Stex Toys

I’ve been a long time fan of the power given to a websites readers by RSS. Allowing you to keep tabs on what is being posts or written on a site without having to actually visit the site directly unless you want to read the full article. And despite finding many clients for managing my ever growing list of interesting sources I’ve always geared back to using Google Reader for it’s ultimate portability and simplistic, in a user friendly way, interface.

Today however I came across a Firefox plugin that takes things a little bit further, and better still it doesn’t set about replacing Google Reader, but on building upon it. That’s not to say you need to be a Google Reader user to make use of this tool, but if you do not only will your feeds be synchronised with it, but even your read count, stars and shares are all there too.

(continue reading…)

I make use of iGoogle, Google’s customisable homepage, from time to time as it has a fairly friendly layout and allows me to see quite a few things at once, expesially since moving to my 24″ 1920×1200 Display </boast>

They’re recently added an extra feature which allows you to maximise any of the onscreen gadgets to what they are calling ‘Cavas’ mode where it will occupy the vast majority of the screen. This is great for gadgets such at GMail or Google Reader as they can really use the extra space when you want to concentrate on them.

In the past I’d ended up using each on a seperate tab to try to mimik this behaviour, however now I have no need to do this so spend less time flipping between tabs which is a bonus.

It seems at present you can only see this on www.google.com/ig and not the UK equivilent however I’m sure it will be ported around once they are happy with it.

Hit up the tour to check it out: iGoogle tour.

I’ve used Google Reader for some time now, and often tag certain items for sharing with my friends, however it turns out I only know one person who also uses Google Reader so that market is a little limited. Therefore I’ve added yet another widget to this blog to promote those shared stories a little more. To be fair the information goes out through Plaxo.com also, and from there hits Facebook is my contrived multi site setup, but one more can’t hurt.. much.