influenced dot net

I think I was a bit hasty with my initial comments regarding Google Reader.

I’ve been using it a lot the past few days and unfortunately it does have some niggles..

I’ve made a quick list of pros and cons which I’ve found.

Pros:

• Quickly loads RSS article text when switching between visible RSS items
• Star items for future reference
• No frames, neater and better looking

Cons:

• Can’t easily select different RSS sources to read items from, have to open “your subscriptions” and even then it’s not as useful as it could be
• Doesn’t order by date properly, seems buggy
• Sometimes slow updating the list (i.e. loading a new list when you navigate a page down)
• I’ve read some articles multiple times.. never had this with Bloglines
• Sort by relevance – relevant to what?

I think I’ll stick with it for a while as it’s still Beta and see if they fix any of these issues

Update:

It seems the ‘articles appear multiple times’ was in fact an RSS feed problem rather than a Google Reader problem..

With further testing I have encountered a few more issues:

• Slow performance at times which causes the AJAX interface to behave very strangely
• Very difficult to manage lots of feeds (currently I have around ~140)..
  • Cannot assign multiple feeds the same label in one step
  • Cannot erase a complete label group (I know there would be conflicts with multiple labels but could be worked around)
• Importing isn’t great (see below)
• I’m seeing very old articles on some feeds even though I haven’t clicked the ‘show older articles’

I had around 40 feeds tagged with ’9rules-network’ and decided I wanted to delete this label group and reimport it using the latest 9rules OPML file.

Unfortunately I had to delete them one by one, then when I reimported (which took a loooong time for some reason – didn’t first time), half of the imported feeds had the old label again which had been completely erased earlier!

You must remember however that it is a Beta version and hopefully the Google Reader team will persivere and make the reader into something special.

Many thanks to Mihai Parparita from the team for e-mailing me regarding the issues I was having.

Google Reader rocks! I think this is now my web based RSS viewer of choice. The interface is perfect and the speed at which it loads RSS entries is outstanding (since it uses a Google cache). Bye bye Bloglines, it was nice knowing you

I recently tried out NewsGator too but wasn’t really too impressed with it, maybe I’m missing something big but it just didn’t really blow my skirt up.

I’ve uploaded a new build of gen_announce which fixes the following bugs:

• MySQL Updater thread not being released
• SSH tunnel listener thread not being released

I don’t know how I managed to overlook these two but I sort of rushed it out today as I was rather busy at work!

Download here:
gen_announce_v0_2_1_61.exe.

I’ve just put the finishing touches to the latest version of my Winamp General Plugin gen_announce..

gen_announce has a few different methods of advertising your currently played track:

• mIRC DDE command
• MSN Messenger ‘now playing’
• MySQL SQL Query

It is customisable so you don’t end up advertising the fact that you’re watching a movie cough

gen_announce also includes a SSH tunnel ability, e.g. if you need to be on the same server as your mysql daemon to have access to it, you can tunnel via SSH (assuming you have a SSH account on that server!)

You can download it here: gen_announce_v0_2_1_60.exe.

Edit: I need to look into stopping Markdown formatting links that have underscores in

Unfortunately, I’ve been really busy with other things and this site has been pushed towards the back of the pile.

Today though I’ve implemented Adsense and got it working with my application/xml serving to capable clients via this tutorial. One bad thing is that it seems to have broken my layout slightly in Firefox which I will need to look at in the near future.

I really need to implement a menu and a proper backend system instead of currently entering raw SQL commands into my DB!