Category Archives: software

Get some bling for your Firefox

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Personas image

Firefox Personas is a Firefox addon that gives you a nice themed look for your browser. Why use Personas when I can just install a theme? For one, all this does is give you some nice background images, as opposed to a complete overhaul with new buttons etc. It’s also a lot easier to switch between looks – they’re all accessible right from the plugin menu (which you access via the little fox face at the lower left corner of Firefox) so no need to keep going back to the Mozilla site for a new theme.

If you fancy getting your own piece of Firefox bling, you can download the addon here.

Google do it again – Google reader

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I know they’re a big evil corporation and everything, but I do love Google.

For the last couple of days I’ve been toying with different feed readers (my staple diet is usually either Blogbridge or Feedlounge). Some time ago I’d toyed with FeedDemon – when I bought that a free business grade subscription to Newsgator came with it. I’d never really used Newsgator all that much, but after reading this post on Khaled’s blog I thought I’d give it a try. It’s pretty good I must admit – both speedy and functional.

To get to the point, whilst browsing around the different feeds on Newsgator, I came across a post on the official Google blog (go there for more info) saying that a new version of Google Reader had just been released.

I was sceptical, when it first hit the masses it was pretty useless if you had anything more than around 10 feeds (I watch hundreds). Basic was an understatement. So, approaching with caution, off I went to take a look.

Was I ever surprised – it’s just like Gmail only for news feeds now! One feature that I always look for is the flag (save an article for later) feature, and Google has it with the starred items, just like in Gmail. You can now have folders to sort your feeds, a ‘shared’ folder for articles you want to share with others, and lots of other little features, all within a slick and simple interface. Load times have greatly improved too.

This is what Google Reader should have been the first time around. But hey, I’m not complaining, better late than never. Well done Google, this is another killer application for me, and best of all, it’s free!

Firewall recommendations?

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Can anyone recommend a firewall for windows? I’ve been using Sygate for aaaages, but as that’s now been taken over by a certain evil corporation I need to find a new one. Please don’t suggest Norton, McAfee or Zonealarm though, else I’m likely to swear at you. :)

Scuttle and coincidences

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I am slowly chipping away at the work that needs doing on Thought Pixels. I haven’t been much in the mood to write content or fiddle with updates/design/code recently, but the latter at least is slowly coming together.

Last night I was looking at my old install of Scuttle over on thekatshiskers.com domain, and decided it was about time I moved it over and upgraded. Well, I did the latter but haven’t bothered moving the old database over, I thought I’d start from scratch. Nothing like a good clear out now and again. Now all I need do is play around with the design a little. I’m not bothered about complete site integration, but I’m not too keen on the default look (too much green for a start).

So I got that done, and then by some coincidence today spotted a post over at Weblog Tools Collection which pointed to a ‘review’ of Scuttle over here. I hope nobody takes even the slightest bit of notice of this ‘review’, it’s obvious to anyone that has used Scuttle that the poster has no idea what he’s talking about. He compares Scuttle to social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, when in fact Scuttle is something totally different. The big difference being that Scuttle is a free self-hosted php/mysql application. Which means that you are in control of your bookmarks and data, rather than some big name on the web. People really should research things better before they decide to berate them.

Incidentally, my installation of Scuttle lives here, and if you want to grab your own copy, you can get Scuttle here. There’s also a nice Firefox extension that makes posting to your own (or somebody else’s) Scuttle easier.

Feedlounge

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After a few days of using Feedlounge, my brief thoughts are thus.

The interface is very slick, the nicest of all the online feedreaders that I’ve seen so far.
Navigating around the feeds is very easy – always a good thing. The different view formats help a lot.
I love the ability to flag posts that I want to return to later.
Bugs – there have been a few, but nothing that makes it unuseable and they seem to be getting dealt with swiftly.

But is it worth $5 a month? For me, not really. There are plenty of other more practical things I could spend that money on. Personally I don’t think I can justify that cost simply to read news feeds, when I can do the same thing with almost the same ease with Blogbridge. But that’s just my personal choice, I’m sure there are plenty of others out there willing to pay.