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Lots of good feedback from my recent post on how I evaluate software. Marc and Buzz add to the discussion as well. On Marc’s weblog there is an especially good comment from Hal Rottenberg where he adds some more rules:

The Five-Minute Rule:
“If software breaks within the first 5 minutes of install or usage, TOSS IT.”

The One-Day Rule:
“Use a new piece of software for a day. When I wake up in the morning, if I am not moved to continue using it, or if I am having difficulty using or configuring it, uninstall it.”

Nice, I could not agree more.

My Guru now has a Weblog, this is great and much more useful and personal than a newsletter. Welcome to the party David.

Tonight Scoble mentioned, my seven day rule for evaluating software and I figured I’d explain a bit more about my short attention span for new applications.

I love to try out new software all the time, in fact its sort of an obsession. I’m always on the prowl for cool new applications. After seven days of use though if I’m not totally blowon away or if its not improving my PC life, its straight to add/remove programs I go. (Please, have a good un-installer).

I actually go as far as to set a reminder in Outlook for seven days from the installation date. When that reminder goes off I either send the author a cheque for their great work (even if its a 30 day evaluation) or I remove the application from my system.

Some of the applications which have made it past my seven day rule have included Newsgator, David Allen’s Outlook Add-in, and ActiveWords. This week it is the Groove 3.0 Beta, which appears to be a winner.

If I’m not using the application regularly after seven days, I remove it from my system. It keeps my system clean (hopefully it is a good uninstaller) and I move onto the next new good thing.

**Why only seven days?
**
1. Seven days is enough time to start/break a new habit. I try make an effort to use the new software and make it part of my day. I do try and give the software an honest chance though, if it is a bad week with lots of un-ordinary activity (weird hours, travel) I’ll evaluate the software on a later date.

2. In seven days I’ll use multiple machines, I’ll be at home and work. Is the software important enough and more importantly useful that I’ll use it across multiple machines?

**What will make a piece of software get registered vs. uninstalled?
**
1. Does it play well with my other applications or does it clobber my other applications?

2. Does it have a weird user interface or is the experience sleek?

3. Is the data easily available to all of my machines or do I have to perform registry judo to get the data to another desktop?

4. Does it improve my PC experience, make me more productivity or do I have fun with it?

5. Have I completely forgotten about the application after seven days?

That’s my seven day rule of taking new software for a spin.

What do you look for when you’re evaluating new software?

Today’s Friday 5 is fun, here she goes…

**1. What was the last song you heard?
** The theme song from the kid’s show called Arthur me and my little one were cosied up in my lazyboy, spending some quality time watching one of her favorite shows on the Tivo.

**2. What were the last two movies you saw?
** 1. Beethoven
2. Scooby Doo, once again quality time with my little one.

3. What were the last three things you purchased?
1. Lunch (Pasta Ya Gotcha — Texas Tijuana Pasta)
2. Gasoline for my truck
3. A Grande Mocha from Starbucks

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?
1.Take my wife to go see The Passion
2. Go swimming at the Pro Club with my four year old
3. Play some XBOX Links Golf
4. Get my wife’s printer working in her office

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?

1. My wife as she drifted off to sleep in the couch beside me. Its been a long day.
2. My little one, Josie as Arthur ended she told me her eyes wanted to go to sleep and that she wanted to go to bed and I was home tonight so I got to tuck her in.
3. Eric (not sure what his last name is). I found a Golden Retriever wandering lost on my way home. I pulled over and she was all alone, she jumped into the back of my truck and good news she had a tag on her neck. Her name is Summer and definitely lost. I found her owners number on her tag and called her owner. Thankfully they were home and were thrilled that I had found her. She’d been missing since 3:30 this afternoon (this was at around 7:30 pm). I fed her some of my dog’s food while we waited for her ride home.
4. My Dad, his brother had an angioplasty baloon today and is doing very well. He survived two heart attacks this week.
5. Scoble, just on my way out the door from work, wishing him a good weekend

You get this. Many, many more Howard Dean remixes are available on The Dean Goes Nuts Homepage. My personal favorites include AC/DC , Crazy Train and Dean Goes Nuts!

What is your favorite?

During Scoble’s recent battle with designer’s about the look and feel of his site. Foo of ForgetFoo.com put some skin in the game creating a very sexy and lightweight design for Robert’s web site.

This wasn’t the first time Foo has done this for Robert, check out Foo’s Longhorn edition of the Scobelizer.

Long story short, Robert didn’t adopt either design, but Foo’s given me permission to leverage the templates and thus my new style is born.

Thank you Foo for the great design and for the permission to use it on my site.

Just got a Plaxo request from Hanselman and have had a few from some other folks. So I figured I might as well hop into the pool too. Let you know if it stays installed for more than a week. (my attention span for neat little tools). So far pretty cool. Let’s see if I am still using it by next week!

There’s no excuse anymore to not get into the game. Check out the referrer service, with a single line of Javascript in your HTML you can enable referrers and have publicly available referrers.

Now even the Google Webloggers can play the referrer game!

With no disrespect intended for to Radio Userland I made the move to DasBlog this weekend from my old site. I also secured a domain name giving this place a bit more permanance. For those of you considering making such a move I’ve included some tips and utilities to help you on your way that will allow you to get DasBlog up and runng and make it so you can take your Radio content and comments aloing with you.

Where can get the you get the latest version of Dasblog?<o:p>

The latest version of DasBlog is on the Dasblog GotDotNet Workspace, this is newer than the one on the Dasblog website.

<o:p>

Any installation issues?<o:p>

The beauty of DasBlog is that it is all file system based and no SQL server was needed. Installation for me was as simple as dragging and dropping the project files to my web server and setting the correct permissions. I’m running Windows Server 2003 on Webhost4life. In order to DasBlog up and running I had to give NETWORKSERVICE read and write permissions to the /content, /siteconfig and /logs directories. Thanks Omar<o:p>

<o:p>

What about your Radio content and comments, do you lose them?<o:p>

Yes, you can bring your previous Weblog entries and the associated comments along with you. Here’s how you can do it:<o:p>

<o:p>

Importing the Content<o:p>

1. Turn on XML Archiving of posts in Radio Userland. On my machine I saved these to C:Program FilesRadio UserLandbackupsweblogarchive)<o:p>
2. The XML archiving does not happen until after midnight. To force the archiving to happen immediaitely complete these steps:<o:p>

· Open the Radio Client Application (Right click on the Radio Tray icon and selet open)<o:p>

· Hit CTRL + ; to open the Quick Script window <o:p>

· Type “radio.weblog.archive.update()” <o:p>

· Hit the Run button <o:p>

· Watch the status messages on the “About Radio Window”. You’ll see it write a message for each post it’s actively archiving. When it stops, your archive files should all be there.
<o:p>

3. Download the DasBlog Radio Importer tool and run pointing it to where Radio Userland has stored the Archived XML from step 1.
   
   DasBlogRadioImport.exe
   /from:”C:Program FilesRadio UserLandbackupsweblogarchive”
   /to:”C:DasBlogContent&#8221;
   <o:p>
4. Once the import is completed, you can copy the c:dasblogcontent files to the DasBlog Content folder and you’ll have all the entries on your site.

Thanks to Sam Gentile and Drew Marsh and Google J for your posts that helped me get through this. <o:p>

<o:p>

Importing the Comments
Scott Hanselman wrote a utility that will import your Radio Userland comments as well. This cool tool is in the source project for DasBlog so you’ll need to download the source and compile. If you don’t want to do this, I’ve compiled a version and placed a copy here. The format for the tool is:

<o:p>

DasBlogRadioCommentImport.exe
/commentserver:https://radiocomments.userland.com
/userid:<######>
/contentdir:”C:DasBlogContent” <o:p>

<o:p>

Notes:<o:p>

· Make sure you know what your comment server is. Check your HTML, some folks use radiocomments2, etc<o:p>

· Use your radio user id WITHOUT leading zeros.<o:p>

· Make sure you use “” quotes when giving the path to your /content directory<o:p>

· This app has ZERO error handling, so if Radio ever changes their comment HTML, good luck.<o:p>

· Make sure you’ve ran the RadioCommentImporter successfully first with the same user id, otherwise the Radio PostIds won’t “line up”<o:p>

<o:p>

Copy the entire C:DasBlogContent folder to the DasBlog /content folder.<o:p>

<o:p>

How can I save my permalinks?<o:p>

I’ll be honest, I don’t have this working yet, but thought I’d put this in for completeness, let me know if you’re successful in getting this working. Essentially it’s a custom http handler to watch for referrers from your original Radio Weblog. Details are over on Scott’s Weblog, I’ll try to get this working next weekend and will upd
ate this.<span sty

le=”mso-spacerun: yes”> This assumes that you still have a site over at Userland Software.

That’s all, I’ve got my old content and a shiny new home. Welcome to the show..