The Other Blog is going well. This is my anonymous contribution to the 46.1 million offerings currently listed on Technorati, and contains all the slightly suspect content I’m too scared to post here under my own name. It’s a whole lot of fun - not giving a damn and never having to look over your shoulder.

My experiences out there in Anonymousville have had me thinking about ideas for unusual blogs. A few weeks back I stumbled across Captain Picard’s Journal, a fictional offering set in the Star Trek universe and written as a series of journal entries from the POV of various Star Trek characters. It’s an interesting idea, and with a Technorati rank of 5579, quite a successful one, though I have to say that the quality of the writing is a little on the weak side. Editing guys! Please!

But it got me thinking. Fictitious blogs make for an interesting writing exercise, and the scope is unlimited. How about a seemingly normal, everyday blog, but set ten or twenty years in the future? You could introduce one major event which changed the world - say a hard core terrorist cell of Scientologists set off a nuclear bomb in Manchester in 2010, and take it from there.

Or a contemporary blog written from the POV of a young student, set over the course of a year, but getting stranger and stranger as the weeks go by. A mystery with religious or cultish overtones perhaps - I might even find a use for those three years at university studying mediaeval history. Now that would be a first.

Books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Adrian Mole would have made great blogs. But would anyone have known they were fiction?

The possibilities…

I admit it - I’m an Anita Blake junkie. Laurell Hamilton may have turned her pint sized, penguin loving, zombie raising action heroine into a soft core porn star about three books ago, but I can’t help myself. I’m like a kid in desperate need of a Harry Potter fix, and even Hamilton’s conversion of her lead character from a nun to a reluctant nymphomaniac almost overnight has failed to quench the flames. I’ll take what I can get.

Danse Macabre is out in about ten days. That’s 496 pages, which translates to about 200 pages when the sex scenes are filtered out - but it’s better than nothing.

How sad am I?

I’m a Newsgator convert.

There was a time when I thought Bloglines ruled in the battle of the RSS readers, but that day has passed. Ever since they introduced a bug when running in Firefox about four months ago, and NEVER fixed it despite my many annoying emails, I’ve been feeling less than pleased. So a week ago I crossed the great divide, and abandoned Bloglines in favour of the competition.

For anyone still clicking on those bookmarked links every day, or trawling up and down their blogroll in search of updates - what’s keeping you? The Newsgator interface is first rate - plenty of white space and the annoying adverts are almost unnoticeable. They seem to have gotten everything just right - the quiet, calm colours, the perfect fonts…

I’ve even tried out the desktop choices such as FeedDemon, which has such great reviews on www.download.com, but why pay when the FREE alternative is so much better.

So my recommendation for watching all those blogs and eBay auctions is Newsgator - hands down.

I backtracked a PageFour referral yesterday to a site called Literature and Latte, home of a new Mac tool for writers named Scrivener. The designer acknowledges PageFour’s influence on one of the key features of the product, citing the Snapshots as inspiration for their implementation of versioning. I’m flattered that my humble offering is having such far reaching influence, but in all fairness I can claim credit only for trying out a few non-standard ideas borrowed from elsewhere.

A little over a year ago I read a book called About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, written by Alan Cooper. It was the thoughts and ideas presented in this book that formed the basis of PageFour’s more unique features. The author questioned much of the established wisdom or ‘way of doing things‘ in User Interface design, using MS Word as a primary example of how not to do things. He demonstrated how many of the features common across software are common not because they are intuitive or even useful approaches, but because they were first implemented at a time when meeting the hardware requirements was more important than satisfying users. Today, with hard drives and memory doubling in size every eighteen months, hardware limitations are almost a thing of the past. Yet despite this, user interfaces still carry the burden of design weaknesses from a bygone era, and many of us have come to accept these flaws as the correct way of doing things.

When you put a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and start typing, the words appear on the page as you work. You don’t have to make a decision ten or twenty minutes later to either keep what you wrote or clear the page. You’ve spent a lot of time thinking carefully about which words to use and how to string them together, so of course you want to hold onto them. Yet this is exactly the sort of decision that software like MS Word expects you to make every day. You type into a blank document, the words appear in front of you, and after you’ve finished your work, you’re asked if you want to ‘Save‘ it. You’re basically asked if you really meant it or were you just playing around for the past twenty minutes?

Software works this way because hardware works this way.

A blank document in a word processor is not the same as a sheet of paper. When you type into MS Word, your work is stored temporarily in one type of memory. When you ‘Save‘ your work (which of course you want to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered to begin with), it’s stored a second time in a more permanent type of memory. This is the ONLY reason software asks you if you want to save your work, and it only asks you because once upon a time memory was scarce and very, very expensive, and if there was even the slightest chance that you really were just playing around, it wouldn’t have to use up that little bit of permanent memory.

And because software worked this way once (out of a kind of necessity), it still works this way today.

Users are expected to understand how the hardware and Operating Systems of their computers work in order to use even the most basic software. They are expected to know what files are, how folders can exist within folders, and why they need to ‘Save‘ their work even though they can see it right there on the screen in front of them. Most people who use software should not need to know any of this - that’s what software is designed for, to control how the user interacts with the rest of their computer and act as a buffer between them and the hardware. Properly designed software is supposed to handle all this for you.

Many of the core elements of PageFour came from ideas presented in the chapters of Alan Cooper’s book, in particular the ‘concealing‘ of files from the user, the quick Snapshot feature to replace the over- and often mis- used ‘Save As‘ option in MS Word, the naming conventions of Pages and Notebooks, the automatic saving of all changes, and the interactive archiving.

These ideas are not my own, I simply tried out different ways of doing things suggested by other people, and in doing so attempted to dump the baggage of decades of ill thought out interface design at the door. The guys over at Literature and Latte are more than welcome to copy or adapt features from PageFour, just as I’ve copied and adapted ideas from Alan Cooper, and hopefully they won’t stop there. Just because things have been done one way for decades, does not mean there are not better ways.

One of the things I love about living alone is that I never have to explain myself. Why has a particular book caught my attention? Isn’t it a little on the childish / trashy / (insert your own adjective) side? Why am I listening to that music when it’s so clearly gay / tacky / not in vogue at the moment?

My younger sister is very much aware of contemporary fashions. Apologies for outing you on a public forum Susan. Her fake Louis Vuitton hand bag failed to grow on her until she discovered what it was, saying at first that she couldn’t possibly hit the streets of downtown Queensland with such a tacky and colourful item swinging by her side.

I gave up liking what other people liked somewhere in my early twenties. I’m embarrassed to admit that there was once a time when I saw the Booker shortlist as somehow important, but am pleased to say I’ve grown out of such childish views. I’ll now proudly admit to never having read The Da Vinci Code, failing to demonstrate even a vague interest in all the hype, and when the ‘critics‘ on Newsnight Review sing the praises of a particular piece of popular culture I avoid it as if it were a new Richard Gere film.

Playing on the stereo at the moment is a collection of British songs sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

Not exactly Top of the Pops material, but I’ve no doubt Kathleen was a belter in her day, her vinyl contributions pouring off the shelves like hot potatoes back in the forties. Recent purchases include three CDs from The Blind Boys of Alabama - discovered thanks to a mention on a blog I have a lot of time for - and Hilary Mantel’s autobiography Giving up the Ghost. I hear it was big a few years back.

I’m ever thankful for the day I dumped ‘expert‘ opinion as a factor in my purchasing decisions, and for living alone and never having to explain the reasons for my quirky and often spontaneous acquisitions - even the ones tucked away out of sight in case anyone happens by.

PageFour is finally listed in the Open Directory.

About three months ago, I spent some time jumping through all the hoops during the submission process. The rewards of a mention are huge, as it is probably the most widely read classified listing out there, but there is no way to influence or speed up the process. Turns out some people really are immune to the persuasion a fast dollar brings.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Open Directory Project, it’s the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It’s managed and policed by volunteers and takes itself as seriously as the other big non-profit sites like Wikipedia. The beauty of the site is the absence of spam and advertisements of any description, and the knowledge that every web-site and product listed has first been checked out by a human being with the power to deny entry.

PageFour is listed under the Writers Resources category and shares a page with a host of other products and services aimed at writers. It may turn out to be the most profitable link yet, introducing the product to new audiences. Referrals have already begun to flow, so I’m crossing my fingers.

I never resigned from my last job. After a couple of years, me and the boss sort of came to an agreement that I’d be leaving a few months later when the work was completed. It was a micro-sized software company operating out of one room, and once the product was finished and out the door, my job was done. It was harmless and very civilized, and the parts I’m not telling you about probably broke all sorts of employment laws.

Without asking, I knew the current day job would require a little more formality, so Sunday evening I typed up the appropriate letter to satisfy the bureaucratic machine. Resignation letters are not something I’ve had much experience with, as most of my departures have been along the lines of: “Hey, guy with the hard hat! Tomorrow’s my last day,” or “Dave, I’m out of here. Where’s my money?” I signed my security away with a dash of red ink - not exactly revolutionary, but every little difference helps.

So yes, I have resigned - finally.

After three years and eight months working for The Man (and his brother, and his sister, and her husband too - though that’s a recent thing), I will shortly be a free agent. I have no pension fund, no mortgage, no kids, and no reason to fear the lack of a steady income over the months ahead. All I have are a whole heap of crazy ideas and a passion to do my own thing in my own strange (and possibly weird) way.

Smarter people than me have done less dumb things than this and lived to regret it, so there is a chance that it will all blow up in my face six months from now, and I’ll be unemployed, broke, and singing for my supper on a street corner in central London. I can’t sing for shit - even at eleven years old they wouldn’t let me sing at my own Confirmation, so I could be destined for a life of penury and starvation on the streets.

But at least I’ll have tried.

Even knowing all the things that could go wrong, it was the right decision. It’s all too easy to take the cosy route and stay where you are, sitting comfortably on a career path you may not even want out of fear of change and worries over paying next months rent or mortgage. The time for second guessing is over - I’ve tried the day job thing and decided it’s just not for me.

My final day as a productive drone oiling the big machine will be the fourth of July. A perfect day, and then it’s sink or swim.