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.

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!

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.

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.

However I’ve also had my eye on Feedlounge for some time, and the service finally launched today (well, yesterday now for you people who have normal sleep patterns!). The biggest downside is that it isn’t free. That made me hum and har for at least 30 seconds, but I decided to take the risk and sign up for a month. For a cost of $5 I thought it would be worth the risk, and I can always unsubscribe if I don’t like it. I’ll let you know in the next day or two how it turns out.

This weekend I bought what is turning out to be one of the best (and cheapest) gadgets I’ve ever bought – a USB cup warmer! Purchased at PC World for £5.99, it’s doing it’s job brilliantly! I am renowned amongst those who know me best for always letting my tea go cold, and now it doesn’t get cold, woohoo! Admittedly it doesn’t keep it warm for hours on end, but then if it did no doubt it would taste bloody awful anyway. But it stays warm for almost an hour, so, a thumbs up on that one from me.

Domains – I have too many sites spread out too thinly at the moment. Time to cut down and get back to basics. femalegeek.com is going, though I will copy over the posts from there to here. moon.gaz.in – staying for now, but definately on hiatus for a while. thekatswhiskers.com – will forward the root domain to here tomorrow, but keep the domain for a little while at least.

This place needs jazzing up a bit too, never did really finish it off properly. I’ll get around to that as and when though, I’m feeling too distracted for it right now. Plus I can’t make my mind up on design, so I’ll keep mulling that one over.

And that, as they say, is all about it!

I’m just wondering now how to give away those that I don’t need. If anyone who reads here would like one, (and you’re in the UK), let me know and I’ll post one off to you (email me via the contact link in the navbar). The Mac disc and 2 of the PC discs I’ll keep for myself, but the rest are free to whoever wants one.

And now I have an itch to install Ubuntu on something. Think I’ll try the live cd on my powerbook.

I have been using various bits of software, but it’s becoming a royal pain in the rear to keep manually updating each one, so I really need a cross platform solution (windows/linux at least).

I’m not overly keen on browser based readers, but if that’s the only solution that’s what I’ll have to do. Bloglines and similar services – can’t stand ‘em. I’d much rather have a seperate programme to read everything in.

Any suggestions?

I’m also working on a new project (which will be vbulletin based) along with a friend, and have just decided to see if I can integrate Textpattern with that. It would look so much better than a bog standard forum portal, but I’ll have to see how far they will integrate first. If nothing else, the integration and design will give me a chance to flex some new coding and design muscles, so it’s all good.

So, I’m off to fiddle. If I’m not back in a few days I’ve gotten lost somewhere between Textpattern and vBulletin…