Archive for March, 2006

When Ocado first came out in the UK they were great. You could book your the delivery time down to the hour, they’d actually have what you ordered in stock and their software was really easy to use. So I used them a few times but eventually decided I wasn’t so lazy that I wanted to spend a fiver for the privilege of doing my grocery shopping on my ass. Actually I think I ran out of free delivery vouchers.

Since then they bombard me with offers trying to entice me back. From these mails you get a rough idea what they need their average customer to spend per week to stay profitable. If I recall correctly it was initially spend £50 and get free delivery (normally £5). This was close enough to my typical spend (£20-£40 depending on how hungry I am when I shop) to get me to spend above £50. This gradually rose over time until the offer I received today:

			For deliveries by 11/03/2006 Dear Mr Barr, March is already here, the year is flying by and we don’t want you to spend more time than necessary doing your weekly shopping. Place an order from the comfort of your favourite chair and we’ll give you a special gift and a little more time to do something else! Simply place an order over £85 for delivery between Monday 6th and Saturday 11th March and we’ll add a free bottle of wine to your order. We look forward to seeing you next week at www.ocado.com. Neil Jewsbury On behalf of the Ocado Team.

Spend £85 and get a free nondescript bottle of wine? No free delivery any more, I guess that was too expensive. Clearly I’m no longer in their target market, who spends £85 a week on groceries? I know I could easily unsubscribe but I do find how their offers are getting less and less enticing when they’re trying to get me to spend more money very funny.

Update: This week’s offer is spend £90 and get two bottles of wine! I thought when someone was getting desperate the offer was supposed to get better.

Yahoo! has released a bit of code to add action buttons to your blog. It’s a good idea, but I don’t like the look of the buttons (I know I could tweak the CSS) and the actual functions aren’t that useful. The actions they have are:

• Bookmark with del.icio.us
• Email it
• Blog with 360°
• Print

Most browsers have the ability to email and print from the file menu, so they’re not too handy. Given my lack of interest with 360°, I wasn’t too interested in that button either. But I do like the idea of the buttons, if only to feed my ego that other people might be interested in what I have to say.

I like what one Yahoo! blogger, Jeremy Zawodny has. His actions are:

• Find related posts on Technorati
• Bookmark with del.icio.us
• Submit to digg
• Submit to reddit

So in the true tradition of the web I nicked his idea and converted it to run with Wordpress. I’ve attached the HTML you need to embed in the templates if you want to add it to your own blog.

Now that I’ve started backing up data to a remote server, the importance of the copy on my laptop has been reduced dramtically. I recently came across an interesting post about securing your data if your laptop gets nicked.

Basically the idea is to setup a cron job to check for a file on a remote server (probably your website), and if that file is there, destroy all data on the laptop. It’s an interesting concept but having an automated task to wipe out all your data is a frightening one. Something I’ll think about once my backups are a lot more comprehensive, and if I ever start taking my laptop outside of my bedroom.

My backups with rsyncbackup worked like a treat. I decided to just let it do it’s thing and rsync the initial backup rather the try to save time and copy the data myself. It went very smoothly except for two minor glitches:

• It helps to point at the correct directory
• It helps if you have permissions to read the files you want to backup

Once those problems were fixed it just worked. Incremental backups now take less than a minute. The only tricky bit is automating it. Normally I’d just setup a cron job but my laptop spends most of its time in hibernation, so for the time being I’ll just do it manually.

I’ve been using Yahoo!’s MyWeb 2.0, and 360° to a lesser extend, for a while now. I’m not overwhelmed by either.

MyWeb 2.0

I’ve made it my default search in Konqueror so virtually all my searches have been with it. In two weeks I’ve only saved six pages. I don’t want to save a page unless I feel it’s useful, but by the time I determine that, I’ve long left the search results page. If it integrated into your browser’s bookmarks, I think it would be a lot more useful, but it’s still just a bookmark tool.

It doesn’t use your saved pages or searches you’ve done to personalise your search in anyway, which is disappointing. It’s literately a bookmarking tool. It doesn’t suggest other pages you might be interested in, or other people you might want to add to your community. So unless you know a lot of people using MyWeb 2.0, you’re never going to build a web big enough to restrict your searches to it.

There are a few other nuisances as well. You can edit the tags of your saved pages, but not the notes. Most of the pages I just saved and planned to come back to annotate them, so it was frustrating to find that I couldn’t edit the description. MyWeb 2.0 is also limited to the American search so I couldn’t limit to UK sites, which is something I do quite often. I also found when I was looking for less common information, Google is still miles ahead of Yahoo!’s search.

360° Yahoo! 360° is essentially a homepage maker for the social networking world. It gives you a blog, lets you put up links, photos, etc. It wasn’t what I originally thought it was and since it’s more geared to community and content generation I decided to give it a miss.