Disqus - Latest Comments for MarinaMartin

Re: Marcelo’s next thing

mcalbucci — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:33:29 -0000

Yep. I was think WWMD... What would Marina do? :)

Re: Marcelo’s next thing

MarinaMartin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:23:50 -0000

Awesome to hear what you've decided, and serious props for having the self-restraint to not split yourself into thirds.

Re: On Sleep

MarinaMartin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:35:15 -0000

I agree; I'm also a nightowl, and my productivity at night is nowhere near my productivity during the day, all other things being equal. I'm an efficiency consultant and I'm lucky that most of my work can be done on roughly my own schedule, but even one AM meeting a week can make me upset and throw off my rhythm. (You read the Maker v Manager schedule article, I'm sure ... to me, sleep is just one long boring meeting.)

I pull at least one all-nighter a week to help me enjoy the best of both worlds. A bowl of pasta with flaxseed oil (omega-3s) is key for keeping alert for an extended period of time, moreso than caffeine (which makes me jittery and overtired after hour 18). I find I can trick myself into thinking I slept by going for a run and showering around 5am. If I'm in a slump, I listen to one fast-paced song loudly on my iPhone, and/or read a Seth Godin post, and I'm good to go.

Re: louisgray.com: RSS Is Doing Great, But Stand-Alone Feed Readers Are Collapsing

superjaberwocky — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:48:56 -0000

I totally agree. Google Reader doesn't yet have the "pro" level features that NetNewsWire has. Thankfully, with NNW's Google Reader support, I can use NNW on my home and work computers and use the Google Reader interface when I have to.

Re: Legacy Technology Dies Hard

fredwilson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:00:10 -0000

My mother in law ran a business for 20 years on a pc software program I built for her in the mid 80s using an off the shelf pc database software package. It was not even client server and had no GUI. But I built it custom to her requirements and although she tried a few times to replicate it on newer technologies, nobody ever could make it work the way she wanted. So she stuck with the thing I hacked together over a long weekend

Re: Legacy Technology Dies Hard

ShanaC — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:58:01 -0000

Very true if you talk about small specialized software for things like medical services. Some offices have it custom written and refuse to budge, because thier software packages are so damn complicated and lame between the legal side and the technicalities of insurance + medical side. Easier just to port stuff from years and years ago.

Re: Legacy Technology Dies Hard

MarinaMartin — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:17:02 -0000

My life has been an interesting contrast the last few years, as I'm a social media / tech early adopter in my private life but I work (as an efficiency consultant) primarily with low-tech companies. I see Windows 95 terminals and legacy software from the early 1980s on a *constant* basis. Yet, these same companies with older technology are generally profitable and have money to spend on services; they've simply been humming along just fine as-is and don't understand why they should change. And since their workforces are typically older, an overnight transition to Windows 7 and Yammer is untenable.

There's still a great deal of money left on the table when one caters to and markets via new technology.

Re: louisgray.com: RSS Is Doing Great, But Stand-Alone Feed Readers Are Collapsing

MarinaMartin — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:30:10 -0000

Google Reader lacks many of the robust features of NetNewsWire, namely smart lists. Without smart lists, I can't do things like mark all "Twitter Digest" blog posts as read with one keystroke (K) and I can't subscribe to a bunch of feeds but only pull posts containing a particular keyword. (Yes, there's Yahoo Pipes, but setting that up for a ton of blogs takes for-ev-er.)

When you get a lot of feeds, Google Reader is horribly slow. My job is very RSS-intensive (Well, I should say, it's research-intensive, and RSS makes the research faster) and I've got more than 4,000 feeds. Google Reader freaks out on me; NetNewsWire behaviors perfectly. I love NNW and it's definitely not a legacy app, as about 25% of my clients use it actively.

For a small number of RSS feeds, Google Reader is fine, but GReader is painfully lacking in advanced features for power users.

Re: How To Live (Comfortably) on $36 A Month For Food

andrewhyde — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:08:22 -0000

I did a chick pea lamb stew the other month, lasted forever and was tasty as can be.

Re: Warm the Mug

MarinaMartin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:29:11 -0000

In many retail environments, the number of positive comments an employee gets has a significant impact on their future promotions and raises. I'm not familiar with PF Chang's specifically, but I know at other large chains the comment has to be sent in writing to count (which means almost no one does it, so they count even more).

Next time (or now -- there's still time!) I'd leave a comment. Otherwise her manager might never know.

Re: How To Live (Comfortably) on $36 A Month For Food

MarinaMartin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:57:29 -0000

Look for a bakery outlet. In Salt Lake City there's a Wonderbread factory outlet where you can get three loaves of bread for $1. The bread was perfectly fine but was cut wrong or the bag may have been misprinted.

A big pot of lentils and rice or chick peas and rice last for days in the fridge and is incredibly filling (and good for you).

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

MarinaMartin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:00:32 -0000

No one seems to have mentioned this yet, but having content behind a paid wall does *not* exclude it from appearing in Google search results. Google has a special arrangement for walled gardens wherein you must agree that the searcher can view the content of the page that appears in search results (but no pages beyond it). So, if a search brought me to page two of a paid NY Times article, I could read page two, but not page one or three without paying.

Newspapers are a conduit between sources and the audience. As we've all seen, the Internet is allowing sources to reach an audience directly, making the newspapers unnecessary in many cases. Instead of focusing on reporting news, they should focus on helping people understand the news and learn. An article on Sunni violence would be free to read (probably ad-supported), but then I can pay $10 to take their online "Learn About Sunnis vs Shiites" course so I have context and can better participate in discussions (online and off) about the topic. Yes, there is an increasing number of free educational content out there by colleges, but if you actually take the time to go through it, it's not very good for self-learning, and probably downright intimidating for most people.

Re: Another test post (Scripting News)

Effwad — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:51:07 -0000

Don't you get it, Marina? These test posts serve two purposes: to test Dave's software, and to show the world in a not-so-subtle way that he's working on something that's going to be a Big Deal. It's sort of like when people use Twitter to send personal messages that could be sent just as easily -- and more dependably and effectively -- through email. Like @SoAndSo: I just got some really cool elite news. Call my cell.

Re: Another test post (Scripting News)

MarinaMartin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:57:10 -0000

Well now I'm inclined to stay subscribed just to spite you ;)

Re: Another test post (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:22:15 -0000

Please I beg you to unsubscribe.

Re: Another test post (Scripting News)

MarinaMartin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:01:33 -0000

Well, I like your blog, when you're not posting test posts. They're rude. It's like I signed up for your email newsletter and you send me 10 blank emails every day. I appreciate the work you are doing but I'd rather send you $10 than have you take up $10 of my time marking test posts as read.

Re: Another test post (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:45:20 -0000

Suggest you follow a different blog, since you find this one so annoying.

Re: Another test post (Scripting News)

MarinaMartin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:35:20 -0000

Couldn't you make a fake blog somewhere and put the test posts there? It has been a touch annoying getting 10+ test posts from this blog recently, and since you're not using a similar naming convention in every post, I can't filter them out with a smartlist in NetNewsWire.

Re: There's a missing product (Scripting News)

MarinaMartin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:06:14 -0000

I agree there's a missing product, but I disagree with your description of what it is.

Anyone is already fully capable of bumping up your status updates in terms of importance. I could stick your Twitter RSS in a priority folder, or have them emailed to me, or get them as SMS. Your friend asking if you were going to reboot clearly did not take advantage of these options, so presenting another option for making you high-priority in his information stream isn't going to help.

As for meeting someone in the airport, the odds are just as good (better) that someone random -- who does not have you in their high-priority stream -- would be there and have time to hang out. This seems like a job for a location-aware mobile app. Or (shocking!) starting a conversation with a stranger in the airport.

What I'd like on Twitter is the ability to mark select status updates as high-priority (say, with a ^ sign, which isn't used for anything except exponents). Friends could subscribe to all my updates, or just my high-priority ones, and I could have a separate view on my iPhone and a separate alert from Tweetdeck/Nambu for tweets marked important. (Will spammers take advantage of this? Yes. But I don't follow spammers.) Then those truly or quasi- important tweets ("I have an hour to kill at X" "Who remember the name of that book?") have a higher likelihood of being seen, but everyone (sender and recipient) gets a say.

Re: Disqus lost my comment

MarinaMartin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:40:10 -0000

I took Disqus off all my blogs last week. Comments were regularly disappearing; I'd return to an old post that I know had 20+ comments and suddenly they were all gone. I thought it was my imagination, but it happened one too many times. Ultimately normal WordPress comments + the Subscribe to Comments plugin are perfectly adequate.

Re: Twitter Search This

andrewhyde — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:33:36 -0000

I had a feeling like I was an idiot here. Still funny, and on a mobile or in an app this is a hard setting to find.

Thanks, updating the post.

Re: Twitter Search This

MarinaMartin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:02:45 -0000

If you pick which language you want to search from the drop-down menu (English), the search results get significantly better for DIA/DEN.

However, case-sensitive search would be great... for Twitter Search and for Google Alerts, while I'm making a wish list.

Re: Disqus Is Growing and Hiring

danielha — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:56:50 -0000

Sorry Marina, there's no excuse for this. I have known about this -- it's not exactly a bug, but we could have made the behavior better. I will make sure this is addressed in the next update to the plugin.

Re: Disqus Is Growing and Hiring

giannii — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:28:50 -0000

Hey Marina,

Can you email me which posts you're having issues disabling? I'll take a look at it today.

Giannii
DISQUS
Community Manager
help@disqus.com
http://twitter.com/giannii

Re: Disqus Is Growing and Hiring

MarinaMartin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:59:04 -0000

Perhaps one of these new hires can fix the bug that Disqus doesn't let you turn off comments on particular pages/posts? It's two lines of PHP to fix, they've known about the issue for forever, and they haven't fixed it. It's the reason I took Disqus off all of my 12 blogs; I could (and did) fix the code myself, but ignoring it for this long really makes me wonder what they're doing all day.

http://disqus.disqus.com/turning_off_commenting...

Nice idea, ultimately not worth giving up control of my own commenting system.