The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

How mundane it is to blog. I've put this blog on the back burner for many months now, as I've lacked inspiration for posting. Lately, I have been blogging exclusively about chess, which most likely doesn’t interest most of you. While it is a passion and I intend to keep posting occasionally on the subject, I don't want this blog (nor more life, for that matter) to focus on a board game. It is good to see that the small number of subscribers hasn't dwindled despite the chess focus of late, though. Why blog? In the end, I want to use this space to improve my writing and also to serve as a two-way communication platform with anyone else out there in the depths of cyberspace. Since I enjoy the creative process of writing, I will try to produce more stuff here, and perhaps from a more personal angle. I can't guarantee that it will work. But one thing's for sure: I will not promise to write more here; those are classical final words of the last post on dead blogs!...

It is about time that FeedJournal gets a blog of its own, instead of being squeezed in here, on its founder’s personal blog. Although subscribers could use the label feed to subscribe only to FeedJournal related posts on my blog, I feel that it is better to niche the content in it’s own blog. My main reason for putting it off as long as I have, is the post frequency – I simply haven’t posted enough to warrant two separate blogs. My aim is to invite other FeedJournal users and enthusiasts to share their experiences with the service on the new FeedJournal blog, to help keep the content fresh there. New posts on the FeedJournal blog, will automatically be published in new FeedJournal Reader issues. The new blog is available here . Here, on my personal blog, I will continue my personal musings and random non-niched posts. Don’t expect more than a couple of posts a month here. All FeedJournal related stuff will go into the new blog.

Starting today, I am offering my latest blog posts as a free magazine in PDF format. You will find the link to this blog's FeedJournal magazine in the left sidebar. Print it and read it wherever you like; during your commute, in bed or anywhere else where you prefer to be offline and rest your eyes from the computer screen. As soon as I publish a new post the magazine is updated. The oldest post is pushed out to make room for the new one. Even if reading my blog posts on paper does not excite you, you might be thrilled to know that the same service will soon be available to all bloggers and other content providers who want to offer their readers the opportunity to enjoy the newspaper/magazine format. In the coming days, I will publish information about how you easily can integrate and customize this service with your own RSS or Atom feed. Available customizations include logo, font selection, number of columns, page size, limits on articles, multiple feeds, deep linking, content f...

After blogging for almost a year using Thingamablog, I have decided to switch blog platforms. While Thingamablog is a great idea in theory it doesn't work out that well in practice - at least not for me. The basic idea of Thingamablog is that there is no server software required - all HTML is generated on the client and then uploaded to the web directory of your choice using FTP. I carried around my blog database on a flash drive in my pocket at all times and could blog both from home and my office. The problem was that the FTP upload became slower and slower as the database grew in size. Because I run the database from my removable drive I once did the mistake of removing it too early from the computer with a corrupted database as result. Of course there were no backups. I decided to do away with my web page as well and merge the information into the blog instead. Of course I still want to be able to blog from any location I want, and avoid ads. And get it for free. Blogger.com is...

I am back from a long blog break which became much longer than scheduled. We went for two weeks' vacation in Sweden, which was excellent. Coming back to Israel I realized that I had forgotten my USB disk in Sweden. The disk contained my blog database, so I asked them to send it to me. A week ago it arrived, but the Thingamablog database had been corrupted for some reason; I guess it didn't like all the traveling... A lesson as good as any to take backups more seriously. Now I have finally managed to restore the database to a state more or less as it was before, and the blog should get going again.

When writing drafts for this blog, I have been struggling with how to type up the articles. Sometimes I am working on different computers and I need an easy way of moving the documents between locations. So far I have been using a USB drive where I store the documents. This has the drawback of needing the same application installed on all computers. Another option is setting up an automatic synchronization between shared computers but it doesn't work for me because some of them are blocked behind a firewall. Enter the new paradigm of online word processors! The idea is that your documents are edited using your web browser and the files are hosted on the service's website. You can choose to share or protect each document, and despite being a new phenomenon there are already a few interesting players on the market. All of these online services automatically integrate many a...

Welcome to my blog! I looked around for some different options in getting this thing to run. My previous experiences are with Blogger and I did not feel like barking up that tree again for various reasons. My requirements were that I wanted to integrate this blog with my web site that I am setting up at the same time. This web site is running on one of the free hosting services, so I am unable to install MovableType or any other blogging infrastructure there. That's when I found the wonderful open-source Java application called Thingamablog which allows you to keep your whole blog on a local database (or a USB flash drive as in my case) and then publish the whole blog including RSS feeds to any web server, only requiring an FTP connection. I am also able to customize the HTML design exactly as I want it with Thingamablog. So far I am very impressed...