Happy to announce version 1.2 of my news reader application

After much of a delay and managing time to code during weekends, I am glad to announce version 1.2 of my news aggregator application. Check out http://whiz.kiprosh.com

Current Features

• drag and drop widgets
• simple accordion driven ui for conveniently reading news
• cross browser compatibility - tested on widely used 9 different browsers
• ajax driven functionality
• tried to made it one of the fastest rss reader

To keep it simple at this point of time, I just have very limited set of rss feed sources in the app.

Oh btw thanks to Nilesh, Alex, Matt, Biju and Sachin for feedback and appreciating the application :)


Upcoming Features (for v1.3 and higher)

• navigation menu to have list of various feeds categorized appropriately
• feeds source with aditional info like ranks, no of hits etc.
• user personalized start pages and improved UI
• ability to search particular news / information from the list of rss feeds or user selected feeds

Bing Search Tricks (even Google and Yahoo doesn't have these features)

Use these cool and interesting tricks with Microsoft's new search engine Bing.com

1) Get Bing search results as RSS feeds
Neither Google nor Yahoo provide RSS feeds of their search results. We can subscribe to search pages from Bing as RSS feeds.
- Open Bing Search
- type your query, say for example "Ajax" and
- then on the results page, append “&format=rss” to the URL
in my case where i tried search query as "Ajax", the rss URL got created is http://www.bing.com/search?q=ajax&form=QBLH&format=rss
(This is one of my favorite feature as I am trying few feeds in my aggregator app :) )

2) Find Web Pages That Link to Documents, MP3s, Videos, ZIPs or other file types
The "contains:" operator in Bing search helps us find web pages that link to other online documents and multimedia files like music and video. This is different from Google’s filetype: search operator that looks for content inside PDF and Office documents.
For example, if we wish to find all pages on Wikipedia that link to MP3 files, type “site:wikipedia.org contains:mp3″

3) Limit Your Search to Websites that offer RSS Feeds
Another search operator in Bing Search is “hasfeed” - it lets you find only those web pages that link to RSS feeds. For example, you could write “ASP.NET MVC hasfeed:” to find web pages that are about “ASP.NET MVC” and also syndicate content as RSS feeds.

We can also group hasfeed: with other search operatorsLets say if we want to know about all pages related to ASP.NET MVC on MSDN.COM that have feeds, then we should just type “asp.net mvc site:msdn.com hasfeed:”

4) Track Companies from the IE Favorites Bar
If we search for a company stock (e.g. GOOG or MSFT), Bing will automatically create a web slice for that company which we may then add to IE 8 and track the performance directly from the favorites bar. We need Internet Explorer 8 to try this feature.

Chrome - My favourite browser these days

I am using Google Chrome a lot these days (apart from using Firefox & IE) for my browsing and testing needs. Chrome is amazingly fast and quick. Features that make Chrome distinguish itself from other browsers like Opera, Safari, IE, Firefox etc. are simple but truly amazing.

First, every tab is an independed process. Each tab is on its own - if one tab crashes there will be no impact on other tabs. This is very useful feature. Chrome has revolutionary JavaScript engine, which is made to work even faster than in the fastest browsers. Here are the speed test results http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10030888-92.html

Another feature I like about Chrome is its built-in task manager where you can see what tab eats more memory or CPU time than others, and effectively manage your tabs to reduce unneeded memory or CPU usage.

Here are few links casting comparison between Chrome and other browsers

http://www.evilscience.org/internet-explorer-vs-firefox-vs-opera-vs-chrome-vs-safari/

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=00bc01fe4c8c766e&hl=en

Oh did i forgot to mention a very cool feature - visual sampling of most visited sites, search engines, recently bookmarked pages and closed tabs on its home page.

Wanna test your website (and webpages) on 60 different browser in one shot ?

Today I just thought to test my website (Aggregator app) across different browsers to have preliminary results. I came across this cool website http://browsershots.org/ which tests webpages on roughly 60 browser (including browsers running on Linux, Mac, Windows, BSD etc) in one shot. It took around 27 mins to test my simple site on all 60 browsers and the results were astounding and really helpful. It provides first hand impression of UI issues (i.e. various formatting, colors, tables, tabs, button spacing etc etc.) for your web pages. I found it really useful. I was testing my app only on fewer versions of Firefox, IE, Chrome etc. but thanks to Nilesh for pointing me out to try and test my app on other version of various browsers as well. We together sat down to explore few open source tools and while exploring we came across this useful site.

Here is a link to 10 useful resources for Cross Browser Testing http://designm.ag/resources/cross-browser-testing/

I do recommend to use other open souce tools and websites to perform Cross Browser Testing, but these kind of resources are really handy.

Will you Bing it, or Google it ?

Recently I read an article on new search engine "Bing" by Microsoft and was quite impressed by its search capabilities (thanks to Nilesh for sharing this info on bing with me). Unlike Google who invented advertising-based search model which produces most popular items for each query, Microsoft is aiming to change the game by calling Bing - a decision engine which will offer more insights to users for helping them take decisions, and not necessarily throw the most popular and relevant items. Bing in Chinese language means a certain answer, or response to a query.

I tried few searches on www.bing.com and liked "Related Searches" section as well as opinion index (which rates the search results based on an algorithm developed by Microsoft.) Its quick and clean. Yeah its pretty early to say anything about its success, that the time will tell. But I think I would definitely be using bing along with google for my search and not just google alone :)