a drift of sawdust? When I was relating this train of thought to a coworker this afternoon, my dilemma deepened as I realized that breast milk represents a third option in our home, though not one as readily available for amputated appendage transport. I’m happy to report that I didn’t wind up having to make this difficult decision, having kept my fingers intact and having only one close call with the circular saw. Sadly, I’m still not sure which would have been the best option.

Just over four months ago, I finished Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and did a quick read of DeLillo’s Falling Man before taking on Pynchon’s latest, Against the Day. His very short The Crying of Lot 49 aside, this is the first of Pynchon’s book I’ve read in one go, if plodding through it over 4 months can really be considered a single go. I went through start to finish with no stamina-loss-related break, in any case. My slowness was the result primarily of a paucity of time to read for long at a stretch (that reality TV’s not gonna watch itself, you know). When you’re reading in 10- to 20-page increments, it’s hard to get through an 1,100 page book very quickly.

So, what did I think of it? I’m not sure. The first 700 or so pages were for the most part very engaging, and it’s the easiest long Pynchon I’ve read yet. Whereas GR was hard to follow a whole lot of the time, AtD was pretty manageable. The next 300 pages were harder to get through because the dominant plot line just wasn’t as interesting to me as some of the others. As Pynchon closes up the book (which he really does with more tidiness than I might have expected) in the last 85 or so pages, it’s a more fun read again, though not nearly as much so as earlier parts of the book. I guess I liked it well enough. Although it’s physically heavier, it didn’t feel as content-weighty to me as GR did. Something about it doesn’t seem as important to me as GR did, though I can’t articulate what the difference is or why GR has a feel of importance (maybe I’m swayed by its having won an award?). I’m sure my enjoyment/slogging ratio in AtD was higher than it was in GR, but GR I think is the better book.

One thing that really hit home for me during this read was a difference in the way I appreciate certain books. Some authors or books make me wish the whole time I’m reading them that I were able to go out and write long fiction. They inspire creativity in me. Steinbeck in his best books and Richard Powers in The Time of Our Singing make me feel this way. An author like Pynchon doesn’t. I appreciate the complexity in his books, but they don’t inspire me to want to do my own creation. Both sorts of appreciation are valuable to me; too much of the former would continuously highlight my personal creative deficiencies and make me feel like crap all the time.

I’ve been pushing really hard for the last week or so to get through to the end of AtD because I’m traveling a week from today and didn’t want to have to carry that brick around with me the whole time. Now I’m off to do what I predict will be reading of a lighter style in Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. I’m also picking through Best American Nonfiction for 2007 (edited by David Foster Wallace, one of my faves). From there who knows? Maybe the book-length study of Wallace’s Infinite Jest that should arrive in 30 days or maybe another reread of the subject of that study. Maybe back for a second shot at Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Zadie Smith and Gass are on my wish list, so maybe they’ll round out my year. Or more likely I’ll punctuate hours and hours of TV with the occasional batch of poems or shorter fiction. Recommendations always welcome.

For nearly three years now, I’ve worked for a company called Flock. For nearly three years, we’ve been working toward releasing a 1.0 version of our product. And yesterday, we finally did it, amid much less fanfare than I might have expected (not even a company blog post). Starting as far back as version 0.5 just under two years ago, I’ve been using Flock as my primary web browser (that’s what we make, a web browser built on the same platform that drives Firefox), so I’ve been around to see all the changes the product has gone through.

Our first public beta was released to much hype with subsequent fizzle. It had a neat skin, a photo viewer/uploader, a rudimentary blog authoring tool, and something we called the shelf, and that was it, besides the basic browser functions. Although we had many early enthusiasts (some of whom are still with us), reactions tended to be along the lines of “this is what the hubbub is all about?”

In June 2006, we released version 0.7 of the browser and saw lots of downloads and a lot of press (I worked 20-hour days for a week to keep the new web site from dying under the strain of our traffic). We were thinking at the time that we’d have a 1.0 version by the end of the year, but change was in the air, and after some executive turnover, the end of the year had come and we didn’t have a 1.0. In the first couple of months of this year, I feel like we really hit our stride and started executing. We pushed a 0.9 version with subsequent updates that got tolerable reviews, and our 1.0 beta releases over the past few weeks have been met with the customary skepticism, but for the first time, a lot of that skepticism is beginning to turn over. People are posting that though they found our product either not compelling or too buggy in the past, they’re loving it now. And plenty of newcomers are saying that they’re addicted.

I’m going to do a little sidebar here on the social web. I’ve always been pretty cold to it. What need do I have to send to Twitter every half hour an update about what I’m doing, or to read in real-time that my social-web-addicted buddies are going out for coffee or sitting through a dull meeting? Do I really want to read another “20 Questions” type post on MySpace? Basically, I don’t often have time or the compulsion to fool around on social networking sites. I spend my day working on the computer and so don’t typically like to spend much time playing on it. A year or so ago, I signed up with MySpace and Facebook basically because my work compelled me to. It was another way for Flock employees to consume our own dogfood, so to speak, and to network with users of these sites who were interested in Flock. But there wasn’t much personal value to me in signing up on these sites. I had a profile but I didn’t use the sites with any regularity.

The latest version of Flock has changed this because it brings the social web to me. The nifty services sidebar notifies me when I have new messages or pokes in Facebook, and it lets me drag content from the web to friends’ avatars to share it with them. I can find individual friends within my network more easily than by using Facebook itself because I can type part of a name in a textbox embedded in my browser to filter my friend list. I can see updated statuses easily, and an icon lights up for friends who have uploaded new media. When I click a person’s media icon, a media bar appears and is populated with thumbnails of their media that I can scan at a glance, clicking through to actually view only the things that interest me. Probably the best thing is that Flock tells me when there are updates so that I engage only when I have a good reason to rather than having to remember and bother to visit Facebook to look for updates. Since I’ve been using Flock 1.0, I’ve been engaging with people in my network, sending messages I wouldn’t have sent and viewing photos I wouldn’t have bothered to view. Flock 1.0 for me is like the Reader’s Digest of the social web. I’d never go out of my way to read a full-length bio of Meredith Baxter-Birney, but if I’m sitting on the can and have read all the jokes in my Reader’s Digest, I might thumb through the RD condensed interview with her, and I might even enjoy it a little.

That’s the main thing that differentiates Flock 1.0 from previous versions for me. I’ve long been a fan of the built-in feed aggregation, and it was Flock’s Flickr uploader (which also works with Piczo, Photobucket, and I believe Facebook) that prompted me a year ago to buy a Flickr Pro account. It previously hadn’t been worthwhile because, as a Linux user, I had no painless way of uploading photos in bulk. Flock also has built-in del.icio.us integration, the aforementioned shelf (now called the web clipboard, basically a little drag/drop area that lets you store dragged items for later use in blog posts), the blog editor, and all the goodness that comes with Firefox 2.0’s underlying engine.

I’m an employee of the company, of course, and so I have a vested interest in our success. But I really really do like the product and would use it for the built-in feed reader even if I weren’t an employee. (I’m not only the president of the hair club for men…) I suspect that there are plenty of people for whom Flock provides no benefit that Firefox doesn’t. If you don’t upload photos or read news feeds or belong to social networks, Flock’s probably not for you unless you just think it looks pretty. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for my dad, but I probably would for my sister and most of my friends. If you do do any of those things, why not give Flock a shot and let me (or our talented support staff) know what you think?