Sweet Victory

Do I know when to jump off a sinking ship or what? Less than 1 week after I move all of my newsletters from the uber-buggy Zookoda to the very orange but very effective FeedBlitz , the Australians have thrown in the towel, offering Zookoda up for sale . Here's some comments from Zookoda's announcement, along with my own commentary: "Over 5200 blog publishers have adopted Zookoda as their blog marketing tool..." Yeah, but how many of us have left? Moreover, FeedBlitz claims to have more than 65,000 active feeds. Conclusion: Zookoda never really got that big. "A Zookoda user has the right to add or delete their mailing lists from the system at any time." While they may have the right, Zookoda appears to have turned off this feature (probably to try and hold onto the data from folks like me who are trying to leave), thus bolstering the appearance of a robust operation. "As such - NOTHING WILL CHANGE for at least a couple of months. During this process we ...

So Saturday was a 12 mile run - my longest run in probably 17 years, and my last long run before the 1/2 Marathon in 2 weeks.... all that considered, it went pretty well, just under 1:54:00. All of which means it's going to take a very special day for me to break 2 hours in two weeks.... Which means it's important to remind myself that I started all of this nonsense only 75 days ago. From zero to 12 miles in less than 90 days is pretty cool. Then again, I'm also pretty sore today, likely because of the hills I climbed in miles 8 and 9:

I got my notice that I could download the new Times Reader from Microsoft and the New York Times. Thus far, I'd say the Times Reader is about as good as most of Microsoft's beta products.

Ever since I started running in July, I thought it would be cool if I could post snippets of my workouts on my blog. I have no good reason for this other than to brag and to motivate myself, but hey - whatever gets you through the day. I finally found a service that lets you do just that. If you keep your running log at Breaking the Tape , you can easily get some javascript like I have on the right (I selected my last three workouts, but they have many options.). So now even my blog readers will know if I'm staying off the couch!

Those of you who've followed the blog know that I was once one of Zookoda's biggest supporters. When I started using it in April or May, it was one of the snazziest blog to newsletter tools out there. I immediately started using it for this newsletter, as well as three different corporate newsletters. Previously, I'd been a free FeedBlitz customer, and while their service over the years had been good, Zookoda had some features that FeedBlitz either offered for a fee or - in some cases - not at all. So I jumped on the Zookoda bandwagon. Around mid-June, the problems started, as when my newsletter was first delayed. I'm not going to spend time rehashing Zookoda's lack of response to this issue, other than to say they didn't seem to care. Service only got worse from there, and by this month, the Zookoda success rate for me was somewhere less than 50%. In the past couple weeks, I've certainly driven FeedBlitz crazy, as I asked Phil (their CEO, who actually re...

I think with my latest blog-over, I've committed the cardinal sin of bloggers. Blogs - I believe - should be focused. They should be specific, so that the reader can say, "Hey, this is for me," or "No, it isn't." But the reality is that - as a human being - I struggle with focus. Not for short stretches of time, mind you, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm simply into a lot of things. I have my profession, my family, my diabetes and my hobbies. At the moment, I'm not happy having a blog that only addresses one of these things so - at least for the time - being, I'm going to declare this blog as fair game for whatever strikes me. I think these types of blogs tend to make for bad reading and if so, I apologize. But hey, it's still free, so who are you to complain? ;)