The Start Page
The start page has been revamped to show a quick overview of your feeds recent contents if you choose to add them in, which would be useful for those who keep track of many feeds. As you can see from the screenshot above, it shows the five most recent articles from your selected feeds. When your cursor hovers over an article (cursor not shown in screenshot above), it shows you a quick preview of it.
Clicking on an article expands it and marks it as read (as seen above).
In this beta, you get 3 different views to choose from - Quick view, Full view and 3 Pane view. Compare this with the previous version - Display headlines only (Quick view), Display summaries and Display entire posting(Full view). It would seem that display summaries has been removed.
The Quick view
As the name suggests, the quick view gives you, well a quick overview of any single feed. If you have many articles in a feed, you could simply scan through all of them and pick out those that attract you. In this mode, clicking on an article marks it as read, as seen in the screenshot above. Maybe it would be nice if they added a preview of the article (like the one in the start page) when your cursor hovered over an article.
The Full view
The full view shows you the header and contents of the articles. Nothing really new here (I think).
The 3 Pane View
The 3 Pane view is arguably the most popular view for web mail. So it's no surprise that Bloglines decided to implement the 3 pane view in this redesign. If you're familiar with using web mail such as Yahoo Mail, using this view should be a walk in the park.
Some other new stuff
In this beta, simply viewing a feed doesn't cause you to read every single article in the feed. Maybe it's just me, but that's what happens when I select on a feed to read articles. It's slightly annoying if there are plenty of articles in a feed (possible for a feed like digg). The only exception to this is when you are in full view. In full view, as you scroll down, each article in view will automatically get marked as read. However, I feel this is an improvement over automatically marking every article in the feed as read when you select the feed.
If you notice in the screenshots above, there are a few thousand articles unread. However, the scrollbar doesn't become anorexically thin. This is due to the dynamic loading of articles introduced in this version. Bloglines will load about 50 (I guess) articles and when you scroll to the bottom, it'll load another 50. This is superior to the old version where up to 200 articles in a feed will load.
What remains the same
Some shortcuts are still available like 'j' to move to the next article and 'k' to move to the previous article. 's' to move the next subscribed feed and 'r' to refresh the left pane are also kept the same. 'm', 'n', 'o', 'O' don't seem to exist anymore. 'f', 'A' were not tested.
What's missing
Quite a bit seems to have disappeared or maybe I'm just passing them by. For example, I don't see where the blog, clippings and playlists links went. Feed options also seem to have been omitted. At first, I suspected this could be due to me using Opera, but viewing the beta in Firefox did not prove any different.
Conclusion
As a current Bloglines user, I welcome the new beta especially the 3 Pane view. Admittedly, the start page won't be too useful to me, although dynamic loading of 50 articles and manual marking of read articles is very much appreciated. The shortcuts I regularly use are also still there so the only parts that are missing (that I can see) are the links to blog, clippings and playlists as well as feed options. Hopefully, these could be implemented soon so I could fully enjoy the beta!
Monday, August 27, 2007
Looks like our spammer/phisher friend has been busy at work. If you have no idea what I'm talking about refer to my previous post.
For the past couple of days, people have been receiving Myspace links to his/her sites. And this didn't just start yesterday or the day before or even the day before that. Nope, it went back to at least a month ago, when the sites below were first registered. As always I don't link to the original sites, so they are linked to their whois results at godaddy.
In my last post, I listed out some ways of reducing the damage if you had already visited these sites. However, what should you do if you would like to stop yourself or others using your computer from visiting these sites? Well here are some ways you can do that.
- If you're using Internet Explorer, you should be able to add the sites into the restricted zone. This should prevent you from exposure to these sites, but if you install another browser, eg Firefox or Opera, I believe that you can still access these sites through Firefox or Opera. So this is not a totally foolproof method.
- Another way would be to add them to the HOSTS file on your system. By adding them such that they resolve to a non-existent ip address or your own computer, your computer will not be able to access these sites. These should work for any operating system that uses the HOSTS file, including windows, macs and linux. However, this is still not entirely foolproof if you use a router, but for most users, this method or the previous method should be adequate.
If you use a proxy to resolve addresses, there is an extra step. You will need to configure your browser to access these sites directly. This is because connection through a proxy will bypass the HOSTS file, since the proxy is doing the resolving of addresses. Search for your proxy settings and add the sites addresses into "No proxy for" or "Do not connect through proxy" (it's different for various browsers) for your browser. By accessing these sites directly, your computer will use the HOSTS file and will be unable to go to these sites. - Lastly, if you use your own proxy such as SQUID, or if you use a router, you should be able to add these sites into an access control list or a block list.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
A website has started populating the web with useless sites that probably includes nasties as well (I didn't like the prospect of spending the weekend cleaning my computer of whatever-ware they have there). The idea is simple really. Setup a site at coolstuff2see.com and have other websites that contain iframes pointing to this site. Just so people won't notice when they visit the homepage of coolstuff2see.com, say it's under construction. Perfect!
Yes, you can tell it's the weekend and people are in the mood to be careless. I suppose the webmaster was thinking, hmm what would people like to do during the weekend. Maybe you'd like to meet coolfreepeople at this site coolfreepeople.com (not linked to protect you). Or perhaps you'd want to check out cool stuff at coolstuff2see.com/skanks/register.html (again not linked to protect you). How about some amusement at amusementpeople.com (do I need to say it again)? If you thought you'd find something nice at these sites, think again.
What do these three sites have in common? Well, first, they are basically useless to most people except for maybe the webmaster. Second, they are newly created sites as you can see here, here and here. Third, not only are they useless, they may contain crapware, adware, spyware, well, stuff that is not too good for your computer.
So do yourself a favor this weekend, and don't go looking for CoolFreePeople. Not at these sites anyway.
Edit: I just realized that I totally forgot about the people who had visited the mentioned sites above before coming here. So what if you had already gone to the site?
First off, stop going to sites that you received in your instant messages or email. If you really need to, check it out first.
Next, do a virus/adware/spyware scan. Basically do a check to see if anything on your computer had been compromised.
Lastly, since that seems to be primarily a phishing site, if you entered your email and password (bad idea), change them as soon as you can. If you use the same username or email address and password for other sites, change those as well. Phishers are normally in it for the money or identity theft, so focus on changing your bank, paypal, e-gold, etc passwords.
That's all I can think of to reduce your collateral damage. If you have any more ideas, the comment form is just a click away.
Normally I don't care about pageants. But this video was the highlight of the recent Miss Teen USA pageant 2007. Miss South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton, was asked a question in the final five. And what happens? Well, let's just say she speaks for herself.
The simple, innocent question:
A recent poll showed that some Americans can't find the USA on a world map and why do you think this is?
Her mind boggling answer:
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uhmmm, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and uh, I believe that our, I, education like such as uh, South Africa, and uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uhhh, our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for us.
The result? Not as disastrous as you would like to believe. I mean four out of five ain't too bad considering her answer. I honestly thought with such an incomprehensible answer, she would have been booted from the show. On another note, I think people watch this just for the comedy. Seriously.
[Source: DListed]
Afterthought: By the way, did you notice the host's (Mario Lopez) face after her answer? You could see him start to form a smile which eventually becomes a wide grin as he looks to the camera.
The upcoming eclipse is called a central lunar eclipse. It's central because the moon is entering the center of Earth's shadow. A lunar eclipse is simply Earth casting a shadow on the moon, unlike the one in Heroes, which is a solar eclipse, where the moon casts a shadow on Earth.
Depending on where you are, the eclipse will begin at various times with varying degrees of darkness. Unfortunately, all of the times happen to be in the morning, like really really early morning, when most people are asleep. Oh stop complaining, will you? It's not everyday that you get to see an eclipse, although I keep seeing it on Heroes.
[Source: Astronomy Magazine]