Internet

Over the last few months I’ve been using various Google applications such as gMail, Google Talk and Google Calendar more and more. To the point, now, where the majority of my online life is spent with at least one of the three open in a window somehwere. So I decided to give Google Reader, the RSS aggregator from Google a try.

I have been using Bloglines for a couple of years now and thought it was time to try one of the competitors to see if they have caught up yet. The first thing to say is that the look of Google Reader is excellent, nicely animated and a good use of the screen real estate. But unfortunately that’s where the good stuff ends. It’s rare for a Google app to have concentrated on the look and feel at the expense of functionality but it seems that’s what’s happened here. If you have been reading blogs for a while your blog roll is likely to be quite large, mine is hovering around the 200 feed mark, so I imported my OPML file. Or at least I tried to but Google was unable to interpret the XML. It was pretty easy to identify the problems but, importantly, the file was valid XML. Bad show Google.

After I had managed to import the file, obviously all of the feeds were unread so there were several thousand entries which needed to be marked read to get me up to date. Unbelievably there are no "bulk" operations available. So a quick scan round the internet turned up the Grease Monkey script which will open each entry and mark it read. Leave it chugging for an hour or so and voila, everything is up to date.

I can forgive the problems so far, they will only happen once during setup and ths is a beta product after all. But just normal use is not great either. There are no keyboard shortcuts (that I could find at least) to navigate between entries. There are keyboard shortcuts, but I didn’t find them. The actual aggregation is slow (like 6 hours or more behind Bloglines). The AJAX code, although very clever, is perhaps trying to do too much, so that you’ll often have to refresh the page to get over JS errors which have been caught but not handled properly.

All in all quite a disappointment from Google. Back to Blogines for me I’m afraid.

Update – Nicholas Baum from the Google Reader development team left a comment that I was wrong about the shortcut keys not being available. I am happy to correct myself. For further details go here.

Futurama is back. Now we just have to wait for it to get to this side of the pond.

With all of the buzz around AJAX beginning to die down a little and people actually thinking about the best way to go forwards, this is an excellent article which looks at the four main contenders for providing function libraries. The ever popular prototype, the up and coming Dojo, Mochikit of which I know nothing and the very new Yahoo UI Library.

For a long while now prototype has been my library of choice, it is relatively lightweight and does everything that I have needed. However I have been playing with Dojo and barring some misgivings about its size (a whopping 142kb for the AJAX version) the functionality is incredible and now that IBM has weighed in behind it who would bet against it becoming the de facto standard?

Anyway, if you are a web developer and you don’t know much about these libraries then read this article, it’s a great intro and also does a good job of comparing the different options in an unbiased manner. For the moment I think I’ll be sticking with prototype but if/when the size of Dojo gets even more configurable I’ll definitely be taking a closer look.

What are other people going for?

On the one hand we have Gary and the other Alan. I guess the truth lies somewhere in between.

Now this is just too cool!

Be sure to get over to Carl Tyler’s World Cup Sweepstake Competition. He’s put together a very cool little Domino app which allows you to pick who you think will progress at each round of the upcoming World Cup. It costs $25 for an entry with all of the entry money going to prizes. Should be good fun to watch how it progresses.

Rocky and Libby pointed out this personality “DNA” survey which asks a whole load of questions to analyse your personality. I come out as an “Independent Analyst”:


Like Rocky I think it’s a fairly accurate assessment of my character. It only takes about 15 minutes, well worth a look during your lunch hour.

I know this is like heresy in the geek world but when I’m using a Windows PC increasingly I am finding myself switching back to Internet Exploder, and I’m not happy about it. The problem is that Firefox 1.5 appears to be getting slower, buggier and crashes more often. Initially I just assumed that it was my PC at work, it’s got all sorts of crap on it and is probably due for a rebuild, but I have also noticed the same on my home PC as well over the last couple of weeks. The recent upgrade to 1.5.0.1 doesn’t seemed to have helped much either.

This is not to say that I like IE, I don’t, it’s several years out of date in terms of functionality, has Microsoft’s unique take on "standards" and crashes a lot as well, but it has the advantage that it seems to reload a lot quicker than Firefox when it does go belly up.

So the plan is to downgrade Firefox back to 1.0.7 to see whether that makes any positive difference. Looking around t’internet there seem to be a small but significant minority of people who have had similar problems to me. Has anyone else noticed any similar issues or have I crossed a line here?

A good friend, Phil, is once again running the London Marathon this year. I’d definitely recommend getting over to his site and sponsoring him as he’s running for a very worthwhile charity. However, even if you don’t it’s still worth reading the training blog that Phil’s keeping if only to truly appreciate the effort that goes into running a marathon. The only risk is that it just makes you feel massively lazy (well it does me anyway!).

One for the music lovers here, Phil pointed me to a Guardian article about how they tried to tie each line of the classic London Tube map to a genre of music and then rename each of the stations with an appropriate artist. One of my favourite pieces of art is Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear where he does something similar (I’ve actually got a print of it  on the wall in my lounge), but this is actually more impressive as all of the intersection stations actually seem to work. You could spend hours reading this.