This one is for Daisy, who wants a local newsfeed without all the sports. What happened is she added the RSS feed of a local paper she likes to her Google Reader, was inundated with articles that didn’t interest her, and got disgusted.

Step 1. Go to Google News.

Step 2. Scroll down a little and on the right you should see a box something like this:

Step 3. Enter the city, state or zip code of you preferred geographic location

Step 4. The local news will now appear in this section of the main Google News page. Click on its header, which should be a link along the lines of “Nashville, TN, USA.” At this point you could just click on the RSS link in the left margin and subscribe, but take a minute to fine tune.

Step 5. Scan the stories to see types you aren’t interested in. Me? I’m not too interested in NASCAR.

Step 6. At the top of the page, just to the right of the main search box, is small text reading, “Advanced news search.” Click on that.

Step 7. Note that the result retains your city, state or zip. Go to the “without the words” field and enter the terms you’re not interested in: NASCAR, murder, basketball, whatever…. Press enter, and voila, news without the bits you want to avoid.

Step 8. Now click on the RSS link in the left margin and subscribe to the results in Google Reader. You now have a NASCAR-free news feed.

I’m hopelessly hooked on Photoshop, but people often ask me what they should use for photo editing and I’m loath to recommend anything so expensive. I tried The Gimp, and while it’s as close as you get to free Photoshop, it’s a pain to install and not particularly easy to learn.

Enter Picnik. It’s not only free, it works in a browser, so it doesn’t matter if you’re on Windows, Mac or Linux. It’s also much more user-friendly than either Photoshop or The Gimp. The one down side is it’s slow. But if you only edit photos every so often, it’s the perfect answer.

Me? I’m sticking with Photoshop. But I’m delighted to have another free tool to commend to others.

Holy Batphone. According to the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project, cell phones matter more to U.S. adults than the internet, TV and email.

“When asked how hard it would be to give up a specific technology, respondents are now most likely to say the cell phone would be most difficult to do without, followed by the internet, TV, and landline telephone. This represents a sharp reversal in how people viewed these technologies in 2002.”

Add to that the central role web browsing plays for iPhone users, not to mention Google Android, and I wonder — how can any self-respecting web diva not be riveted by cell phones? Right after the iPhone was released, I figured my interest would morph from a hobby to a critical professional skill, but now I’m wondering just how soon that will be. Six months? One year? I can’t imagine it will be as long as two years.

So many people my age and older (over 50, that is) are intimidated by the web. With a hang-dog look, they’ll say such things as, “I don’t understand computers.” This seems to be particularly true of women.

I wish I could take them and breathe web confidence into the core of their beings. Almost all of these people adore books. And just as you don’t have to master book authoring and publishing to be a literary aficionado, neither do you have to be a brash young programmer or a web diva to enjoy the web.

Chances are if you are reading this, it’s not a big issue for you. But chances are even better that you know plenty of the people I’m talking about.

What’s the answer? I think it’s simple — play — wherever they want, as long as it’s the web. You’re never to old to play and it’s never too late to love the web.

I’m a big fan of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), but my inner librarian groans over their latest tactic. In a recent post they warn: ”How many outdated web design and development books are lurking in your local library, school or college, waiting to corrupt an innocent mind?” True enough. Library shelves do indeed suffer from outdated materials of all kinds, and librarians have their hands full keeping up.

Where I take issue is their proposed tactic. They want fans like me to go around putting warning bookmarks in the offending tomes. How much better a use of energy it would be if WaSP fans contacted collection development librarians with lists of books to pull and prioritized lists of suggested books to add. That’s what I used to be (a collection development librarian, that is) and I would have welcomed an assist like this.

I know it lacks the flamboyance of littering the shelves with cute little bookmarks, but it’s so much faster and more effective, not to mention better library manners. Think — you could even donate some of the good books and put WaSP placards in the front — or maybe even include some WaSP Good Book bookmarks for readers to pluck and enjoy.

Last week Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Beta (IE8). I’ve been swearing (under my breath) at IE for the last five years, but it may be time for me to find another fall guy. Microsoft has not only been listening, they’ve been soliciting feedback from their most outspoken critics — web developers who care about standards.

If you’re a web standards fan, I’m sure this isn’t news. But if you are like most of the rest of the world, you’re probably saying, “So what?”

Good question. Standards are the bedrock of the web, and while it would be erroneous to say Microsoft played fast and loose with them, they were notoriously sluggish about improving IE and bringing it into compliance. They had almost total market domination with IE6 for five years. During that time IE’s lack of standards compliance slipped from being a minor headache for web developers to a major crisis.

The crisis peaked when Microsoft finally released a new version — IE7 — and jillions of websites broke. At Vanderbilt, IE7 didn’t just cause cosmetic problems; it broke some mission-critical hospital applications. Because of this many IT departments around campus have blocked deployment of IE7. I expect we’re far from alone. The irony is that the problem was IE7 being more standards compliant than IE8. But it still wasn’t as compliant as any of the other major web browsers.

It’s been an enormous e-pickle. To their credit, Microsoft took ownership of the problem, scrambling to come up with something better. The result is IE8.

Should you rush right out and download IE8? I’d advise holding off, because it will overwrite whatever version of IE is currently on your PC. However, if you’re responsible for websites, you should get it soon. The good news is it should be able to toggle into IE7 mode. As soon as it’s a bit more stable I’ll be updating the PC I run IE7 on, testing IE8 and reporting back.

“The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness.” – Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key

This quote undergirds what may be the best sermon I’ve ever heard. In Beauty Is Truth, the Rev. Gail Seavey dove into two topics not usually discussed in UU circles: art and beauty. With her background in art (a degree from Rhode Island School of Design and many years work as a sculptor) she is uniquely qualified to examine these subjects.

Doing web design, my thoughts often hover on the edge of art and beauty. When I create a really good design, surprisingly perhaps, I don’t mind that inevitably it will be gone within a few years, morphing into something else, or evolving into a new aesthetic that keeps pace with both new technologies and new tastes.  It reminds me a bit of Tibetan sand paintings.

At times I have wondered if web designs might be art. Until I heard this sermon I’d always thought no – it’s more akin to craft. The answer still may be no. I don’t know. But there’s unquestionably much beauty in the web that I respond to from deep within myself. I think of the simplicity of the Copyblogger design that this site uses, the famous minimalism and whimsy of Google’s home page, the elegant Flash of Hobart Design, the evocative colors use by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and so on.

Paralleling what Rev. Seavey said about white European males “inventing” an art, you mostly hear about male web designers. I’m hard-pressed to think of the names of any women web designers other than those I know personally. No matter that they are every bit as good as the big names in web design. In fact, I tend to minimize my role as a designer because if (as is often done) you divide web work into the more feminine design (look and feel, CSS, etc., etc.) and masculine development (programming, PHP, MySQL, etc., etc.), developers get more respect — and money.

In the end, though, what really matters, as Rev. Seavey puts it is: “When we become part of the creative god-process – making our own true feelings – our beauty – visible to the world and seeing the beauty made visible by others – we enter into a profound communion that helps us transcend our limits a little, mutually expanding our visions of beauty, truth and right.”

[Continuing on with Part 3 in brief series on Google Sites, this post veers in a more technical direction.]

In the bevy of early articles that came out last week, a point that was made repeatedly is that Google Sites has similarities to Microsoft’s Sharepoint. As Michael Arrington noted in TechCruch, “Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach called the combined products under Google Apps a ‘Microsoft Sharepoint killer.’”

I’m bothered by this language. It’s true that both are web tools for collaboration, and the Apps suite is more directly in MS’s path than Google usually is.  However, having worked quite a bit with Sharepoint in the past, I have to say the two seem worlds apart to me. Sharepoint is based in the old model, where IT is the center of the digital information universe. Sites is based in the new model, where end users are the center of their own digital information universe.  Sharepoint typically costs thousands of dollars to deploy.  Sites is free.  Sharepoint takes a lot to learn.  Sites is a breeze.  And so on.

So to me it feels not so much like a direct blow as an Aikido move, using the momentum of the opponent to one’s own advantage. Sharepoint can get up and lumber on in its own proprietary, IT-centric mode, while the smaller, more agile and crowd-pleasing Google Sites takes a bow.

[Continuing my brief series on Google Sites.]

The best thing about Google Sites is that you don’t have to be a webmaster or IT person to set it up and use it — plus it’s free. Not only that, a web-based collaboration tool hasn’t been readily available to most people before now. I can’t wait to recommend it to some groups I’ve helped build websites for. However, there are other Web users whom I’ll advise to steer clear. It’s not for everyone.

Who Can Make Great Use of Google Sites?

Small Non-Profits. It’s easy to imagine organizations like Gilda’s Club and RASAC building very useful intranets for themselves with Google Sites.

Churches. The observant might have noticed the picture in my first post was of an intranet for my church. To start with, I’m setting up a separate site for each committee that wants one and then tying them together in a central site. I’m particularly excited about rolling it out to our Stewardship Committee, which is knee deep in pie-charts, calendars, newsletter articles and so on. It will be very helpful to have most of this stuff in one easy-to-access place.

Small Businesses. Google has a helpful example of what this might look like.

Who Should Think Twice?

Individuals. This is a tool for collaboration and internal communication. It’s not really meant for an individual’s personal website.

Healthcare. While the sites do use a secure https connection, I couldn’t find any assurance that Google Sites are HIPAA-compliant.

Large business and organizations. I can imagine it working well for larger organizations in time — but not yet. There’s not enough substance or malleability to make it a good choice yet. The potential is enormous, however. I’m looking forward to watching Sites grow.

Last week there were dozens of reviews of Google Sites, a brand new addition to their Applications suite. Yet, as I went through article after article, I couldn’t find the answers I wanted. My big questions….

What is it? And who can best use it for what? Other related questions I couldn’t find answers to included is it yet another Content Management System, will it work for non-techies and is it any good? Eventually it became obvious that I’d just have to try it out. And that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend.

30 hours into this, I can see why others have trouble defining it. While the name is “Sites,” it’s not an all-purpose website authoring tool. It’s more of a website niche tool — albeit it a big niche. The niche is using the web for collaboration, particularly for projects and work groups. Google says it’s for easy creation of team websites. For example, it could be a terrific tool for co-authors, an illustrator and editors to use in managing the production of a book. Or a small business could use it as an intranet — making announcements, keeping a general calendar, and gathering boilerplate or template files in one place.

In its current early form it’s set up to do eight things.

1. Share internally. While you can open your site up to the world, it’s designed particularly for people with the same email address to use together. Typically this means a small business email address — not a large organization like vanderbilt.edu and certainly not generic email accounts like comcast.net and gmail.com.

2. Add simple web pages. You don’t have to know HTML to do this. It’s much like adding pages to a blog.

3. Gather related files into a page (called a “file cabinet”). This strikes me as one of Site’s most useful features. It’s easy to imagine ways to gather documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, graphics, and other file formats in one place defined by the project at hand.

4. Integrate announcements into the site. You can have a page of announcements and then display summaries with links on the home page.

5. Add Google Gadgets. The plethora of Google Gadgets available for iGoogle is available to a Google Site too. This opens up lots of possibilities for designing Google Gadgets to use collaboratively.

6. Create lists to track projects.

7. Integrate with other Google Apps. The other “apps” typically include documents, calendar, and chat.

8. Search the site the way only Google can do.

Technically, the software used to write this was a Wiki. But thank heavens they don’t intimidate people by saying that anywhere in Google documentation. Even better, it doesn’t use any of those peculiar Wiki markups. So in my opinion it’s not a Wiki, even if it once was.

You might have noticed I haven’t answered all of my own questions yet. I will do that in upcoming posts, as I continue to pick apart the who, what, how and why of Google Sites.