Its fair to say that my posts have been becoming les and less frequent in the last couple of weeks. Blogging hasn’t fallen out of favour with me, far from it in fact, its just I have decided to give this site a makeover of epic proportions. Well, a little bit more than a lick of paint anyway and I want to be happy enough with it that I can concentrate on blogging and other commitments in my life. I have got some great ( I hope) posts up my sleeve and I will be going on an all out blog offensive when I go live.
I have now have seven email accounts operating from Thunderbird – the excellent, free email client from Mozilla. As you can imagine sometimes recalling what email was from a particular account can become quite tiresome. As good as Thunderbird is as a client, the search facility is ancient and the indexing of Google’s Desktop Search offers exactly what I want (privacy issues aside), instantly . I am not a fan of the sidebar that comes with the Google desktop, it reminds me too much of the Office sidebar they inflicted on us a few years ago, and floating deskbar just gets in the way. While the deskbar is more possibility it is still intrusive, what I really need is an extension to integrate my Google desktop search directly into Thunderbird. There is implementations of this available for Outlook and even Outlook Express but an extension could be done so much better and seamlessly integrate into this great app at the same time. Is there anything out there?
The lack of posts I can put down to a number of reasons, primarily the fact that I have been busy with various websites over the last few weeks and am struggling to manage my time. Ok, really that is only part of the reason, the other is that i have just decided to hook myself back into the PC gaming market and my true gaming love, first person shooters (FPS).
First up is Google X, an OSX inspired front end for Google, using some slick javascript and incorporating virtually the whole of their catalogue of tools and services its a pretty feat for a 17 year old! This leads me onto the subject of the new Google layout that’s being talked about a bit at the moment. Slightly more likely to actually make it into their search engine, a screen shot is available here. Nothing major but I quite like the simplicity they’re still going for, while increasing on the features and usability. – On a side note this image has been hit in excess of 45,000 times since the 25th and got 30,000 in the first two days – that’s got to be one reason to be thankful of Yahoo’s involvement in the infrastructure of Flickr!
Nick Wilson and Jed Brown have released their latest version of the Performancing Firefox Extension. 1.1 is a bigger and better version of their Blog editor that integrates with Firefox to help us blog more effieciently.Aimed squarely at the same userbase Flock (see earlier review) is aiming at, Performancing now has support for most of the major blogging solutions such as Wordpress, Drupal and Live Journal. Integrating tags and your categories, the extension allows you to blog quickly on the topics that get your attention. Performancing sits comfortably at the bottom of Firefox incorparating many of the settings that you find in your admin panels in a window that is both easily height adjustable and collapsible at the press of the F8 key.
