October 25th, 2006
Even though Firefox 2 is slated to be released later today, the release builds have already made it into the Mozilla Firefox release directory. The impatient (like me) can go get it right now.
Oh, and a must have extension for those who want to enjoy the 2.0 release: Nightly Test Tools. Despite it’s geeky sounding, “why the hell would I need that?” name, it is essential for preventing your transition from Firefox 1.5 (or lower, god forbid) to Firefox 2.0 from becoming an exercise in frustration caused by extensions being disabled if the authors have not updated them for Firefox 2.0. With Nightly Tester Tools, you can “Make compatible” any “outdated” extensions to force them to be usable in Firefox 2.0. Granted, this doesn’t always work (if, say, an extension uses functionality that no longer exists in Firefox 2.0), but for most of the extensions I’ve had to “make compatible” so far function just fine.
Oh and while you’re there playing with your extensions (Firefox extensions you sicko), you’ll probably find that you no longer need extensions that save and restore your browsing session (such as SessionSaver or the functionality that comes with Tab Mix Plus) and certain feed subscription extensions (such as Feed Your Reader) - these already come built into Firefox 2.0.
October 25th, 2006
After 2 failed experiments with Typo and Mephisto, I caved and went back to WordPress. As you can see (if you’re on the site itself instead of reading from a feed reader), it’s all green and so 2005-looking (the year 2005, that is) - gonna have to convert the templates from the old Mephisto setup to WordPress.
What exactly went wrong with Typo and Mephisto? Well, Typo was beating the crap out of my VPS, among other reasons. Mephisto was fine until the Mongrel processes running it started dying after a few hours - the 192MB or RAM that I have on the VPS was 100% used and the Rimuhosting guys have wrote me more than once suggesting a memory upgrade as I was causing way too much disk swappage on the host machine. I put the high memory usage down to comment spammers, but hell I wonder how everyone else manages to keep their Mephisto or Typo blogs up assuming not everyone has the luxury of an excess of 192MB of RAM to play with. If you’re running a Typo, Mephisto, or any other Rails-based blogging application under low memory conditions successfully, I want to know!
Another reason I had for abandoning Mephisto was the difficulties I had with its templating system. I could generally live with the lack of an easy way to display stuff like monthly archives unless I was following the trunk, but it was the lack of pagination (such as paged monthly archives) that really annoyed me. Rick Olson has stated that pagination probably won’t go into the Mephisto core and I disagree on its lack of usefulness (but this is another matter). I lacked the perserverance to finish up a pagination plugin when I realized that I had to work off the trunk which was already very much changed from the point release I was using.
Rails is such a wonderful framework, but throwing (another) templating layer into the mix (Mephisto uses Liquid) is a mixed blessing. The whole exercise felt very much like jumping through hoops when there’s already a clear path to goal - nevertheless, I’ll have to give the benefit of the doubt to the lack of documentation and the fast-moving development on Mephisto trunk. I’m probably geting too old for living on the edge where blogging software is concerned.
Anyway, I’m glad to come back to WordPress and less downtime, I hope.
October 24th, 2006
With the recent update of Google Reader, Google’s shot at an online feed reader, I just had to try it out even though I was rather contented with Bloglines. I’ve been a long-time Bloglines user (since end 2003 I think), and even though there was little in terms of innovation and useful new features happening, Bloglines was, in my opinion, ahead of its time way back in end 2003, and it provided an unchanging interface that worked (well, my opinion on that changed after using Google Reader, as we will soon find out).
So, I took some time to clear the backlog of unread articles in my 289 feed subscriptions at Bloglines recently so I can “start over” at Google Reader and not have to read the same unread articles twice. Export Bloglines to OPML, import into Google Reader… It went painlessly and I noticed that Bloglines “folders” got converted into “Tags” in Google Reader - mmm, taaaags. But oh wait, what’s this when I try to “manage my subscriptions” - tags, folders and labels. I’m getting confused.
Just to make sure that they really are the same thing, I created some test tags/labels/folders, and yes they are actually the same thing (meaning if you add a new folder, it becomes available as a label and tag). I’m sure the terms used will be made consistent as Google Reader moves out of beta (or rather, gets further along as a beta).
If you noticed how unorganized my Bloglines subscriptions are, that’s because organizing feeds was a pain on Bloglines back in the day (it was clumsy to organize feeds into folders, you had to select a feed, scroll to the dropdown, and select the action to move it into a folder), but that’s not really a problem now with the new drag and drop interface for managing subscriptions that Bloglines pushed out recently (I think). Thankfully, Google Reader makes managing subscriptions easy as well with the familiar Gmail-like labeling.
Anyhoo, I started using Google Reader for a bit to read new articles in my feeds, and it wasn’t long before I just found my killer feature: ‘mark items as read when you scroll past them’.
This preference will tell Google Reader to only mark those items you have scrolled across as read. I hated it in Bloglines where clicking on a feed would mark all its articles as read, especially for those prolific blogs or those for which I have a backlog (200 entries is usually a little too much for one sitting for good blogs). I have to say it again, this is the killer functionality for me. I’ve been bitten by interruptions and crashed browsers once too many times. I always click on feeds (in Bloglines) with more than 50 unread articles with no small amount of trepidation, fearing that I won’t be able to read them all or that I’d do something to crash Firefox (which is surprisingly common when you’re working with large datasets in JavaScript). This often results in my reluctance to click on feeds with more than 50 unread posts, and with the vicious cycle 50 becomes 200 (the Bloglines limit for unread posts) and the feed rarely gets read (happens with blogs like Scoble or news websites like The Register).
With this feature in Google Reader, I can click on “All items” even if it says there are 1 gazillion unread posts and still feel safe about not losing my place. Those of you using non-web feed reader applications may scoff at this (I’m really not sure, I haven’t used one in a long time so I only assume something like this is common in applications like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon), but I’ve yet to see this done in a web application. Offline feed readers are not really an option for me unless they integrate to an online (i.e central) source (let me know if one exists!). For this feature alone, I decided to make a switch to Google Reader from Bloglines.
Google Reader can get a little slow though, but then I only have 512MB of RAM right now so it probably isn’t indicative of anything (the new Bloglines is slow on the Macbook Pro as well I noticed). Hopefully all this will be moot when I get the 2GB RAM upgrade that’s waiting at the store. Other than that, Google Reader seems faster to respond network-wise (which I’m not surprised at, considering that it’s Google (and their distribution channels)), and it’s also prettier. Yeah, looking good matters to some people, like me (not that Google Reader is fantastic aesthetically, but it’s far less staid than Bloglines).
Now all that’s left is to keep those fingers crossed for some sexy Gmail integration - I’m thinking something like RssFwd, a wonderfully useful creation by Choon Keat. I use RssFwd to track some important blogs and to track the latest releases of TV show torrents (Choon Keat is not gonna be happy about that though heh).
Firefox 2 - it’s out
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