Remodeling the Mountain Visions blog

Howdy subscribers, 

I posted a while back I was rededicating myself to the blog (and Flickr and other content host) and less Meta hosted/controlled content. Meta serves a purpose, sort of like an RSS reader, but it shouldn't be where the stories of your adventures are locked in forever. 

I'm slowly going through and updating abandoned/broken links in the sidebars and in general cleaning them up to reflect current information and things that are important to me.

I hope to eventually clean up the sidebars so they are useful again. I've already updated the broken aurora map and the Adirondack Ice Conditions and NH Avalanche conditions.

I've also fixed all of the subscribe options in the top left corner. So if you want to subscribe, I highly recommend Feedly but there are additional options below. I may also put an option for email subscription in the future. 

At this point most of the broken links have been removed. Any that remain are place holders so I can update them with current relevant information. 

I'll be chipping away at it as time allows. 

Thanks for viewing Mountain Visions!

Meta (Facebook) Walled Gardens...They were fun at first but now it's time to make information open again!

I've grown a little tired of the increasing walled gardens where your information is public but it's locked behind a information paywall of sorts that only benefits the site owner. 

Blogger (Google) makes money off these blogs for sure, or they would kill off blogger, but anyone can search for and access them.* And that means information is freely available. 

I've planned many a trip off a blog trip report that wasn't meant as a source of beta. Just folks musings. And I'm sure folks have done the same with Mountain Visions.  

Meta sites on the other hand (Facebooks parent company) still allow you to overshare but they hold all the information behind a sort of paywall. This benefits absolutely no one but Meta and actually is the entire antithesis of why the internet became so important. 

I think the big appeal early on with Facebook was your post were viewed by most of the folks you cared about.  People you likely interacted with in real life. Increasingly, feeds are clogged with ads and recommended post. And with people friending (follow) folks they don't even know feeds are getting clogged. It's basically turning into a Chinese style internet where everything is controlled by one company including what the algorithm wants you to see. Sure engagement is higher but thats as short term dopamine boost, not a long term solution. 

I've mused enough, the nitty gritty of my plan -though I've planned on this before- is to try to cross post for now to the blog also while (and this is the ambitious part), retroactively pull old Meta post and place them on the blog. I'm skeptical this happens with any volume, but I'd like to give it a shot. 

*Many search engines strongly priortize commercial, sales and paid sites. I use Mojeek when trying to find things I don't have to pay for. Like if you search "bikepacking" you'll get a lot of commercial sites. Or places to buy gear. That's great, but I want to search trip reports and personal blogs. Mojeek does that best. And also, although it's Russian, Yandex tends to be better as well. Especially for image searches. 

The genius of WebOS and Synergy

I use MS Outlook as my desktop client for email, calendar and contact info. Through third party apps (Fonebook) I can even download my friends Facebook images, and birthdays into my Outlook, as well as updated contact info.  Fortunately the Pre does away with local storage of data, and puts it all in the "cloud" meaning you can sync all your accounts (Facebook, Google, Palm for now) with Synergy without every truely storing a contact on your Pre (you have access even offline, but they continuously sync when you have a signal).

The fact that Synergy is cross platform, meaning it doesn't require an specific desktop operating system is ground breaking. Palm allowing PRE to be virtually OS independent using Synergy via the "cloud" is something that should both separate it from the competition and also force the competition to do similar things (competition is good!).

Unfortunately, not everyone has there data already in the cloud (Google or Facebook), and in my opinion Google's weakest application is Google Contacts. Plus, Google by default adds every email address you ever responded to you your contacts. Finally, the Pre is still being tweaked, and currently you can only select to sync all or none with Google and Facebook.The means if you are someone that friends every person you meet in life or online through Facebook you could have 500, 1000, or even 5000 contacts that you actually don't really know or need contact info on floating around your Pre. Google is just as bad when email replies are factored in.

So until Palm updates the Synergy portion of the Pre to break down contacts and/or selectively add groups of contacts, I will not use Google or Facebook with Synergy. .

What I did to solve the problem was sync my Outlook one last time with Facebook, then I did a 1 time, 1 way sync using Palms data migration utility for the Pre with Outlook to my Palm profile on the Pre. This is now synced with my Palm profile in the cloud. For the time being my Palm profile is my only contact database, but it's pretty accurate and essentially includes Facebook since I was able to update Outlook with Facebook using the Fonebook utility.

Palm truely has a cutting edge product and some head turning features, but the WebOS still is in it's early stages and not everything is perfectly sorted out, so for the time being little adjustments must be made to make the most of the WebOS and Synergy!

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