Sephy’s Platzish

Jamie Oliver is known for making simple food; I’ve done up one of his recipes in the past - lemon stuffed chicken in a simple dough. It’s been a while since I’ve made some of his recipes.

However, something I didn’t realize (mostly because I don’t watch much TV, especially breakfast TV), is that he’s a regular guest on NBC’s Today Show. Yesterday, I was perusing their site to find video of a completely different feature to any of the cooking stuff, but one thing popped out at me - Chef Jamie’s chicken recipes.

I go to watch it and they’re just amazing recipes, though the folks don’t quite do everything right, there are some great ways to make chicken. Unfortunately, I can’t embed the videos here, but I can give you a link to it, and a little bonus, an interesting cooking segment from earlier in the show, the team, along with Robin Williams, making lamb shank.

As you might expect, there’s a bit of fun along the way with Robin in the room. However, the recipe does look really good to make, the only issue being to find lamb shank in the store.

Though the first dish I want to try is the Roast chicken breast with lemony Bombay potatoes, I might just try to get that done tonight, but I don’t know…

Try chef Oliver’s lamb shanks (4:3)

Chef Jamie’s chicken recipes (widescreen)

So, the other day, I got a question from Snoskred about switching Google Reader feeds from one account to another. However, thanks to her PageRank being lowered, she’s done with them and wanted to move over to a different feed reader, namely Bloglines. As is the case, I go and find out how to do it, and then come back with how to do it, and I’m sharing it with all y’all.

Step 1: Export your Google Reader Subscriptions

The first thing that you have to do in order to change your reader over is to get a list of the current subscriptions you have now. In Google Reader, it is fairly simple to do that. Starting from the page you see when you log in, click on Settings.

Once in the Settings screen, you then click on Import/Export, and then on Export your subscriptions as an OPML file. Really, there is no need to worry about what an OPML file is, other than a file that lists your subscriptions in a format that is readable by most sites.

When you click on the Export link, a new window or tab will open, and you should be asked to safe the file. Put it in a folder that you will remember, such as your desktop or your Inbox folder, if you’re following an organized desktop plan

Step 2: Importing to Bloglines

Admittedly, it’s not the easiest thing to do when you go to import your old subscriptions for the first time, but now that I found it, I can say that it is quite easy to do. Here’s how. I’m going to assume that you’ve already signed up for Bloglines and have been to the Feeds screen at least once.

When you’re in the Feeds page, to start the import process, click on the Edit link in the left panel

Here, simply click on the Import Subscriptions link.

Now, the right panel will change to allow you to upload your recently-exported subscription list. Click Browse to bring up a window that lets you search for the file. You should start out in the same folder you just used, however, if you don’t, you should remember where you saved it.

When you’ve got the file selected, click Import, and Bloglines will automatically go through the list, and import your feeds and maintain the folders you have put them in. When it’s finished, you will see a list of all the feeds that were imported, which looks something like this -

That’s it. You can now go back to the feeds screen and see the following sight:

If you’re interested (or haven’t put your mouse over the image ), there are 16,113 unread items there. That’s a quirk of Bloglines - when you import feeds to there, it picks up the first 200 items for every feed that are available to them. Almost none of these items are from anytime in the recent past - for example, I found posts from ProBlogger from over a year ago, and from other blogs from almost two years ago.

Luckily, when you’re reading through, you don’t have to load every item, rather you can simply click on each folder and mark it read, and if you are good at going quickly through a list of things, it should take no more than a few seconds.

Hints and Tips for Bloglines

The first thing that you will notice about Bloglines is that it does mark everything read when you click on the feed or folder. If you want to save something for later, there is a small checkbox in the bottom right of every entry called “Keep New:” - if you click that, it will keep that entry for you for the next time you load that feed or folder.

Another important thing to note about Bloglines is that they have a limit (in the current version) of 200 items per feed; that means that if you have a feed that updates quite regularly, then it won’t pick up more than the first 200 items since you last looked at the feed.

A glimpse into the future

Note in the last paragraph, I mentioned “current version.” There is a current Beta out for Bloglines, and here is a sneak preview of it (note that this is with my main Bloglines account so it doesn’t have the imported blogs in there, yet).  There are a lot of really sweet ideas that you may want to explore, such as being able to put your most favorite blogs on the front page of the site and be able to move them around.

To check the beta out, go here and sign in with your username for Bloglines.

Over to you

Is there anything you’d like me to have a how-to put together for? All it takes is asking; just go ahead and send me a note via my contact page, and I’ll be happy to do it.

Also, if you’re a user of both readers, or are partial to one or the other (or like something else, such as NetVibes or Thunderbird), have a say in the comments.

Another week down, and time to look back.

Posts I liked -

• Meg has a message for everyone - Hey You! Yes you, with the Partial Feed
• Lucia reports on something happening within the PayPerPost community - Getting paid to remove links
• It was recently Animal Awareness week Down Under. The RSPCA wants us humans to be more Animal Aware.
• From Sydney Daily Photo, a view of the city from the South
• Craig lets us all know The Importance of doing Nothing
• Neatorama features video of an honest car salesman (note: contains strong language )

NaBloPoMo posts I liked -

• Thirty-eight questions

New blogs this week in the US Blogs community at BumpZEE -

• Life In…
• This I know…….thoughts from a Mormon.
• Amazing Facts
• Angelika
• Nordic Walking US

Keywords -

• host pictures online no account - Yep, you can - read here
• funny fraud emails - I’ve seen quite a share of them. They usually come after I’ve sent them a mail addressing another scammer.
• latest version skype 3 ox - Uh, I don’t think Skype works on an ox…
• test my skype sex - No thanks.
• why do women do not like other women dressing beautifully - You’re asking me? Any ladies have an answer to that?

I took advantage of an offer to get free credit at Sponsored Reviews, and I put my blog on there. However, I got a little note from Google Alerts that a review came in, and I hadn’t approved any yet. It turns out that Maurice, the Cayman Host, reviewed my site independently after seeing the offer on there. I checked through the offers, and his site didn’t show up; how cool is that?

I received tons of offers, of which I’ve accepted three; one didn’t follow a requirement I set out, another did an OK review, and did ask how to do the requirement I set out, however, the best review so far has come from Untwisted Vortex - he’s reviewed my blog in the past, and graciously accepted to do a review. You definitely should read it

This week around the blog, I’ve discussed some dreams that I had, along with firing the phone company and the need to improve Google Reader some more.

In the Tuesday Think Tank, we started a look at HTML with tables, and last but not least, I caught up with an old friend

Coming up this week, we continue looking at HTML, and I’m going to look at fonts - sizes, styles and types. It’s some things you may have seen already in the past, but always good material for reviewing. I also have a couple of ideas in my mind for posts for this week, and I’ll sit down and do some writing on those ideas.

‘Til Next week!

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to let go of something they’ve held dear to them for years. Well, actually, I can’t say that about what we’ve gotten rid of - mainly because it’s too expensive!

You see, we have had the same phone service from the same phone company (albeit with a name change when they were absorbed into one of the amalgamated “Baby Bells“) for at least as long as I’ve been alive, and I know a lot longer than that. We’ve been happy with their service, but with the advent of VOIP services and much cheaper phone service, it was time to change.

On a month to month basis, we’d been paying somewhere around $40 for the privilege of having a landline telephone, with unlimited local calling (which, in this part of the state is our town, and a couple of neighboring cities; calling anywhere outside of an around 10-mile radius cost anywhere from 9 to 24 cents per minute). The only “extra” we had on the line was Caller ID.

Of course, like any good natural “monopoly”, our phone company knows how to soak you for the extras. I was perusing their site last night and found out that our Caller ID cost us $9.25 per month, almost a full quarter of the bill. How ridiculous is that?

I have a cell phone and pay $5.28 per month for a basic pay-as-I-go plan (that’s including all taxes and fees); of course, that goes towards my account balance and I pay 25¢ per minute for all calls for the first ten minutes each day and all texts are 5¢ to send or receive. All in all, I don’t mind the high per minute rate, since I’m getting the service for a dirt cheap rate per month; it also includes caller ID (though without a name).

A long time ago, we had looked at Vonage for our phone service, but the biggest hurdle was that we couldn’t keep our phone number (which is strange since customers of the same phone company in a certain much larger city to the east of here are allowed to keep their phone number). However, it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I found a bargain when it comes to VOIP service.

For those who don’t know, Vonage charge you $24.95 per month for unlimited local, long distance, and calls to certain countries. Another service, Packet8, charged $19.95 a while ago, but have raised their price to $24.95 for unlimited domestic calling. However, the service that I found,  Phone Power (direct link, not an affiliate link ), has a great deal - $9.95 for unlimited local and long distance for the first six months of your subscription.

The catch?

You have to switch to a regular plan after the six months; that’s it. There are no contracts, no set up fees, and you get a free router (they charge $14.95 for shipping - not bad for a free router).

We’ve fired the phone company, and are switching over to a new company over the next few weeks. I’ll have to keep y’all updated on the quality of the service (it should be pretty darn good since we now have 5 meg internet service (5000 down, 512 up)).

Obviously there are a lot of things that we all use from day to day which come from Google, but that doesn’t mean that everything they do is something we should be jumping up and down and running towards.

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Cutts opened up a Poll on Google Reader Features that his readers (and all of you) would like to see added to the program. Honestly, there is only one thing that I see which would be of use - drag and drop to rearrange feeds.

Not surprisingly, it’s the second most popular option. One of the most interesting items on the list of suggestions Matt has on his list is “Let me click to rename feeds”. Apparently there are a lot of people who haven’t made use of an already built-in function of Google Reader - Subscription options. Right in there is this strange option - Rename subscription.

One thing that I swear that there wasn’t much overwhelming demand for was having the ability to create a blogroll from your list of subscriptions. However, they’ve gone and done just that. If you look at the post where the developer mentions it, you’ll see that he’s using it.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of him personally, as I have as many, or possibly more, blogs in my reader, but the thing I notice is that the blogroll is quite long, and could use a way of putting it into a div that would scroll in the page. In fact, it extends a full 4,000 pixels beyond the end of the content.

The other thing that I notice is how it doesn’t integrate with the rest of the page very well. I know that there are javascript blogrolls that will pick up the page’s preexisting CSS and fit in with the rest of the page. Unfortunately, this widget doesn’t do that, rather opting for a style which, and I think this is a partially good thing, somewhat screams Google.

No, it’s not the poor integration with the site it’s hosted on, or even the fact that it’s a javascript-based element (it makes sense considering that your reader is a flexible thing, so products produced based on it would need to be fluid). The thing that gets me is the complexity of the code.

Snoskred pointed me to a link about this new feature on TechCrunch. She made the observation that this should make grabbing the HTML from a blogroll easier than how we do it now - manually making the links and updating the sidebars.

Let us take a look at an entry in a couple of blogrolls. The first is from one of the bigger Blogrolling blogrolls out there, the Blogger Chicks blogroll. Because of how big it is, it’s set up to have a scrollbar, but what I didn’t expect was that it is set up as a table. This is the code for one line of the blogroll -

<tr class="blogroll_tr"><td class="blogroll_td"><a href="http://www.expired-convictions.com/" target="_blank" title="Last updated: 04:18:46 [GMT] on Saturday, September 29″>Expired Convictions</a></td></tr>

It’s fairly simple, and you can easily extract the information you need - the linking code. Now, for comparison, here is the code for one line — yes, just one line — of the blogroll listed on TechCrunch -

<li style="border: medium none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0.4em 0pt; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; text-align: left; text-indent: 0pt; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: none;"><a style="border-style: none none solid; border-color: -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color rgb(151, 224, 122); border-width: medium medium 1px; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; text-align: left; text-indent: 0pt; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; color: rgb(88, 191, 47);" class="i" title="CenterNetworks - Social Media News, Opinions and Insights" href="http://www.centernetworks.com">CenterNetworks - Social Media News, Opinions and Insights</a></li>

Again, that is just one line of display. In numbers for geeky types like me, the Blogrolling listing is 207 characters long, and the Google listing is 963 characters long. Before some statistician starts jumping up and down to tell me that I’m not using a full statistical sample, I know that and that I’m sure that the numbers would be different depending on the actual length of the address and name of the blog. However, if you have, say, 50 blogs on your blogroll, using the numbers above, that leads to an extra 37,800 bytes to the load every single person viewing your site has to download. It may not seem like much, especially with broadband being so omnipresent, but over time it does add up.

Not only that, it makes grabbing the HTML quite difficult. The one redeeming feature is that the title and the href properties are right next to each other, at the end of the a tag. However, it’s not the simplest thing to get accomplished.

Some Suggestions

Since this is Google, they’re fairly responsive to suggestions, for the most part, there’s always a great amount of suggestions that people have. Andy Beard has brought up a suggestion about opening up feed lists for wider use. One of Google’s engineers has mentioned that you can get this information, but right now it’s not fully optimized. I don’t think it will take too long for that to get sorted.

I also have a couple of things that, if some Googler would like to maybe take it up and make them options.

Post Time

One of the things that I like about Bloglines is that it will tell you what time the post was made on the blog. However, in Google Reader, you’re told the time that the post was picked up by Reader. It’s a minor pedantic point, but it’s one worth mentioning.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d rather have the time on the post reflect when it was made instead of, in the instance of some feeds, a bunch of posts all “posted” at the same time.

Rename Tags

While you can easily rename subscriptions, renaming tags is an arduous process. To change the name of a tag, you have to go through the following procedure:

1. Make a new tag
2. Assign all subscriptions from the old tag to the new tag
3. Unassign all subscriptions from the old tag
4. Delete the old tag

It’s a major hassle, and one which I’ve not taken the time to do. However, I can’t see why you can’t simply go into the Settings, and under Tags, rename the tag. You can do that in Gmail, I can’t see why you can’t in Reader.

Over to you

What suggestions do you have for Google Reader, or for that matter any Google product? Feel free to leave a comment; if you haven’t commented before, it will be held for moderation, and should appear within a few hours of posting.