If you are a .NET developer you've faced the issues I've faced when using a major search engine... results that don't really fit your problem.

But Google has an interesting feature that allows you to create a custom search engine.  You define the sites it searches. 

Dan Appleman has put together a site www.searchdotnet.com that searches his list of .NET sites and overall the results I get from this site are pretty good.

So I am in the process of transferring my church 's website from www.bataviachurch.org to www.lifestreamcc.org since we changed our name on June 1st.

Along with this change it was required of me to get a new FeedBurner link for our sermons since I had 'BataviaChurchOfChristSermons' originally.

I figured I'd give a few simple names a try first.... and you won't believe what worked.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/streamingsermons

Thats it!  I was stunned that out of 1.7 million feeds that this wasn't already taken.  But it wasn't!

Very cool.

Well I think I am finally dropping FoxMarks.

FoxMarks is a Firefox Extension that synchronizes your bookmarks between machines.  It was a beautiful extension until version 2 was released.  Version two has been a train wreck, and for the longest time I just kept running version 1.  However I quickly grew tired of the notification that my FoxMarks extension was out of date, so I finally decided to give version 2 one last try.

Needless to say it failed bad.  Its a shame to see such a good product become such a bad product.

So I did a search for a replacement option and find out about Google Browser Sync.  Syncs not only my bookmarks, but also my cookies, history, saved passwords, and open tabs and windows.  BEAUTIFUL!

Now when I switch from my work PC to my home PC I keep many of my settings.

The big news is that Microosft has offered to buy Yahoo!  But Google isn't happy.... says it would be unfair if they combined.  Here is the problem with this, in this arena Microsoft isn't the big bad bully... Google is.  Microsoft and Yahoo just don't compete with Google in search.

My personal take is that the merger is a big yawn.  I rarely use Yahoo.  I use Live search when I remember to, kind of a dog food thing... M$ has provided me a generous life style with their products, so hard to be against it.  But what makes Google hard to compete with is its integration... I keep waiting for a LiveSearch tool bar for my firefox browswer and I'd certainly install it over my Google toolbar, but its just a habit of mine to goto that area of my browser to make a search.

So yesterday I made a post saying that my Feedburner email was put in gMail's spam folder.

Was surprised to get an email in my inbox from a Google employee wanting me to send him the original email... had a thought later in the day to Google his name... Matt Shobe.  That's right, co-founder of Feedburner. 

Two thoughts came to mind:

1. Whoa... what in the world is he doing emailing little ole me?  He was co founder of a company sold for $100,000,000!  I don't know about you, but if I sell an idea for that... I'm retiring!  Or if I am working I am certainly not emailing 'customers' about issues.

2. Whoa... how'd he get my post??? Two thoughts... one heck of a data mining program to find stuff like that... no way he's reading my blog is he? 

Turns out that there are employee's that keep an eye out on mentions of what people are saying about FeedBurner... and my post was brought to his attention.

So he forwarded my issue onto an internal Google employee to stop the emails from being marked as spam.

Took advantage of the time to bring up another issue to him... one I'd really love to see fixed.  Time will tell. 

So over to the left I allow you to subscribe to my blog via email.  I have my gmail account subscribed so I can see it come through. However today I didn't get it, and I find the email in the spam folder!

The great irony here... Feedburner is a Google owned company!  You'd think of all places they white list their own companies would be high on that list.

Click to see larger image.

Learned over on LifeHacker that you can now fix Google Maps.  It has always had where I live wrong, located down the street from me.  But now you can move the pin point marker 200 meters and it will show immediatly.  So I corrected my house:

Before:

After:


Or you can use what has quickly become just a better offering, Microsoft's Live Maps.  And while my house is still located 'down the street' my house is actually on the map!  The image quality is a ton better on Live Maps and they have this "Bird's eye" view that appears to have been taken by a plane passing over.