And the RSS Reader Winner is…
For a while now I’ve been trying to find the perfect RSS reader for me. I’ve tried having the feeds integrated with my email client using Newsgator, but that didn’t work. The feeds all ended up in their own folders and I just never bothered to scan those folders. Then I tried using Sage from within FF while I was hacking the ZP RSS support. Again, that didn’t work because I needed to make an effort to open Sage and scan the actual feeds for new items.
What I was really looking for was an unobtrusive system that would periodically flash into my field of view and let me decided whether that was a story that I wanted to read. Something that came extremely close was the News plugin for Trillian. Oh so close! But it only supports RSS 0.91, which is a bit limiting.
OK, that’s not a bad approach I thought, what else is out there? Enter RssReader. Very close to what I needed, it does flash up a little notification window that disappears after a while. Thing is, I’m a bit of a UI snob, and that pop window is just ugly!
So recently, I stumbled across the Yahoo Widgets (not to be confused with the Yahoo User Interface library!). I’d played with Konfabulator before but it never really stuck. I guess second time it hit the right spot. And then my journey really began! Who would have thought finding an RSS reader that could handle multiple feeds and display them in a sensible manner was going to be that hard. There are close to 400 RSS readers listed at the widget gallery, but only a handful do multiple feeds. Most are preset to grab a feed from “insert your favorite feed here”. Quite annoying. I must have churned through about 20 of them looking for the right one. In the end, I settled on MultiNewsReader. Yes, I know that it doesn’t actually pop up a notification window like I wanted, but I can run on open all the time, and the tranparency in the black mode is just right so it blends into my background. From time to time I glance at it and a suitably interesting story grabs my interest and I can launch straight to it in my browser.
Filed under Technology, Updates | Comments (6)TwiddlyWiki – a personal Wiki
One of the problems I’ve been trying to solve lately (yes there are many!) is how to capture and collate all these little bits and pieces of cool content that I find during my travels through the web. Bookmarking is cool, and Foxmarks (an extension to FF) really helps, but it does lack things that I’m kinda used to now. For example, tagging, a timeline, comments, etc.
Being an ardent fan of Wikis and having pushed Confluence, into my last two places of work I’ve always been looking for something light weight that could serve the purpose of being my personal Wiki. Enter TwiddlyWiki, a Javascript Wiki that does everything in your browser. No server required. Just set it as your home page, or one of your home tabs and you’re done. Sweet!
I’m getting used to the syntax slowly, because I am so used to the one in Confluence but so far I really like it. It fits right into my current philosophy of zero foot print, client side goodness. Now all I need to do is figure out how to synchronize this from muliple locations.
Filed under Technology, Updates | Comment (0)Indigojoe Site updates
Quite a few updates to the site, but the main thing is this really cool player created by Johnny. Now we don’t have to use the one from MySpace, which is a relief. It’s pretty much done now, and all that remains is the arguing about Font styles and the like 
All in all, it was a pretty fun project, that came together very quickly and allowed me to hack some sizzle stuff for a change, instead of the usual enterprise framework crap. For such a small site, the list of technologies used is kinda long: AJAX, FAT, moo.fx, Flash, lightbox.js, Javascript and CSS to name a few. Oh, and PHP and mysql too. Fun!
Filed under Design, Javascript | Comment (0)
