Archive for the 'Internet' Category

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Ditching Safari RSS

Published on 20 August 2007 in Internet, Journal and Personal computing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I have finally stopped using Safari‘s built-in feed aggregator [Wikipedia]. It’s not that it’s a bad feed client – I actually think it’s quite good for providing basic functionality. It’s also not that that I wanted to use a more advanced stand-alone package (I have plenty of other software toys to amuse me). No the main reason was that it was simply affecting my productivity.

Essentially the simple beauty of the way Safari RSS works is also a curse. Feed subscriptions are stored as bookmarks and appear within the normal bookmark interface with the number of new articles shown in parenthesis. So, every time you navigate the bookmark feature your mind is distracted by other people’s latest blog posts.

It’s even worse if you organise your browser bookmarks the way I do – all either on the Bookmarks toolbar or in sub-folders of the toolbar. Consequently I always have an advert in my browser window trying to entice me away from whatever productive I’m work I’m trying to do. For an avid blog reader, it’s just as poisonous as the dreaded email notification icon.

So I had to free myself. Consequently, I’ve turned Safari’s RSS features off and installed a separate standalone feed aggregator, Vienna. I’ve not tried any others but it seems nice enough. It has smart folders as well as conventional ones and I think I’ll be much more effective at organising my feed subscriptions now that they are separate from my browser bookmarks.

Tip for anyone else considering dumping Safari RSS: See Export OPML out of Safari RSS [macosxhints.com] for a quick and easy way to migrate your feed subscriptions into your new feed reader – assuming, it can import OPML files [Wikipedia].

I’ve also found some side benefits of the change:

  1. Safari is now ever-so-slightly less of a randomly crashing memory hog with the RSS feature turned off.
  2. If Safari continues to annoy me with it’s randomness there’s no more RSS shackle stopping me from going back to using Camino.

Stop manually checking to see if a web page has changed.

Published on 5 June 2007 in Internet and Snippets. 3 Comments

ChangeDetection is a handy free and simple service that lets you set an alert for when a web page changes. Perfect when RSS, etc. feeds are not available. And here is a bookmarklet to make it even easier: a {at} b(.)foo'">Change Detect This!.

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Ocado delivery confirmation e-mails include iCal

Published on 3 June 2007 in Internet, Personal computing and Snippets. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Ocado now send an iCal file for the delivery time with their order confirmation e-mails. Neat!

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Weaning myself off Google; earning iPoints for searching

Published on 12 April 2007 in Internet, Journal and Personal computing. 1 Comment

BBC News reports on search companies renewing their attempts to compete with Google. The article caused me to remiss on life before Google. Like most people I don’t even think about what search engine to you use anymore, reaching for Google has become an automatic reaction. The combination of the accuracy of search results plus the clean, uncluttered layout meant there was no reason to worry about using other search engines.

The article did prompt me to go back and re-discover some old search engines and I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only do they still exist but have been thoroughly revamped. In fact, I’ve actually decided to switch to Dogpile (UK) as my Safari home page! Why? Well, firstly, by aggregating results from MSN, Yahoo and Ask as well as Google it seems to find a few hits that get missed by individual search engines. I also earn iPoints just for searching!

The Google functionality I miss most is the ability to load a cached version of a page. Though I could work around that with some AppleScript.

We’ll see how long this lasts…