I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have now decided I’ll be moving psionmark.com to tumblr.

The nature of this blog is short (and hopefully sweet) posts of mostly random stuff from my head. tumblr suits that kind of blogging perfectly. In addition, it has an awesome iPhone app, free domain pointing and a number of other features that I think make it more suitable for Psionmark.

I’ll still be using self-hosted WordPress for my main blogs (FlightSimX etc) as I still think it’s THE blogging platform for medium to large scale blogs.

See you over at psionmark.tumblr.com (domain pointing to psionmark.com in progress).

I’ve got a social network over at Ning. Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the service. You get a lot for your money, i.e. free. Well, not quite in my case, as I’ve gone for the ad-free option, but that’s my choice.

However, one thing they’ve got badly wrong is their handling of visitors from URL shortening services, Facebook etc. An earlier post covered my use of su.pr, which I’m finding is a terrific feature. However, if I try and use it, or most other URL shorteners, for a Ning site, you get the rather ugly message shown below.

Not good

To make matters worse, the “click here” link always takes you to the root of the site, not the linked page! Even worse, Ning provide a “Share” button for pretty much everything on the Networks, yet even their own links return this error! This is just plain stupid.

So, come on Ning. Sort it out, please. If you can’t or don’t want to, at least remove the Share links, as they’re worse than useless.

So, what do you think of the new theme? I fancied something a little different and it sure is that!

Not sure if it’s a keeper yet, but I’ll try it out for a while.

I had a quick play with SquareSpace over the weekend. It does look pretty neat, but I’m not sure it’s really worth the $14 a month you’d need to pay to get a custom URL. It was pretty easy to import my blog from here, although the images needed some work to remove some tags. Overall, nice as it is, there’s nothing shouting “Wow, this is amazing. I must move over right away”, so I’ll be here for a while longer at least.

I love Last.FM. I’ve discovered some great artists that I’d probably never have heard of otherwise.

I recently inadvertently trashed the music library on my iPhone – apparently the iTunes database had become corrupt. I’d been listening to my iPhone in the car using one of those nifty FM transmitters that lets you listen through your car radio, so was a bit miffed at not having my collection available, when I suddenly remembered Last.FM. So, I connected everything up and set off on my journey and am delighted to report that everything worked smoothly! There were a few drop-outs on a 2 and a half journey, but it soon recovered.

This is one of those things that, when you think about it, is pretty amazing. There I was, in my car, streaming my own personal radio station over the Internet to my phone, then broadcasting that via FM to my car radio. That’s pretty impressive in my book.

I’ve been playing around with su.pr for the past few days (see my earlier post for my first impressions) and I’m pretty pleased with it so far.

Stumbleupon seem to be listening to their users and are adding features quickly. The latest additions are “Short URLs on your domain” and “SEO friendly redirect”.

The latter is probably the most important. With these 2 services installed, anyone who clicks on one of the shortened URL’s now ends up on the original URL, rather than one prefixed with the Stumbleupon short URL section. This is important for SEO, as the click is now registered as a click on your own domain.

Is it bringing in traffic?

su.pr additional traffic

It certainly looks that way. Not a huge amount at the moment, but, as Tesco would say, every little helps! Check the image above. In 5 days of use, I’ve had an additional 192 page views as a result of using the service. That’s not to be sniffed at. And, given that it’s very early days, I’d expect to see that increasing.

More coming soon

One of the features being worked on is the ability to post to Twitter, Facebook etc automatically when you post to your blog, as many other URL shortening services already do. When that’s in place, I can really see no good reason to use any other URL shortener. Stumbleupon’s ability to generate huge amounts of traffic can’t be ignored.

Stumbleupon have just launched their URL Shortener – Su.pr – into private beta.

I was lucky enough to pick up one of the invitation codes from Techcrunch – if you’re quick, there may be one or two left.

First impressions are very favourable. The interface is nice and clean and offers a wealth of stats about the URL’s you’ve shortened and submitted through Twitter.

Stumbleupon Su.pr

You can integrate your Twitter account into your profile and tweet right from the site with automatic URL shortening.

When a user clicks on the shortened URL, they will see the destination URL wrapped inside the “Su.pr Bar”, with a lot of the functionality you’d normally find in something like the Firefox extension. If you’ve come here via the Twitter link, you’ll see what I mean

I’ve always liked Stumbleupon and this looks like a very useful tool from them. The stats are very useful but, perhaps more importantly, the possibility of bringing in some extra traffic via Stumbleupon is sure to be a winner.

In an earlier post, I explained why I wouldn’t be getting the SlingPlayer for the iPhone.

However, as the player was launched today, curiosity got the better of me, so I took a look on the App Store. If you scroll down to the bottom of the description, it states:

The Slingbox Classic, AV and Tuner are not supported for use with SlingPlayer Mobile on the iPhone and iPod touch, although they may stream with some configurations.

So, in other words “It MIGHT work, but we’re not going to tell you which configurations will work and which won’t. You’ll have to pay your £17.99 to check”.

What the hell are they playing at? They’ve already done themselves enough damage with forcing the hardware upgrades and now they’re telling people they potentially needn’t have upgraded after all?

Funny way to run a business if you ask me.

Update

The Sling Media site now states:

The Slingbox AV, Slingbox TUNER, and Slingbox Classic are not fully supported for use with SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone & iPod touch. A Slingbox SOLO or Slingbox PRO is highly recommended.

Still as clear as mud, eh? What does “not fully supported” mean? Has anyone tried it on a Classic?

Following on from my previous post about Windows 7, I’ve now successfully installed it on my MacBook Pro. Well, mostly!

My first attempt at installing resulted in it stalling near the final stage. I then realised I still had my external firewire drive connected, so I shut it down, disconnected and re-started the installation. This time it went without a hitch.

Installation was pretty fast, though curiously slower than it was when installing as a virtual machine via VMWare Fusion!

I installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7. I attempted to install the Boot Camp drivers and, although they appeared to install okay (the sound drivers definitely worked), I don’t have a Boot Camp icon in the taskbar and don’t appear to be able to run the Boot Camp 2.1 updater. I’ll take another look. It’s not a show stopper.

Although Windows 7 correctly identified my graphics card, I downloaded the latest drivers from the nVidia site. They had a new version for my card and this installed without any problems.

The main (well, pretty much only) reason I use Windows is for flight simulation. I initially tried X-Plane and can report a marked performance improvement over 32-bit XP. Everything is just so much smoother. I’m also getting no issues with “blurries” that used to sometimes occur when it couldn’t load the textures in fast enough. I’m now installing Flight Simulator X to see if there’s any improvement there.

Impressions of Windows 7? Pretty favourable. I like the “cut down” look. There’s noticeably less general clutter and it feels leaner. All subjective stuff, I know, but first impressions count The system is very responsive in general.

Is it the best Windows yet? Possibly, but too early to tell. Would it make me go back to Windows from Mac? No.

In case you missed it yesterday, Windows 7 Release Candidate went public.

I’ve been looking forward to this (well, relatively – it is Windows, after all!) as I’d heard good things about running Flight Simulator X under Windows 7 64-bit, which should sit nicely on my MacBook Pro.

To give it a quick try, I first installed the 64-bit version under VMWare Fusion. Despite the forums saying graphics hardware acceleration doesn’t work under Fusion for Windows 7, I gave it a try and it works a treat.

First impressions? I thought I’d perhaps installed the wrong OS! It looks (to me) a lot like a skinned Ubuntu! It’s running pretty fast under Fusion, I have to say. I like the new “task bar”, with icons representing running applications. I’ve installed Chrome and, with a little tweak, have it running well (it won’t run “out of the box” on the 64-bit version).

The next task was to install it under Boot Camp. This has proved a little more tricky. My first attempt resulted in an aborted run, as it was asking me to press a key during installation and the Mac keyboard drivers hadn’t yet loaded. I found (what I hope is) a solution here, which I’m trying out as I type. I’ll report back on the success (or otherwise) shortly.

You can download the Windows 7 RC here. Be aware that it expires in June 2010 and from March 2010, it’ll start re-booting your machine every 2 hours!

Anyone else got it going under Boot Camp?

I created a couple of Ning networks a couple of years back. There wasn’t much activity over that period, but then, about a month ago, I started to get a few new members on one of them, so decided to give it another look.

If you’ve never heard of Ning, they’re kind of a “DIY Facebook”, i.e. a Social Network, but restricted to a topic of your choosing.

One of the best new features relevant to one of my networks (the Flight Simulator Network) is the video and screenshot/photo handling. The built-in player is excellent, as is the ability to add comments and ratings and the ability to embed the player on other sites. This functionality is so improved, I actually decided to shut down my existing screenshot/video site and move everything to my Ning network.

There are other new features, such as live chat, events, user blogs etc. Membership of my network has gone up from around 60 to over 350 in the past month or so and feedback from the members has been very positive.

The only negative aspect I can see is that it’s not obvious to users where they should post new items. There are forums, and groups, which also contain their own forums. Each area also has it’s own Wall, so there are multiple areas for people to post in. This is not a real issue, but it can make it a tad difficult to find newly posted items sometimes, although this is made easier by subscribing to the site’s RSS feed.

On the whole, I’m very impressed by the improvements made over the past couple of years. They also offer Premium services, such as:

• Removal of ads (and inclusion of your own if you wish)
• Mapping to your own domain
• Premium support
• Additional storage

All of these come at a price, but the free (ad supported) version is extremely good.

If you looked in the past and weren’t that impressed, give them another try. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.