From the Guardian‘s perennially unreliable Rumour Mill:

And we’ll usher in the weekend with a long-awaited bit of good news for Nottingham Forest fans after more than a year of Gary route-one Megson: Nigel Clough is rumoured to be tempted by a return to the City Ground.

Hmmm. I have long said that Clough Jnr would be mad to take the job – but maybe, just maybe, he is the man to bring the club a bit of self respect back, if not the glory days like those enjoyed under his father.

Google’s recent page creator has drawn some conflicting views. I’ll pluck two out here.

Scoble is broadly in favour:

I see a lot of bloggers saying “so” about Google’s new Web Page Creator. I think bloggers often miss the larger conversation that we should be having: the Office Live team tells me that 45% of small businesses don’t have a Web site at all.

Congrats to Google for trying to do something to bring more people onto the Web. That’s the conversation we should be having.

While Dave Winer states:

This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It’s a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn’t it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.

Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities. Give me a ring when there’s at least some rudimentary content management in there.

I’m actually with Scoble on this one. I think a lot of the criticisms are missing the point. Some people don’t want a blog, they don’t want to update their sites on a daily basis. I think this is a good, easy to use solution for folk who just want to have a few photos up on the web, or a message to pass on to friends or family. Issues like CMS and RSS would mean nothing to these people, and nor should they.

In truth, the new Google service simply isn’t for people like Winer, or indeed Scoble. I myself can’t think of a reason why I would need to use it. But for the thousand’s of non tech-savvy web users out there, it could be really helpful.

Stikipad, which I mentioned in my brief round up of wikis recently, has now made it’s free account have unlimited edits. Thank goodness sanity has prevailed – 5 edits would be nowhere near enough for someone to work out whether the service was worth paying for or not. A good example of a company listening to their users’ views.

Thanks to Matt at Stikipad for the email informing me about the change – I’ll be giving the service another try soon.

Google has released another new service: this time a web page editor and host. Not really a competitor to it’s own Blogger service, this system just produces flat sites, so really it should be seen as belonging to the same breed as Yahoo!’s GeoCities (is it still called that?)

Anyway, I have been having a play, and it’s actually quite good. For those who have no problems ethically with using Google, and who have few web skills but nevertheless want a small personal web page, I would genuinely recommend it.

What Google really need to do is integrate this in some way with the Personalised Portal – so that people can have their Google Page with RSS feeds displayed too.

A tutorial that goes step by step through the process of implementing a real-world web design into a working template using CSS for layout.

read more | digg story

Seems a nice little tutorial for CSS beginners.

K4 Bulletin Board entirely made in ajax, first forum to be fully transformed with ajax requiring no refreshing.

read more | digg story

Looks interesting – site is suffering from being dugg at the moment.

New FeedDemon beta released – actually, twice. Two versions came out on subsequent days this week.

Beta 2 of FeedDemon 2, the RSS aggregator for Windows, was released this week. If you’ve been testing FD’s development versions since release 1.5, this latest beta is worth getting.

I’ve just installed it and the first thing I notice is how much faster the application seems to be overall compared to beta 1. The release notes outline a long list of additions, changes and fixes since that first beta.

Sweet.

Another good move is that there is now a button on each post to blog that post, as well as sending it to del.icio.us. Sad thing is, the same button is used for both, and a little menu pops up to let you choose from blogging or del.icio.us. Couldn’t we just have two little buttons?

Qumana Beta 2 has been released and it addresses the WordPress issue I (and many others) mentioned earlier.

I must say I have been hugely impressed with the way the Qumana people have engaged with those offering feedback on their product. So, to keep it coming, here’s some more suggestions:

• Get Qumana to integrate with FeedDemon – the ‘blog this’ function doesn’t copy the text of the blog post like BlogJet does.
• For users with multiple blogs, the default is always the first blog you set up. Perhaps the options could be to set either a constant default, or for the default to be the last blog you posted to.
• It would be nice to be able to add a title element to hyperlinks.

Well, just three for now. But I am going to use Qumana to write the posts for a new blogging project I am working on, so I will be able to test it out some more.

I returned to BlogJet to write this post with, and noticed that several new versions have been released since I last checked. Not sure which features are new, but one I hadn’t noticed before was that it includes an auto-replace feature, that can be used to create the automatic parsing of links I mentioned in another post. Nice one!

So, I had a quick look last night at the bottom of my Gmail window – where it says how much space my emails are taking up. Was shocked that it was 25% of the 2695 MB available.

I thought this was pretty shocking – there’s no way I have that much email. Then I had a thought – for a long while a friend of mine had been forwarding those joke emails with huge attachments – up to 10 a day sometimes. After about a week of this I set up a filter to shove them all to ‘archive’, so my inbox didn’t get clogged up.

So, I searched for all these messages and deleted them all (now, that was a pain in the arse. Not least because I had to select them, delete them, then remove them from the trash; but because in search view, only 25 messages appear per screen, rather than the 100 per screen I have normally. That’s just idiotic.) And what was the result?

I am now down to 11% of my available space. More than half my quota was filled with these joke chain emails! I changed my filter from ‘straight to archive’ to ‘straight to trash’.