Even though I work as a website developer until last week I had never bothered to set up an RSS reader. Now I’m not sure why I hadn’t bothered doing this, I was well aware of RSS feeds, I was even running 2 blogs both with RSS feeds. I think I was just stuck in my habit of reading blogs and news websites by navigating directly to the websites.

So I took the plunge and decided to try out Google Reader as Robert Scoble is always banging on about it, I thought about using the built in Firefox RSS reader but a some people were claiming its a bit rubbish.

I thought about getting some sort RSS plug-in for Thunderbird or Outlook but decided that it would be much cleaner to have a web-based solution; I get a bit fed up having to install and configure hundreds of applications everytime I want to use a new computer.

Anyway I’m very glad that I have started using an RSS reader. It helps me keep what I want to read organised, avoid adverts, and stops me opening a silly amount of tabs with articles that I’ll probably never get around to reading. I’m subscribed to about 20 blogs at the moment so am not using any of the more advanced features to keep things organised, I haven’t bothered learning any of the keyboard shortcuts yet either.

In conclusion I can’t really compare Google Reader to any other RSS readers as I haven’t used any others but I’d definitely recommend it to someone wanting to start reading RSS feeds.

Ooohh that RSS feed in the picture above looks really good (nosey people can click the image to see it full size and snoop on what I’ve been reading).

/* Pete Graham */

Last weekend I wrote about how to run IE6 and IE7 on the same computer. Now this technique was working very well until I needed to test some CSS modifications that I had made on the phuser interface in IE6. It was then I discovered the standalone version of IE6 has a problem with storing cookies, which (if you excuse the pun) renders it pretty useless for testing sites that require a login.

Thankfully I discovered that tredosoft.com have fixed this cookie problem, they offer a handy windows installer that will install IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6. Wow image the hours and hours of fun you can have with all those different versions of Internet Explorer! Also it’s bound to really impress chicks that you’re running so many versions of IE on one PC, we all know chicks dig website development. So what are you waiting for download it now!

Click the image above to see it in its full resolution glory!

# Pete Graham

I signed up for a Facebook account today, partially out of curiosity but also because I wanted to see what type of crossover it has with phuser, the website I’ve been developing.

I’ve been finding it quite interesting so far, there’s a cool feature where if you give Facebook your email address username and password it will go rooting about in your contacts and then show you which of them are on Facebook.

It seems better thought out than mySpace its main rival, but not as fun. Some of the concepts seem to have quite odd names. For example instead of commenting on peoples profiles you add comments to someone’s “wall”. Also I am the only one that finds the idea of “poking” people a little dodgy, check the image below to see what I mean.

Anyway I think I need to have a bit more time playing with the site before I make my mind up about but its definitely got some interesting ideas in there.

/* Pete Graham */

If you have a site with a narrow main content area like this blog then the IG Syntax Highliter plugin can break your layout in Internet Explorer 6. This problem can be easily solved by modfying the file syntax_hilite_css.css. Here is where this file is located:

your_blogs_dir/wp-content/plugins/ig_syntax_hilite/css/syntax_hilite_css.css

Below is the first change I've made aroud line 7, I have commented out the original width and replaced it with a smaller one.

The second change required is around line 19, again I have commented out the original code.

Upload this file to your wordpress install and your site design should now render correctly. In this example I have reduced the width of the code box by 50 pixels you may want to alter yours by a different amount.

/* Pete Graham */

I'm back home at my parents house this weekend. I had a bit of spare time of my hands this afternoon so decided I was going to fix the IE6 rendering bug I found yesterday. My parents laptop is fairly new so has IE7 installed, however I've discovered a stand-alone version of IE6 on evolt.org. The site also has versions of IE3, 4, and 5 available click here for the download archive. Since the programs are stand-alone they can be run at the same time, which is great if your a developing or testing websites.

# Pete Graham

I was pretty pleased with the code syntax highlighting plugin I installed yesterday, just before I was about to finish work I got the Blog up in IE6 Arrrggghhh! IE6 redenders the width of the main content column smaller than Firefox and IE7, this causes the main content to be displayed below the content in the right sidebar, not good.

I think the fix is going to be fairly easy, I'll upload it here when I get it sorted.

I also installed the live calendar plugin on my Peteamania blog, unfortunatley I've noticed that this plugin doesn't work correctly in IE7 (the hyperlinks never load). I don't think I can be bothered to fix this bug, although its a nifty little AJAX plugin it doesn't offer much improved functionality over the bog standard wordpress calendar.

# Pete Graham

If your a website developer or designer then you don't want to be editing the files on your live webserver if you can help it. One of the best way around this is to do your development work on a local machine and check your files into a version control system such as Subversion.

However when you checkout files from subversion .svn directories are created in each folder you checkout. If you don't do anything nosey Internet scummers can go poking about in your .svn directory and learn all sorts of things, so keep them out with a nice bit of Apache mod_rewrite.

If your mod_rewrite mad your likely to love this cheat sheet. Official mod_rewrite information can be found here.

The alternative to checking out files is to export from subversion. If you export
.svn folders will not be created, however exporting is a one off operation where all files are copied. If you checkout from Subversion you can then update each time new changes are made, updating will only modify the changed files, so it's fast.

If you want to find out more about Subversion this PDF book is a great resource.

/* Pete Graham */

Theres only one thing that I love more than technology and thats code!

I've added the IG: Syntax Higliter plugin to this blog so I can start publishing snippets of code on this blog. The plugin can support php, html, sql, and a whole host of others languages click here to find out more about it.

Below is a fascinating piece of PHP I cranked out to check its working.

My only complaint I have about the plugin is it doesn't seem to provide any indentation when it displays the code, even if you paste the code into wordpress nicely indented. Maybe there's a setting to activate this. If anyone can tell me where it is I'll buy them a beer, if you don't drink beer then you can watch me drink two instead.

// Pete Graham

Its official Mr. T loves Computer Science, check out this advert for Hitachi for proof, I absolutely creased when I watched it. "I pity the fool that doesn't use Hitachi data System Virtualization!"

/* Pete Graham */

IBM has released an enterprise social networking suite called Lotus Connections. The suite has five components:

• Activities
• Dogear (a book marking del.icio.us style system)
• Communities
• Profiles
• Blogs (well we all love blogs these days don’t we)

The aim of these Web 2.0 components is to help experts connect and collaborate within an organisation.

Some people are claiming IBM are just trying to cash in on the current Social Networking trend, others are going as far as to proclaim “The Death of Social Networking” [1] as if big businesses are doing it, then surely it’s not cool anymore.

Now I’ve worked on a large corporate Intranet system in my previous job and now work developing a social networking website [2]. I believe Intranets are often undervalued by many corporations, not only do they have the potential to affectively catalogue and distribute large amounts of business information but if included with custom web applications they can also streamline/replace clunky manual systems that exist in many establishments.

If IBM manages to deliver a product that successfully merges web 2.0 style collaborative social networks with traditional business Intranets, then you have a situation where the Intranet is potentially the core of the business and where huge amounts of communication and collaboration are done using it. If done correctly these new Intranets will give employees the same feel good factor associated with a social-networking/online-communities and they will also benefit the company through increased productivity, communication and shared information.

For those of you not so convinced look at it this way, if this system provided facilities that meant you could cut the amount of boring meeting you have to attend in half wouldn’t you be interesting in trying it?

# Pete Graham

[1] I will be discussing “the death of social networking websites” later this week as I feel its worthy of a complete blog entry

[2] I work developing phuser.com the official description for phuser is "the antidote to social networking websites"