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.

…needs an import option, for the likes of Bloglines etc and other clients which aggregate feeds!

Either that or I need to write a plugin that does it myself, I think for Google to add a generic OPML import option to it would be the best option though

What a joke, they only support Internet Explorer!

[imported from Bloglines]

Whilst using the prototype.js AJAX library I have needed a timeout ability on the Request method.. i.e. so if the XMLHTTPRequest hasn’t returned data within X seconds, run a function and kill the request…

I have hacked a quick timeout function onto Prototype.js v1.3.1, you can download it here: prototype_1.3.1+moo_0.1.zip

Usage:
Just as you would use an onLoaded method or whatever, add an onTimeout method… if you don’t know how to do that, I would read the following documentation: Using Prototype 1.3.1

[imported from Bloglines]

Is very useful for those forums which let you browse the forum if you’re a bot, e.g. googlebot.. but try to force you to register otherwise..

Just switch your user agent to something like “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)” and you’re in.

Just be weary of abusing this because administrators are likely to limit the Googlebot access further by IP or something.

[imported from Bloglines]

I’m playing with AJAX at the moment and found some useful techniques/tools…

Currently I’m serving different formats depending on what browser is being used.

e.g

for browsers which support application/xhtml+xml / XHTML 1.x, they get:

mime = application/xhtml+xml

doc start =

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

for other browsers, they get:
mime = text/html
doc start =

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Anyway, I have a javascript which creates a global variable called mimexml so that other parts of the script know how I’ve served the original page (there may be a better way to do this)

I’m using the prototype.js AJAX library and the following routine to update a div:

function showResponse(originalRequest)
{
if (mimexml) {
c =     document.getElementById('ici_ajaxresult');
removeChildNodes(c);
c.appendChild(document.importNode(
originalRequest.responseXML.documentElement.getElementsByTagName('div')[0],
true));
} else {
c =     document.getElementById('ici_ajaxresult');
c.innerHTML =     originalRequest.responseText;
}
}

What I wanted to do was “view source” but of the rendered page, after the javascript had done its stuff… (both in IE and FF)

Two useful tools:

Jennifer Madden’s View Rendered Source (Firefox Extension)

Bill Friedrich’s View Rendered Source (IE Utility)

Bloglines gripe: the editor is really very flakey (adding/editing a blog entry.. formatting stuff, pasting, view source, etc)

[imported from Bloglines]

I’ve only just noticed this, but google seems to be putting content links underneath the first search result:

[imported from Bloglines]

It’s out for download now…

I’ve also installed google talk although I’ve got nobody on my list at the moment!

Messenger ID: mark@influenced.net
Google Talk ID: mark.hutton@gmail.com

Edit: I seem to be logged into my google talk account twice… I seem to remember doing this at work on the Jabber network that I created so maybe it’s a Jabber thing… I wonder which logged in client receives the incoming messages etc though? Surely the old client should be automatically logged out.

[imported from Bloglines]

Here’s my del.icio.us bookmarks…

I’ve only just registered so the list won’t be very long for a while

Edit: it seems rather slow! Maybe they should throw a few more servers at the system