never-ever-****-with-my.net

It looks like I eventually found my ultimate software/web site combination to read feeds.

I use several computers, so I always looked for the ability to synchronize the entries' read/unread status on the feeds I follow accross multiple copies of a feed reader.  Of course, I looked at web-based feed readers reviews (e.g. here), and tested a few, but their usability disappointed me.

Here comes, Curio Studio's GreatNews that has a number of catchy features:

• Full page reading - several articles are combined on the same page to speed up reading;
• Filters - "News Watch" can be setup to highlight articles based on keywords;
• BlogThis - Google Toolbar-like function to post directly to your blogging service;
• Labels - articles can be categorized using labels.

The best feature being its integration with Bloglines.com, which lets me do the synchronization trick I missed before.

Just import your feeds subscriptions to Bloglines, and then add a Bloglines sync feed as shown in the image below:

One thing I badly miss since my migration to Movable Type is the lack of compatibility with Google Toolbar's functionalities that facilitate the posting of an article in a single click (e.g. the Send To feature).

I searched the web for Google Toolbar Custom buttons, Firefox extensions, etc. but could not find anything. It looks like Google Toolbar's API is only intended to create custom searches, and a quick look to the documentation to craft Firefox extensions gave me a headache.

Hence, I quickly hacked a bookmarklet to emulate Google Toolbar's Send To feature (inspiration taken here). It works fine with Opera and Firefox, except that window focus does not work nicely in Firefox.

To work with your Movable Type blog, you will need to edit the path to mt.cgi and the number of your blog_id (see bold sections in the HTML code below).

Update 2006/5/7: I figured I could have used MT's built-in Quickpost bookmarklet, but it is not compatible with the EnhancedEntryEditing plugin I use to edit my posts.

• Link structures (who's linking to whom, and links quality) in order to boost people starting/leading discussions;
• Meta data—things (posting frequency, lengths of postings, etc.);
• Postings semantics (the "secret sauce" said Steve Nieker, co-founder of Sphere).

Let's wait and see. :-)

Update 2006/5/2: Sphere has launched.

Sitemaps allow you to inform search engines about your web site's URLs that are available for crawling.

Google developed its own Sitemap Protocol, which can be very easily generated from Movable Type using Cameron Bulock's template. This template adds the main index page, all individual archives as well as monthly and category archive links to a sitemap.

For other search engines, I found out a SEO firm developed ROR, a search engine independent format, which can be used to generate sitemaps, but also product catalogues, etc. The format is described here. Several thousands web sites use it.

As I was not happy with the results of ROR's free sitemap generator, I thought I would adapt Cameron's Movable Type template to ROR format.