Collab-Or-Ate

My blog is a Wordpress blog and I have been running into issues (bugs) with my Wordpress plug-ins. The manifestation of the bug is that I can’t log into my blog — kind of annoying and a showstopper. The only way to fix it is to disable all the plug-ins. So now I’m leery of all my Wordpress plug-ins and looking for alternatives, so I don’t have to reinstall any of them. Enter twitterfeed! To keep my Twitter followers up to date on my blog posts, twitterfeed is perfect.



My other current favorite little tool is foxmarks. I have it running on my work laptop, my old work laptop, and my home desktop. It not only syncs bookmarks but also saved passwords. So I can log into my blog from my home computer with my obscure auto-generated password, even though I’ve never done it from this computer before and I don’t know what the password is.

I’ll be talking for five minutes at O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 5 event, tomorrow (Feb 12). Can you guess which time slot I have? 7:15pm. I’m personally looking forward to hearing what the 7:45pm speaker says though.

I can’t believe this, but the page doesn’t say where the event is being held! It is at Hooley House near Faneuil Hall, at 25 Union St, Boston, MA, 02108

As I’ve mentioned before, approximately 100% of the search engine visits to my blog are from people looking for some information related to the Blackberry Pearl and how to sync it to Notes. Well, I have an update for all of you: I’ve switched. I’m now an iPhone user. It is now official: There will be NO MORE Blackberry Pearl posts here! Except for my final thoughts….

The two phones can’t really be compared to each other. The iPhone is closer to a computer, while the Pearl is good at being an email checker. I won’t bother waxing poetic about how great the iPhone is and how every application that exists on the BB has a way better equivalent on the iPhone, because I don’t want to make you jealous. :) Suffice it to say that it is awesome and I love it.

But to compare it to the Blackberry, I can give some insights. In terms of syncing with your address book and calendar, it is all pretty easy if you have joined the Mac cult and you use both a Mac and an iPhone. I don’t sync the iPhone to Lotus Notes because I got out of that habit when Notes 8.0 broke syncing to the Blackberry. I sync to the Mac’s Address Book and Google Calendar.

Here were some surprises for me:

• There is no built-in bluetooth syncing with your Mac or over-the-air syncing with Google applications.
• If you want to sync with Google Calendars, they may tell you at the Apple Store it isn’t possible, but it is with NuevaSync. Read this Apple Blog post to set it up.
• The iPhone’s Contacts easily synced with the Mac’s Address Book, but it did not intelligently merge any contacts.

Things I do miss about the Pearl:

• The instantaneous push email. I now have to actually touch the mail icon on my iPhone to find out if I got email. I miss the pulsing red light that tells me my phone needs me.
• The battery life is better on the Pearl. I have to charge my iPhone at least every 48 hours.
• My Pearl was comfortably dented and scratched after 2 years of wear, so I didn’t live in fear of scratching it more. I dread the day I drop my beautiful iPhone.

I would like to install Lotus Notes, Sametime, and even Connections on my iPhone, but am not sure when I’ll find the time to do it.