Although the Apple tablet has yet to prove itself as fact or fiction, I hope the new speculation about tablets for periodicala will include the thriving comicbook and manga businesses. Websites like Zuda and Marvel successfully translate the comic reading experience to the web but to be honest, the last thing I want to do is read a comic book on my laptop. I want to be able to read them in the bed, in the back of a cab or on a plane. As the seats in planes shrink (or I get bigger) my 13″ Macbook has proven to be too large, while any netbook has too small a screen to be useful.

There’s some pretty cool readers for the iphone like Comic Reader Mobi (above video) but the iphone isn’t really a good medium for reading an entire comic book. Unless the art is reduced to a panel by panel reduction, the screen is simply to small. I haven’t purchased comics regularly in a decade but I can actually see myself getting back into them if I could purchase with the click of a button on a store like itunes. However, I’m not impressed by the stuff Apple is doing with motion comics at all. Comics are comics because they’re printed, animation is animation because it’s animated. Does the world really need an in-between?

Want to call someone use your Google Phone (Motorola Droid) and Google Voice to ring them up! Want to find their website? Pop open your laptop, outfitted with Chrome OS and Chrome Browser and search to your hearts content. Want your news? Google Reader is there aggregating feeds from FeedBurner. Click through to the website and Google is there with AdSense. Sick of cable? No worries, Google’s YouTube will soon be a fair substitute. Use your Droid to get directions to a job interview, Google the company and find out what their pagerank is.

There’s even a Google internet bus!!!

What I see is a Valley that’s somewhat oblivious to what it can actually do to change the world. Whether that be the startups that it could support or the entrepreneurs it could put forth as success stories, I really just don’t see enough people who actually are given enough credit for doing it in a way that doesn’t look like an Amazon or a Google. And yes, Amazon, Google, Zappos, Twitter etc. all changed the daily lives of people all over the world TREMENDOUSLY. But so have Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, Open Data Kit and Samasource etc. It’s not a question of who’s changing the world more, it’s who’s world is being changed and how.

So now I can call up companies that don’t even sell pizza, order a pizza, and they’ll still deliver it to me. Great. (Editor’s note: really happened.)

But when it comes to offering people who’ve never in their lives had any sort of income, jobs via mobile devices, it barely registers.

Secondly, most companies that end up changing the world do it by accident. I’m sure when Twitter was invented, Jack Dorsey and company had no idea a young Ugandan would use it to microblog his way through a riot, bullets whizzing past, and tanks rolling in. Likewise, I really doubt Sergey and Larry dreamed of all the things Google would one day be used for. Nor, probably, did Tim Berners-Lee when he laid the groundwork for the web.

Finally, I’m not sure Silicon Valley needs to worry about changing the world. They’ve done such a good job of doing it without actually trying that change will inevitably come. With so many brilliant, successful people in such a small area, they can afford to not even think about it. Saying ‘we are here to change the world’ while not really supporting the claim comes across as a bit shallow if you ask me. If you want to really do that, great. But if you’re there to pocket a few million before you hit thirty, nothing wrong with that either.

The motivation of people around the globe looking for innovative solutions to the worlds biggest problems (or smallest), should be to create the same energy, enthusiasm and optimism that exists for whatever reason in Silicon Valley, wherever they are in the world. Whether that be Namibia, Bangalore or Lost Springs, Wyoming.

Arg. How did that happen? It turns out it’s a problem with Feedburner. Feedburner was an awesome service for about 5 months (after it reached critical mass in 2007 but before Google bought it later that year). Since then it’s stagnated and for some it’s just gone down hill:

Aside from things not working, mystery outages, epic mailinglist downtime and non-existant customer service, Feedburner is simply no longer innovating at the pace that it used to. I mean look at it’s competitors: MailChimp, Feedblitz, Feedity, Rapidfeeds. Okay, its competitor Mailchimp because the others are either way too boring (Feedblitz) or too young (Feedity, Rapidfeeds) too appeal to me. Mailchimp, however is pretty damn awesome. It’s a service that that allows you to push an RSS feed out as a newsletter, styled or unstyled. Pretty useful for any blog with an audience or marketers. Secondly, most of these other services offer some basic things that Feedburner doesn’t:

1) exporting your subscriber list

2) pushing to Twitter and Facebook without a third-party applications

3) customer support by humans

oh, and how could I forget…

4) uptime

Those are three things I’m happy to pay for that Google Feedburner still doesn’t offer after two and a half years of owning the service. As much as I dislike Yahoo, I will say they have some awesome products that actually work…even acquisitions like Flickr and Delicious still work even if they have also suffered from corporate cryogenic freeze. Beyond that, most of their premier services have great customer support. Especially the ones that actually have revenue streams attached to them (lord, knows they need that revenue!) But even the things not directly related to revenue have great support: Pipes, BOSS, YUI etc. They seem to value the ‘utility’ their apps offer their customers and the brand loyalty that that builds. Honestly, I’d rather have a mediocre service like this that just works versus 20 Google projects that aren’t quite there yet.

With Feedburner, I fear Google may have another Dodgeball on their hands. A service that’s great and upcoming prior to acquisition only to become boring, buggy and frustrating after.

—

P.S. To anyone wondering what the issue was, my feed validates perfectly in every service under the sun (I tried many), but in Feedburner I get this message:

Yet, even Feedburner’s recommended validation service tells me:

What’s the deal?

Actually something does happen, Wordpress resets the password internally (in the MySQL database) but the link that it sent you to activate that password fails to connect with the database effectively locking you out of your blog. In this scenario, at least for me, all the potentially viable solutions lead to dead ends.

Although it should’ve, launching the database manager to reset the password manually didn’t work. I tried doing this in various ways including this method from Codex, this one from Watching The Net and this one from Thought Outflux. But none of them worked!

Opening up wp-config.php and trying to reset the password there didn’t work there either.

I was at a loss as to what to do. That is until I found the Village Idiot Emergency Password Recovery software. Using it is simple:

• Download the script from Village Idiot WordPress Emergency Password Script.
• Unpack the downloaded zip file.
• Upload the file emergency.php to the root of your WordPress installation (the same directory that contains wp-config.php).
• In your browser, open http://example.com/emergency.php.
• As instructed, enter the administrator username (usually admin) and the new password, then click Update Options. A message is displayed noting the changed password. An email is sent to the blog administrator with the changed password information.
• Delete emergency.php from your server when you are done. Do not leave it on your server as someone else could use it to change your password.

For whatever reason this worked flawlessly where the other methods failed and I was able to regain access to my wordpress blog and set the password to something I’ll (hopefully) never forget again. I’m not ruling out operator error on the other methods but the aptly titled Village Idiot software makes the process fool-proof.

Note: Keep in mind that all of these options will only work if you are the site administrator or have direct access to the server at which the blog is hosted.

^{Look familiar? I originally published this article as a writer for DeveloperTutorials}

Most of mobile carriers offer free Email To SMS gateways which can be used to forward simple text emails to a mobile phones. And the good news, majority of those gateways are free and available to the general public.

You just need to know the number and the carrier of the recipient to start emailing them to mobile phone. Below we put together a table listing free email to SMS gateways for different carriers. You can use as quick reference both for US and international mobile numbers.

Here’s the list of Email to SMS gateways from Africa and around the world:

• MTN (South Africa) [number]@sms.co.za
• Vodacom (South Africa) [number]@voda.co.za
• Setar Mobile email (Aruba) 297+[number]@mas.aw
• Mero Mobile (Nepal) 977[number]@sms.spicenepal.com
• Emtel (Mauritius) [number]@emtelworld.net
• BPL Mobile (Mumbai, India) [number]@bplmobile.com
• Airtel (Karnataka, India) [number]@airtelkk.com

There are also a number of websites that allow you to send free SMS’ via the web. Be cautious though. Sites like these are often suspected of selling your registered cell phone numbers to marketers and spammers: GizmoSMS , TextMeFree , VienSMS

Problems

• Emails ‘below the fold’ go out of sight. If I don’t remember to label them immediately when they come in, then they are often lost to my inbox forever.
• Important/urgent emails are treated just like any other email.
• Twitter has become like my second inbox, but there’s no way to integrate the two.

Solutions

• A ‘Related Emails’ module that pulls up X number of entries from my inbox and attempts to match whatever currently is being read, to things I may have missed or forgotten to reply to. My blog does this, my email should too.
• Unread reminder There should also be an area that randomly pulls unread emails and lists them. This wouldn’t be in the main window, but it’d be off to the side.
• Social Inbox For some people, I simply don’t have their email addresses but I do know them on various social networks. It’d be cool of this app could import all my contacts from all social networks it supported to allow me to communicate using whatever options are available. Of course it would also have to let us know which services are available to contact that person and give us a corresponding form for that communication (ex. If it’s Twitter 140 characters).

Other Features

• Trending/Analytics I’d like to see things like: How often I check my mail? Who sends me the most mail? Who sends me the least? Who gets replied to the least? How long do I allow new messages to sit before opening them etc. It would be like Google Analytics for my email.
• Granular SMS alerts for emails that have keywords either in the subject, body or sender. So if my mom emails “Need you to call right away.” I could have her email address flagged with the the keyword ‘call’. If those two conditions are met in the same message, I’d get an SMS alert telling me that I have an urgent email.
• Personal Assistant/Scheduler I’d also like personal assistant features that are integrated with my Calendar and ToDo list. If something like “I Want Sandy” became integrated, with a control protocol for sending queries to devices and applications, that would be ideal. Then I could do things like forward emails and appointments to my calendar and have them instantly appear.
• Logic I’d like some sort of logical filter that automatically pushes emails from people who I deem the most important to the top of the list. This is different from the Alerts feature because it would help me respond to people like clients, co-workers, and bosses with haste. This feature would learn from the Trending reports mentioned above.
• Smart Replies I’d like to be able to set up a list of conditional responses to emails. If you email between this date and this date I’ll be on vacation. If you email me between this hour and this hour I’m working. If you email me in the next ten minutes, you’ve missed me because I’m in a meeting. This would be tied to the Personal Assistant and calendar so that auto-responders automatically turn on and off without needing to think about it. However, they could be turned off temporarily or permanently by sending a message like “Auto Responder Off” via email or SMS.
• I’d like a Mobile interface to do things quickly when I’m on the go.
• Unified Web and Desktop App Why on earth are all the desktop email applications independent products from their web counterparts? I want one unified solution. This ensures that everything thought out for the online product also fully translates to the desktop product.
• Online/Offline Sync The unification mentioned above would allow for two things, syncing and online backups of desktop drafts. If you’ve ever used Evernote for taking notes, you can kinda grasp what I’m suggesting. This would allow users to theoretically never lose drafts or contacts.
• CMS-like Settings/Plug-Ins Most people find blog engines Wordpress and MovableType pretty easy to grasp. I’d like a similar UI that allows users to customize things. I’d also like to see plug-ins for the web interface and add-ons for the desktop interface. This would allow users to tweak their inboxes however they want.
• Better RSS integration if an application like NetNewsWire had email features it’s be pretty darn close to what I’m looking for.

In conclusion, the things I’m describing could be integrated into existing apps like Thunderbird, or they could be used in a completely new application. What would it look like? Click on the image to see it at Flickr with annotation…

I created most of it in Photoshop. Some of the apps I borrowed images from include Thunderbird for OSX, NetNewsWire for OSX and The Adobe Air app Analytics Reporting Suite. Most of the ideas I also heard on podcast from FOWA Miami ‘08, I just decided to make the mock up to help conceptualize it in case I decide to give a go at building it later.

<h3>Title of Your RSS Feed</h3>
<?php
// assign the feed to a variable named 'feed'
$feed = 'http://url-of-your-rss-feed.com/feed/';
	if ($feed) {
		include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
// define that 'feed' is also your url
$url = $feed;
$rss = fetch_rss($feed);
// string to return if feed fails
 	if ($rss == false){
$string .= "[No Feed To Retrieve]";
	return $string;
}
$maxitems = 10;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
	foreach ( $items as $item ) :
// define the string which is '$title'
// define the action 'substr' means sub-string or 'part of a string'
// define where the feed string starts - first letter is '0'
// define the length of the feed string - 55 characters
// define the trailing characters - "..."
$title = substr($item['title'],0,55)." ... ";
?>
<ul>
<li>
// link to the rss item origin with the description as the title
<a href='<?php echo $item['link']; ?>' title='<?php echo $item['description']; ?>'>
// print the truncated RSS title
<?php print $title; ?>
</a></li>
</ul>
<?php endforeach;
}
?>
<br /><br />

This code will allow you to truncate and print the titles of an rss feed. No more worries about whether or not that aggregated feed from Twitter or another blog will break your design.