WordPress has a very useful more tag (<!--more-->) that publishers can use to split their blog posts so that only the part before the <!--more--> tag is displayed on their blog homepages while the whole posts are displayed on the post/content pages. The purpose of this *teaser* is to encourage interested readers to either click on ads or to continue reading by clicking on the “more” link and get more page views for ad sales. Unfortunately WordPress’ default RSS feed does not obey the <!--more--> tag and only offers Full or Summary syndication. Full syndication is what users want, but publishers are reluctant to do that because their RSS subscribers would get everything in their their RSS readers and they wouldn’t need to click-through or browse to the publisher’s Web site. The Better Feed plugin solves that problem and Da Vinci Planet’s feed looks a whole lot better now

Here’s a neat trick to add an RSS feed botton to your Google Toolbar, similar to Firefox’s live bookmarks. In addition you can get your site listed in the Google Toolbar Gallery. Of course you can add any site’s RSS feed to your Toolbar, but you can only submit your own site’s button to the Google Toolbar Gallery. (more…)

This week I upgraded Firefox to 2.0 and also IE to IE7. Firefox has a few subtle improvements, but IE7 is all new. The main features of IE 7:

• Added tabbed browsing. It is more elegant than Firefox, has a preview tab “(Quick Tabs”) and an easier way to open a new tab.
• Collapsed menu bars. This opens a lot more of the browser window.
• Add-ons, similar to Firefox extensions. E.g. IESpell enables spell checking in forms (Firefox 2.0 does this natively)
• RSS feed handling, similar to Firefox.

Overall I think the that collapsed menu bars makes IE7 more elegant than Firefox and while I think Firefox will remain strong due to the Linux community, IE will retain and regain many users.

Portable applications are becoming very popular and with good reason. Portable apps refer to applications that do not rely on registry settings and can run from USB memory sticks. That makes these applications easy to copy between computers and are therefore normally freeware. Another advantage is that they don’t need to be installed because they simply run from the folder where you downloaded and unzipped the files to. A beneficial side effect is that they don’t slow your computer down by adding registry settings and DLLs that are loaded into memory when the system starts up. The perfect application, in my opinion, is one that is free, portable, doesn’t require administrator priviledges and, of course, is useful. Here’s my list of essential portable apps and combined they take less than 512MB space. (more…)