What happened to Flock!?

I'm sure I've touched on Flock on my blog before. It's a modern browser built upon Firefox, but includes a ton of 'social' features.  You can write blog posts from the GUI, you can view someone's flickr feed, or drag pages / pictures onto 'your shelf' which would save them for later..

I last checked out Flock at version 0.7. Its yet to reach v1 but it looked promising, however, I rely on a few Firefox add-ons to allow me to do my web-design work, and most of these add-ons would not work with flock, so I stuck with firefox until Flock progressed.

So I was naturally interested when I read on the flock blog that version 0.9 had been released.  Not seeing 0.8, i was expecting a few major features to be included.  I wasn't wrong.

The one thing I immediately noticed was the interface.  It honestly looks like something AOL would produce.  It looks far to cluttered and messy.  It looks like they've tried to fit a button for every feature within the interface. 

I liked flock's previous interface. It was clean, it was uncluttered.  It just worked.  This time though, I was immediately turned off.

However, most of the features were still there.  I noticed the flickr feed (or media stream) as it's now known.  That also covers YouTube too!

Flock also allows you to create blog posts within the browser.. Neat trick that!  But i like Windows Live Writer, even though it takes an age to load!! Grr

Flock also includes an uploader, which uploads images somewhere. Not too sure where though as it says i need a photo account, which i have no need for.  Meh!

Im glad the Shelf is there.  Although it's now called 'Web Clipboard' (What's with renaming everything flock!?)

Rss Feeds seem to work nicely, but im happy with bloglines.  Work's a treat that!

The other big thing with Flock 0.9 is 'My World'.  A page which displays a yahoo search bar, some new bits of news from the RSS feeds, and a list of the most recent favourites added... It also shows thumbnails from your favorite media that you've starred.  Handy i guess.

All in all, im quite disappointed with the way Flock has turned out.  I'm not sure what's gone on with the UI but it seems very very messy and off-putting!  I'll still keep an eye on Flock, to see how it progresses but I'll stick with Firefox.

Check out www.flock.com for more info!

Tidy up your bookmarks toolbar with these tools

I don't know about you, but when I find a site I want to visit again in Firefox, instead of adding it to my bookmarks (or tagging it on del.icio.us), I simply drag it onto my 'bookmarks toolbar'. I like my links to be on hand. I want to hit a button and go. i don't want to hit a button, wait for the bookmarks toolbar to appear, and then have to hunt through my bookmarks looking for the site I want to visit. It'd be quicker to Google it!

This is all well and good but what happens when your bookmarks toolbar fills up? Well you get those stupid little arrows at the end, which defies the point as you may as well use the bookmarks in the first place!

I Recently ran out of room at work, and then stumbled on a little trick which I'm going to share.  Several of my links on my toolbar had long names, for example, the 'French Sports Club - Forum'.  I could abbreviate that down to 'FSC' by right-clicking > Properties and renaming the link.  OR, because it uses a favicon which is recognisable to me, I could remove the text altogether and just leave the favicon on my toolbar! 

Fantastic!

But, I soon realised that not all the links had favicons which transferred to the toolbar.  For example. Facebook has a favicon.  visit facebook.com and notice the white 'f' on a blue background next to the address in the address bar.  That's great, but once you drag it onto your toolbar, the 'f' disappears! All that's left is a standard white rectangle which resembles a page.  So what do we do with these links?

We download & Install 'Favicon Picker 2' Which allows you to specify favicons for each link from icons or images on your hard drive! 

But how do you get the favicons on your hard drive.  Well visit this page, enter the URL in the box, and it will soon display the favicon for the site.  Right click & save the image.

Once you've done that, find the link you want to add the favicon to, right-click > properties. You'll now see a new area for the favicon. Browse to the .ico file you saved earlier and click ok!  Now you've added the favicon, get rid of the text and free up a bundle of room on your toolbar!

Huzzah!

I hope that helps you!  If it does, let us know :)

Opera presents Speed Dial...

I'm a Firefox person. I have been for the last 3 years. It started when I was visiting several sites at once using IE6 and my taskbar had more browsers running that work apps! After some discussion with a few friends, Firefox was recommended. I gave it a go, and was amazed. Within a few weeks, my work PC, home PC, laptop & several other systems i had control of now used Firefox as it's default browser.

Then my girlfriends brother told me about Opera. A similar browser. He kept telling me how Opera was better, blah blah! I nearly beleived him, and for a month at the end of last year, Opera was my main browser! But it just didn't feel as good as Firefox. It was slightly quicker, but had less features!

Never-the-less, Opera have just released Opera 9.2 and it comes with a rather nifty feature which I'd love to see on Firefox.

When you open a new tab in Opera, instead of showing a blank page, it'll show 9 boxes which render 9 user-defined websites! Clicking on either of these thumbnails will load the site in the same tab!

I think it'd be perfect for web-developers who run several sites at once. For instance, if they crack open a new tab, and it shows the developer their own websites, which would tell the developer whether they're websites were online or not!

I'm sure it's got plenty more uses, but that's all i can think of at the moment. I will have a play around with Opera at a later date, but until then, Speed Dial is a nice addition to a nice browser.

Check out the screen cast here!

Testing windows live writer

So this is just a test.  I want to see if it works :)

Edit: I decided to download ' Windows Live Writer' after reading about it on Lifehacker.   I thought I'd want a decent little app that I could run in the background so I could add posts to the blog without having to navigate (and forget!) my Blogger password.

Anyway, I finally downloaded it today, and installed it, and my first impressions are quite good! 

Installation & running for the first time

After I had finally found where to download ' Windows Live Writer' (WLW), the installation was pretty painless.   

Running WLW for the first time, it asks you for some details about your blog.  As I'm a "blogger beta", I didn't opt for the 'Spaces' sign up (this is for those who don't have a blog, but want one on Windows Live Spaces).  After entering my details (wrongly), i finally got into WLW and was confronted by a blue-ish word-like application. 

Interface

To be quite honest, i hate the blue appearance of WLW, and would really like to de-clutter the interface.  You have the normal "File | Edit..." menu which you get on most apps. 

Below that, you have the WLW menu.  Create a new post, edit a post, save drafts etc.  You also have  a "layout button.  This is cool, purely because the main editing window reflects what your blog looks like, with all the same styles, fonts & layout! You can change this, just incase you don't like it!

You also get the standard formatting tool bar (bold, italics  etc).  And then, cluttering up the right hand part of the app, you get 2 boxes. One allows you to open or create posts (identical to the top tool-bar), and the 2nd box allows you to insert links, pictures, tags or maps.  But these are pretty much covered in the formatting toolbar, so it duplicates itself.  D' oh!

Usage

Using WLW is very easy.  Once you've set up your blogs, it's a case of creating a new post.  Spell-checking (how handy), and then clicking 'publish'.  It really is as simple as that.  Obviously, it can get more technical depending on your blog!

Conclusion

Well I've used WLW for about half hour, had a quick flick through the menu's and options, and it does seem like a very handy tool!  Especially for setting our your layouts.  I really like the way it let's you see how your post will look like as it uses the same styles as your blog.

This is just my first impressions.  Ill post a more in-depth look at a later date.

 

EDIT: I've just realised that WLW doesn't allow for 'Blogger Beta' Labels, so for the time being, i'll stick with the browser based posting.  Meh!

Clicky web-stats. Perfect!

As I've posted before, I've been getting back into web-development recently, working on my new skills in CSS & (x)html mark-up. One of the things i used to enjoy looking at when I developed websites years ago was the web-stats, hits, stuff like that.

In my recent development however, I've not been able to find a good free web-stat service. Somewhere i can log onto and view the hits, the search terms, the referrers for my sites.

That was until this week when i happened across 'Clicky', the perfect solution.

I Found 'Clicky' to be a decent web-stat app. It shows me what i want to know in a clear & precise way.

Setting up was easy as pie. You register on the website, and it then asks you to set up your website. You enter the URL, and then any other re-directs you have going, other URL's and such forth. Once you've entered this data, and submitted it to Clicky, it gives you the script that you must enter on your website. And it's not much of a script either. It's only 2 lines of javascript, and seems to work a whole host of magic!

I've got Clicky measuring stats for 2 of my websites at the moment, and it's giving me an average hit count (based over a the previous few days), current unique hits for the day, and it also gives you the amount of click's each user has done!

It goes into further detail too! It'll even tell you what browser the user is using, and the operating system they are running. For example, for ClubTrinity.co.uk, the last 20 people to visit were running Windows, 18 of which were running Internet Explorer, and 2 (only 2?!) were running Firefox.

This can be pretty handy when producing websites, but that's another story!

'Clicky' will also tell you what pages have been visited and by whom. Every user has their IP address, and this is how Clicky can tell which pages have been visited by which user. This enables you to see what users are looking for, and obviously allows you to tailor your site to suit. It even tells you how long each user was on the website for!

On the flip side though, as much as i like 'Clicky' (and I've only been using it 3 days), it is missing a couple of features which I'd like to see, screen resolution for example! I'd like to see how many users are running at 800x600 compared to how many are running 1600x1200.

The other problem I found (and i have spoken to the guy's at Clicky about it) is the fact that when you have multiple sites in the Clicky database, it strips all sub-directories from the name.

Now the 2 websites i have on their currently are hosted on the same server, but under different sub directories. So now when i log-in and use the drop down box to choose which site I'd like to see stats for, all i see is the domain name. I'd like to be able to specify and call each site by a certain name. But I've been assured that they are working on this, so it's all good!

I'd definitely recommend Clicky for an on-line, quick & easy web statistics tool. It's helped me out massively, and it will help me tweak my sites further for the better! If you run a website, and your looking for a stat tool, i think this is the one!

Check it out, 'Clicky'