Eventually I found one I loved, and though I never did quite get around to recommending you all the excellant Newshutch.¹ RSS reader many others did (37 Signals and Pstam). Unfortunately they have decided to close the site and after ‘learning a lot’, Nathan and the team(?) have decided its time to move on. I thank them for their effort, but I am really sad to see them go; 18 months of RSS satisfaction.

So I am back to where I started, well almost. One of these feeds that I subscribed to is the journal of John Hicks, a designer based in the Cotsworlds, and for many months now he has been spamming us with his incessant ramblings (concise text actually but it makes for a better story) about his gReader theme. Never paying much attention till the day that my preferred option abandoned me I decided to give it a try.

Hicks’s beautification of Google Reader, in a similar vein to the unfinished Shuttle / Wordpress exercise or Steve Smiths Tiger Admin Panel, has been achieved by releasing some modified css that gives a this RSS reader a new lease of life. Full instructions are here and you can download the theme from his site. This improvement to Google Reader softens my loss. Kudos to you Mr Hicks and your incessant ramblings!

1. there are still some good reviews and up if you are interested and haven’t any idea what I am talking about, I can’t actually access the site at the moment. [back]

He is currently looking for a publisher and I am looking for books for my coffee table so if you know one, help me and him out!

As a quick introduction for those that aren’t aware of it, Feedburner is the stats management package for your RSS feeds, monitoring a great depth of information from subscriber numbers to click through’s to your pages. It re-writes your RSS feed and allows you to add features and customisations adding greater value to both your readers and you as the site marketer or owner.

This clearly is a good deal for all concerned, Feedburner is a relatively established web startup (almost a contradiction) that has raised a little over $10 million dollars in funding and is currently monitoring 422,717 publishers with 721,074 feeds. This works out at roughly $236 a head which in comparison to many social networking sites is pretty high. For Google they are getting the no.1 feed stats management package out there with an established user base and technology.

So what does Google’s acquisition for a reported $100 million mean and how could it effect you as the customer / reader?

• This clearly confirms the value of RSS feeds that many in the web and advertising industry already know. Many net savy readers already read sites through news readers, rarely venturing to the actual site itself and while monetising feeds (as its come to be known) isn’t new this is confirmation that Google clearly sees this as another advertising medium they would like to swallow.
• Google are very unlikely to pull this one out of the open web space like they did with Adaptive Path’s MeasureMap but surely this acquisition will lead the way to integration into Google Analytics. The integration with Adsense and Analytics would seem to make it a likely brethren, ultimately though making web stats a requirement of the feed stats could be a bold move to far though.
• This will be bad news for users who would ‘prefer’ not to use Adsense to monetise their sites as the current ad networks will be inevitably squeezed out in favour of Google based advertising in the future.

Congratulations Feedburner, clear and present evidence of another company making one hell of a profit from flipping their company to one of the biggest out there.

All my sites went down today for about 60mins around 5pm (GMT) with my host denying all knowledge. Not the end of the world but a reasonable explanation would have been appreciated. Especially as this is the 7th day this month there has been some length of downtime! I have been putting it off for ages but a few more issues and poor responses from my host and I might end up making the move. Where do you recommend?

Can’t explain it at the moment and as I wasn’t working on my sites at the time I wouldn’t have noticed had it not been for the excellent Pingdom which monitors my sites like a hawk. For those who work on more than one website or administer an e-commerce website Pingdom is essential and should be in every ‘web masters’ (for want of a much better expression) tool kit.

Errors

Thanks to Gary King for the heads up this morning, he informed me the comments on my site had broken. It seems a rarely used forum on one of my sites had crumbled under the spam bot pressure and filled 150MB of space in my database. My fault for not disabling it. Anyway all working now and comments are up and running again – the forum, retired!

It would appear, and rightly so, that Google has remembered its informal corporate motto, “Don’t be evil.” – well with a little help from the blogspere at least. It seems that someone’s 20%¹ turned into helping us all with tips (read prime advertising) at the top of certain search results on Google. Specifically targeting searches for software or services that Google has a competing product they handily suggested their software above the number 1 search result.

Well after the resulting booing and hissing it appears Google have taken note and, for the moment at least, removed these ‘handy suggestions’. Well done to all concerned, it appears that if we shout loudly enough, even companies tripping over the dollars take note (I couldn’t see anything on their blog about this though).

Interestingly if they had simply continued putting their products at the top of the paid advertising on search results for these terms it would have been far less obtrusive and significantly less noteworthy.

1. Google engineers all have “20 percent time” in which they’re free to pursue projects they’re passionate about. Source: Google [back]

USB2 had turned back into USB1, I was getting read / write errors all the time and little messages about software I had never heard of. Sick to the back teeth of searching for adware or virus scanning I had to give in. Trouble is I had about 20 DVD’s of backups (general non vital stuff) to do first, but with a Saturday and Sunday spare I wrote off my weekend!!

I am now finally up and running again (must get another external HD) with the only significant issue is a load of documents I had encrypted and forgot to decrypt before the change.

Well worth the agro though, its like having a new PC and finally the nightmare ’s over (until about this time next year when Windows dies again)! I think the Mac fan boys might be finally winning me round to the dark side. Mmm OSX…….

IE7, while a massive improvement on IE6 with features such as tabbed browsing, RSS integration and improved rendering engine amongst others, it is still not right. Even with all the stink in the web community about the lack of a standards based browser from the major OS developer, IE7 is still some distance from Firefox 2 or even 1.5 for that matter. For all the effort that has been put into IE7 it’s ironic that as we enter a time for major change in the PC world with Vista, IE7 would have probably been a mostly cosmetic enhancement if it wasn’t for Firefox. Yet still I get the impression of IE7 being a ‘just enough’ browser to appease the majority and keep the web community just far enough from the door. I’d expect much more to come from Microsoft in future releases.

Firefox is continually evolving though, taking (relatively) small steps each time but each time getting the improvements right; creating a product that is a pleasure to use. The integration and perfection of the session saver add-on (extension) is a perfect example of doing the good things really well.

Battles require a contest and I can’t help but feel that from Microsoft’s point of view the browser battle is already won and aren’t really trying. Credit should be given to the IE team for the improvements to IE7 but they still have a long way to go until they are taken seriously by developers and designers and their browser being not being treated with the contempt it currently deserves. There will always be people who want to stray from the conventional but until businesses wake up and see the productivity and usability benefits, Firefox will continue to grow at nowhere near the rate it warrants.

From Mozilla’s and the privileged end users point of view, Firefox is still quite clearly a number of steps ahead of IE7 and they know this. While the gap between Firefox and IE7 has narrowed, and the competition will eventually benefit Firefox’s user too, I don’t get the impression the developers and people involved are too concerned about the developments coming from Microsoft at the moment.

A Browser War? A lovers tiff more like. Maybe in the future with the releases of IE8 and FF3 but at the moment this is just the beginning. As the consumer, the real benefit we will receive is an improved browser that many are forced to use in their workplace and the continued polish of an excellent browser in the home!

PhishTank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. Also, PhishTank provides an open API for developers and researchers to integrate anti-phishing data into their applications at no charge.

What will be very interesting to see will be how the community grows and how their API is utilized. A wordpress plugin anyone?

So come on everyone, “Shop a Phisher!“

Including the obligatory web 2.0 revenue model centred around different subscription plans will keep the investors happy; these range from ‘free’ (5000 visits a month and two pages tracked) up to pro for 250,000 visits and unlimited number of pages tracked. Based on the price plans available, it will be interesting to see how popular this service will becomes and / or how soon one of the big search engines eats them up. My personal gut feeling is that Google will probably be prime suitors and snap them up to integrate them into their existing stats services like Google Analytics and Measure Map.

Combined with a first class statistics package like Mint, I firmly believe this sort of usability testing will become as valuable to site owners / designers as SEO in the future if it isn’t already now. Take a look at Crazy Egg and see for yourself, it can show up some surprising results!

(5:00AM PST): Digg temporarily down while we switch over to Digg v3.0.
(6:10AM PST): Digg v3 is live.
(6:20AM PST): Demand is so high we’re adding more machines.
(7:50AM PST): We are making a run to bestbuy to pick up some more servers (kidding). Seriously though: We are seeing much higher activity than we normally do, so bear with us as we turn on additional machines and tweak the site throughout the day.

While not quite as much a revolution in the design as v2, v3 certainly benefits from the expansion of various different topics such as ‘Science’, ‘Entertainment’ and ‘World & Business’. Adding the ability to sort the stories based on popularity such as top stories this year also expands the feature set.

With sites like Newsvine and Netscape building on Digg’s features and I feel like Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and the team behind Digg are realising the potential threat of competition that increases each day.

Though topic expansion has no doubt been on the cards for a while, Digg has begun grow its service no doubt feeling sure that they have the basic site refined enough to cope with the growth into other subject areas. Naturally as the success of Digg increases so the attraction and financial benefit of rigging the system will increase proportionally. On the back of VC funding back in October, no doubt much of the work has gone on the backend, putting the infrastructure in place to cope with the growing click fraud Digg appears to have been suffering from. With all that at stake lets hope that in the time they have taken to expand into these areas they have done everything they can to minimise the possible effect this may have on genuine news articles. Good luck guys.