The Disasters Emergency Committee are running an appeal to Help families who are suffering in Niger and the neighbouring countries of Mauritania, Mali and Burkina Faso
. You can donate online at www.dec.org.uk. If you would prefer not to donate online then donations can be made by going into any high street post office or bank
Category: Useful Links
The category name says it all!
IE7 Beta 1 – First Impressions
I woke this morning to find out, via Elliott, that IE7 Beta 1 had been released. So I headed off and logged into my MSDN subscription to download the beta install.
First impressions are that the new user interface is clean and with the introduction of tabs a great improvement. However it seems that they have thrown a few of the UI design rules out the window – for example normal Windows UI design has the menu bar at the top of the window – not two levels down beneath the address and tab bars.
Interestingly browsing to a new website brings up the “Microsoft Phishing Filter” which offers to check all the websites you visit to see if they are impersonating a trusted website. Also middle click to open in new tab is supported – working the same way as Firefox. :-).
Things are looking good for IE7 Beta 1 or Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)).
Optimising feed reading
As I get more and more into blogging I have seen the number of different feeds that I read on a daily basis wax and wane a fair bit. For a while I have played with a number of different desktop based feed readers and more recently web based feed readers. It is now over a year since I started reading blogs on a daily basis and the following article chronicles my journey through a number of feed readers.
If I remember correctly I started with Sage. Sage was very easy to use and it was good at keeping track of what articles I had/hadn’t read and provided a nice look-and-feel to the feed display.
I stuck with Sage for quite a while but it didn’t quite hit the spot with regard to integrating the tracking of a large number of feeds. I found myself frustrated by the process of switching between the different feeds to read the new items – what was missing for me was an integrated view with the unread posts in chronological order – In other words you have to read through a feed at a time which involves a lot of switching around the UI and can suck up a lot of precious feed reading time.
flickr comes to london
Carson Workshops are running another One Day Workshop in London soon entitled “Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr” presented by Cal Henderson. I would love to attend this but I don’t think I can afford it (and I don’t think $day_job will pay as it’s not really relavent to my job).