A half a year ago I wrote an article about my Amazon habits. While I still keep on buying stuff from Amazon and checking recommended items now and then (probably less and less in the future), I don’t mark things “owned” anymore.

Why?

First of all, it’s a huge job. Keeping your collection at least somewhat up-to-date in Amazon takes time. The different editions in Amazon are a burden as well. Should I mark them all owned, or just keep with one edition, and which one is the right one?

Since you can’t remove any purchased items from your Amazon collection, I’ve left all my purchased items as they are, with their ratings, so I’ll still keep getting recommendations based on them. It is still clearly better and easier to work with than with a huge, 500-item, collection.

Just as a remark, I’ve bought all in all 83 items from Amazon for myself.

Getting back to what it is about

I realized that constantly looking for recommended items in Amazon is taking up my time with my music, narrowing the selection of bands I will ever get to know as well as little by little adapting me to a more mainstream selection. (Also, Amazon undeniably tries to make me buy more and more from them, or via their service.)

While the recommendation system is generally good, it just can’t deliver the genuine joy of doing elaborate research on new artists and finding a hidden gem. (To be fair, Amazon hasn’t recommended me even a tiny bit shinyish, way too popular, charcoal bits lately.)

Now that I have one obsession less, I hope to be able to focus more on things that matter. Most of all I hope that I could spend even more time away from my computer.

Some days ago I tried Twitter. I was signed up for a few minutes, tweeted a few times and then knew microblogging was not for me. I didn’t know exactly why. One day I had a quick conversation with an IRC buddy, and I realised why I didn’t need microblogging, and why it did not work for me.

What is microblogging about?

From what I’ve read, seen and thought, I conceive microblogging is all about sharing and in the best of the situations, benefitting, cooperating and creating something new. Who you follow and who follows you is much about who you respect and think is worth listening to, and vice versa.

While microblogging is also used much to share something that’s happening in your life, I don’t really think you’ll get the most out of it like that – and so doesn’t your followers. Of course, you are free to use microblogging for this as well, but I think other utilities, like Facebook statuses, are better for that.

Jim Campbell has actually written a pretty good article about how to write a good tweet at a conference, but I think those guidelines work with pretty much anything, if you use common sense to adapt them to said situations.

Bring the micro of microblogging to IRC

While IRC is a place of long-term discussion sets, there is no reason why it could not be a place of microdiscussions or lightning discussions, as I humorously nicknamed the concept.

It stroke me that I’ve been doing these kind of short-length discussions with various people for years. I did not know them all before bumping into them in IRC and with some, these lightning discussions were almost the exclusive way for communicating. This was my way to microblog before microblogging existed!

Later on, I realise now, when working in Open Source communities, a big part of the communication is a series of lightning talks between two or more people. While development should be as transparent as possible, it doesn’t need to be as upfront as possible. Logged and web-published IRC channels are as transparent as possible, but they are not overwhelmingly visible. From my point of view, this makes IRC a perfect place for communicating inside the developer community and demonstrates, how the micro of microblogging actually takes place in IRC.

It’s funny though how #xubuntu-devel is still not logged and published correctly to the Ubuntu IRC logs on web.

Does this prove anything?

I really like to avoid overhead on anything, and so do many people. Why would you need yet an another tool to be able to accomplish something that you can accomplish with your current tools? What’s the benefits of microblogging and IRC in relation to what I’ve covered earlier?

Okay okay, real microblogging can present the timeline of discussions better. Microblogging exposes you to a far wider possible audience. Microblogging is made comfortable to do even with your phone (so is IRC, though). Microblogging also reaches people better, considering they know how to subscribe to RSS feeds (because without those, microblogging appears as useful and lively as a real life bulletin board for the follower).

However, microblogging does not scale as well as IRC, when you need or want a broader discussion. Microblogging also does not deliver the same kind of feelings of connection and belonging to something as IRC does. While IRC does not reach a wide audience, it pretty often reaches the desired audience at least in Open Source communities. This is also as often enough, and it does provide a safe feeling that everything you say is not evaluated by the whole world. (Even crazy ideas and painful facts need to be said.)

Summa summarum

While microblogging is a new, powerful way to communicate, it’s not for me. IRC has served me microdiscussions for years, and that’s the way I’ve learned to quickly sort things out and announce things. In addition, the discussions in IRC can easily be extended to as big as I need. If I need something to stick around for a longer time, I can always update my proper blog.

Go have a lightning discussion.

As part of the quest for more efficient and clean computing, my primary Open Source email address is pasi@shimmerproject.org starting from today. Just in case something still ends up there, I will still monitor the old address, as it’s now bound to my general @knome.fi -mailbox.

Thank you for your understanding. Stay tuned, more rants about Thunderbird are going to follow.

On my posts earlier (part 1 and part 2) I was fiddling with the Thunderbird 2 folderpane. It was time to migrate to Xubuntu Lucid, and now I’m pretty much supposed to be using Thunderbird 3. Sadly enough, the default TB3 folderpane is even worse than the TB2 default, and the userChrome -fixes were not compatible with the new folderpane. It’s time to open your toolbox and start the journey towards a compact Thunderbird 3 folderpane.

This is my “All Folders” -view with the default Thunderbird 3 folderpane style.

There’s no hope that I am able to see all of my folders at once with the default style. The font size is also quite big, smaller will work for me. My first contact with TB3 leaves me a bit confused, because there is so much going on with all the folder icons. This takes way too much space, I’m thinking.

Another thing I dislike in the new default folderpane is the fact it misses the tree lines. Fortunately getting them back is well documented, so no worries about that.

My general experience for searching documentation from the web or live support from IRC for tweaking the folderpane is not that good. Too many times I was getting my earlier blog entries as the top 5 search results when trying to find documentation or maybe even examples. The #thunderbird IRC support channel is somewhat unresponsive whenever you pop in there – I might be asking hard and/or weird questions, but you pretty rarely even see anyone saying anything. If I was asking the wrong channel, I of course expect somebody point me to the right direction. Come on, Mozilla community!

Anyway, in addition to those issues mentioned, I also played around a bit with the overall feel of the folderpane and tried to make mail reading a nice task rather than a confusing one. These include some nice background coloring as well as shrinking the icons. I think I even made some progress in contrast to the TB2 folderpane tweaks.

The tweaks are still work in progress, but here’s a screenshot.

You can see that some of the folders do not handle padding correctly (yet). There’s also a few other glitches, like the Trash folders, which seem to be visible on TB boot, but disappear when you hover the folderpane.

Here’s the userChrome.css as well as envelope.png for showing the envelope symbol for the folders that have unread mail. The envelope icon is from the default Thunderbird 3 icon theme, but at least for now I had to split it out from folder-pane.png to be able to show the icon correctly.

To hide the Local Folders, I used the Mail Tweak -extension.

The League of Moveable Type create beautiful, free and open source, @font-face ready fonts. Can do nothing but be in awe and respect these guys. Nice website as well.

Basic Maths seems to be a complex but beautiful and definitely working WordPress theme based on the Grid layout. Even if you are not going to buy it, I think it serves a few very interesting ideas. Inspire yourself!

Stacey CMS is something I should look closer.