Me, myself, and whoever comes along

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

A few brand new blogs

It's now weird to think that I've created four blogs up to this moment, and that I'm about to create another bunch of blogs in the near future. I mean, I always thought about having a single site with all stuff of mine, but it's clear that keeping things in separate locations makes much more sense. This approach also helps to deploy things incrementally, instead of having to plan all of the site design at first. I still think that I may need to go over this again in the future; I may end up with a single site, with sections for each topic, but it will be much easier to do it using the experience that I'm getting now.

Now, for the real topic of this post. I'm going to start a few new blogs. The first one is about Firefox, the best browser that I've used for a long while. I intend to create a place to discuss improvements and usability-related request for new features. The Firefox community is responsive and tremendously capable, but I still think that a few rough edges can, and should be, polished as soon as possible. Usability is a must, and it is the Achilles's Heel for any project that don't take Microsoft's capability to hit back seriously enough.

In a similar vein, I'm thinking about starting a new blog to discuss GMail, Google's offer in the webmail arena. It's an outstanding piece of software as-is, and it has the potential to grow even better. But again, usability may be improved a lot, sometimes with simple fixes; and it seems that the GMail development team is submerging under the weight of help requests, and it's not very responsive (I've so far received only automated responses for all my requests, none of them was ever answered by a real engineer).

In both cases, the idea is to achieve critical mass for the project before starting. As such, both initiatives are still waiting for a few more volunteers. Anyone interested, please leave your comments here.

-- Outro, similar ao anterior em espírito, é sobre o GMail. Neste caso, queria fazer algo parecido: reunir sugestões de melhorias, discutir a interface, e submeter as sugestões para o Google, com mais peso por se tratar de um grupo de usuários.

Saturday, July 24, 2004

Leitura Espírita

Leitura Espírita

This is my newest blog, where I intend to discuss my views on religion and the philosophy of reincarnation - the belief that our spirit is eternal, in most cases much older than we imagine, and experiences a lot of sucessive lifes as a human being in this material world to learn and improve. It's in portuguese, but I'm already thinking about doing some translation of the content to the english language, if someone asks for it.

That's just me...

Oh well. That's my third blog, now that I've figured out that I really need more than one blog, if I intend to post things so disparately different. But this one is special. This one is about me. It's probably not going to be update as frequently as the other ones, but that's where you are going to know about the real Carlos. (I'll probably make a personal blog similar to this one in portuguese too in a very short time).

BTW, my other blogs, as of now, are:

The House of Unfinished Projects and Half-Baked Ideas (in English)
Rascunhos Rotos (in Portuguese)

Enjoy!