DEC Niger crisis appeal

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

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.

Sage screenshotIf 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.

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