Here's a handy tip from Microsoft's Douglas Purdy: Use Visual Studio .NET to enable tabbed browsing with Internet Explorer! [screenshot] If it's not already visible, right-click on VS.NET's toolbar to display the Web toolbar. To open a new tab, right-click on a Web page and select "New Window." Thanks, Doug!
Often, while doing my daily reading on the Web, I'll end up with half a dozen browser windows open, containing articles I want to read after scanning my RSS feeds. (Or, I'll have a single browser instance whose history list contains the articles I want to read. Upon completing each article, I hit the Back button to proceed to the next one.)
Recently, I've read several favorable reviews of Mozilla, whose tabbed browsing feature sounded like the ideal solution to my browser proliferation issue. So, this past weekend I installed Mozilla 1.3 and gave it a try. Nice! It's every bit as usable as IE6, and has several features that I wish IE would "embrace and extend": In addition to tabbed browsing, I like Mozilla's popup blocking and cookie management. The forward and back buttons on my IntelliMouse Just Worked. And most important, with a single exception (my Radio Userland desktop page), every site I visited rendered just fine! The only feature I missed was the ability to drag a hyperlink from, say, an e-mail message into Mozilla and have the browser go there.
Mozilla hasn't replaced IE as my default browser just yet, but if you haven't tried it, I recommend that you do so.
I've been using nntp//rss for over a month now, and overall, I'm pretty happy with it. I like it for the same reason people who live in Outlook love NewsGator. (I live in Outlook Express, because it lets me handle e-mail and NNTP newsgroups from a single app, and without a VPN connection to the company network. With nntp//rss, I can leverage that same app to monitor my favorite Web sites.)
I do have a handful of wishes (the program's author, Jason Brome, posted a comment the last time I wrote about nntp//rss, so perhaps he'll see these suggestions):
Those are the biggies. Threading and "virtual newsgroups" would be cool, but they're not a big deal to me. It's unfortunate that adding a feed requires multiple steps (add the feed via nntp//rss' browser interface, then "subscribe" to the feed in your newsreader), but I like the fact that nntp//rss addresses most of the issues people have with other popular aggregators, such as SharpReader and RSS Bandit. If you're happy with your NNTP newsreader, you'll like nntp//rss.
Scoble laments:
This is a problem with writing every day. I only have something smart to say once a month.
I suggested that he employ the Spolsky method of only writing when he actually has something to say, but Robert says that reading his blog is "like playing the lottery." Hmm, OK, the Forrest Gump method.
At any rate, I have the opposite problem: Plenty to say, no time to say it. By the time I've worked all day, replied to my e-mail, participated in discussion groups, read the sites in my blogroll (on a good day I get to about half of them), worked out, and spent some time with family and friends, blogging is the last thing I feel like doing! How do you people do this?
It's my perception that John Dvorak, columnist at PC Magazine, loves taking outrageous views on things. Why? Because then people talk about him, and link to him. John seems to think that if everyone talks about his outrageous ideas and links to him, that makes him successful.
Hmm... sound like anyone else we know? ;-) I think Scoble's just upset because Dvorak stole his move.
My long-time colleague Keith Pleas (remind me to tell you about the trip we took together to South Africa...) has started blogging, and he's off to a good start: I particularly enjoyed this post, defending lowly VB programmers against the condescending attitude of certain self-important semi-colon jockies. ;-)
Go, Keith!
Ole Eichhorn links to one of the more gripping tales I've read in recent memory: The story of AccordionGuy's new girlfriend, who was not who she claimed to be. This story has it all: romance, suspicion, betrayal, and investigative work worthy of Lieutenant Columbo.
My only question is: Do you think it's true?
Like seemingly everyone else in the .NET Weblog universe, I downloaded Luke Hutteman's SharpReader yesterday, and have been using it all day. It's a fine piece of software -- excellent work, Luke! -- but, like everyone else, I have feature requests:
The more I thought about the various feature requests, the more it seemed that people want SharpReader to behave like a newsreader: Outlook Express, Forte Agent, Mozilla, etc. Rather than create Yet Another News Aggregator, why not simply serve RSS feeds via NNTP? Users could then read/manage them in the newsreader of their choice.
A quick Google for "RSS NNTP" uncovered two tools which do precisely that: nntp//rss and Genecast.
Genecast is a hosted, subscription-based service ($18 for 6 months), which might appeal to those who want to access their news from any computer, and who don't have access to a server of their own. nntp//rss, on the other hand, is an open source (GPL) Java-based tool that creates an NNTP server on your local machine, rather like Radio Userland. Simply use its Web-based admin pages to subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds (it can import your existing subscriptions via OPML) and point your newsreader at localhost:119. If you install it on a Web-accessible machine, you can read your news from anywhere.
How does nntp//rss compare to SharpReader? Well, it doesn't allow you to categorize your feeds (you can use a hierarchical naming convention to simulate categories, but you don't get that nice aggregation of all items within a category); it doesn't thread items, nor does it generate automatic comments links. On the other hand, it does allow you to post from your newsreader, and it allows you to use all of your newsreader's selection, marking and filtering capabilities. And since it's open source, we (and by "we," I mean "you") could probably add threading and categorization. Check it out!
I loved SNL's spot-on parody last night of patriotically-motivated boycotts: "Cuz it ain't whatcha do to show yer love for this country: It's whatcha don't do to show yer hate for those who don't show their love for this country."
Scandal Rocks Yoga World: Bikram Choudhury, founder of the fastest-growing style of yoga in America, has copyrighted his poses and is threatening to sue anyone who teaches his "hot" style without permission. My favorite quote:
Choudhury, 56, is a yoga guru so brash that he has been known to compare himself to Superman and Buddha, teach from a throne wearing nothing but a tiny Speedo and a headset mike, and proclaim his style as "the only yoga." When asked how he could make such drastic statements, he told Business 2.0 magazine: "Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody f*&ks with me."
Ah, enlightenment!
