Friday, 18 February, 2005

Firefox Multiple Homepages

I only managed to figure out last night how to get Firefox to open multiple tabs on startup, each with a different page loading. And guess what? It was very simple to do.

Simple set your tabs up as you want at startup, and go to options and click ‘set as home page(s)’ It’s that little ‘s’ in parenthesis that’s important. Next time you start Firefox up, all the pages load.

Mine now starts with:

One issue with this is that everytime you hit the home page button on the browser toolbar, all four pages start loading in new tabs, meaning that you can end up with rather a lot of them!

A league of their own

John O’Farrell on the dearth of English players in the Premiership, following Arsenal’s all-foreign efforts this week:

This week, another football landmark was reached when a Premiership team fielded an entire squad of foreign players. “What is Arsene Wenger doing?” said the pundits. “I mean, OK, so Arsenal are 4-1 up, but they completely lack the homegrown talent of their opponents … Oh, hang on, now they’re 5-1 up.” In fact, it should have been six but we’re stuck with these useless English referees. “Where oh where are the top British players?” asked a fan at half time, sensing that he vaguely recognised the bloke serving him a reheated hotdog.

Where did it all go wrong for Forest?

From The Guardian:

The last time Nottingham Forest and Tottenham Hotspur met in the FA Cup, it was the 1991 final. Wembley was filled with Puffa jackets, videos were set for Saturday-night favourite Noel’s House Party, and Cher’s Shoop Shoop Song poured out of the stadium speakers. If that doesn’t date the scene, maybe this will: it was expected to be a close game – and it was. With Spurs losing Paul Gascoigne after 14 minutes, Forest were only undone by a fatal error from Des Walker, who headed beyond his own keeper in the 94th minute.

On Sunday they meet again, this time in the fifth round. And this time, it’s a different kind of fatality paling Forest cheeks. Even the most optimistic daren’t entertain the notion of a win at White Hart Lane. In fact, when Spurs met West Brom in the fourth-round replay to decide who would face Forest, John Motson said it all: “Whoever wins here will host Nottingham Forest in the next round, so there’s the prospect of a good cup run here.”

Onfolio

Onfolio seems pretty cool at the moment. Here’s how the feed of this blog looked on it just now (click for larger image):

onfolio screenshot

It seems to integrate pretty seamlessly with Firefox, too. Just click a toolbar button to bring up the sidebar to read feeds, hit another one to subscribe to whatever you are browsing. It’s pretty good, and I’d recommend it.

Thursday, 17 February, 2005

Scoble’s Blogroll

One of the frustrations of not sticking with FeedDemon was that I forgot to export my blogroll so I could update Bloglines with all the cool feeds I had come across. Frustrating.

So I could start pulling some together, I had a look through Robert Scoble’s blogroll. It’s huge! Lots of good stuff on here, though, I’ve subscribed to loads.

New Link Blog

Have used the free blog available on Bloglines to set up a link blog. Basically for stuff that catches my eye and I might want to see later, but which I can’t be bothered to comment on properly over here.

Blog Client?

One thing I would like to have in my ideal blogging tool is a client that sits on my PC, enabling me to write posts and things, which could then be uploaded when I connect to the internet. WordPress doesn’t offer this, sadly, but given that I spend all day at work, where I can’t install software anyway, it’s academic. Oh, to work from home!

Anyway, I have come up with a modest solution, which is to have a Notepad file open all the time called ‘blognotes’. I type in my posts as I think of them, along with the time that I wrote it. It’s then a case of copying and pasting them into WordPress when I get the chance, altering the timestamp as necessary.

This also has the advantage that posts get reviewed, which means I don’t end up posting something really stupid. Possibly. One thing I have noticed though, is that when copying and posting from Notepad, turn off word wrap before you do it (from the Format menu). Otherwise your line breaks can go a little crazy.

Portable PCs

I am really getting settled down now with the various systems I have put together. I really like using gmail for, duh, my email, and the Yahoo! calender is coming in very handy. I am pretty confident, having thought about it, that I am going to put the webmail notes hack into place, and of course I really like WordPress as a blog engine, and am settled into Bloglines for my RSS feeds for now.

The only difficulty with all of this is the fact that none of it is available without a PC. I really need to get some sort of handheld device, if only to take notes and things whilst offline. But even better would be if I could email, access my calender and post to here from an online PDA type device. Is this possible? I don’t know much about them. Plus, I haven’t any money for this kind of thing. Perhaps I should just forget about it all…