We decided that our house isn't quite cat-infested enough yet, so we've got another, a kitten this time, called Rosie. (Who may or may not be female, but will almost certainly be gender-confused since I call it "him", and Em calls it "her").

He/she/it is now ten weeks old, and going through a phase of biting my toes as I sit at my desk. (Well; I hope it's a phase).

Sometimes you have what seems like a great idea, but on following it through, isn't. I've wanted to code this little extension to our search facility for a while, but when I finally did, it wasn't up to scratch.

FeedGhost makes use of our own graphics library which builds on GDI+ and makes it really easy to create a collection of vector graphic elements, style them, add effects such as gloss or shadow, and render. You can see them in the toolbar and tree, the logo and even the custom window frame. I started this library ages ago with a view to writing a little charting component, but nothing ever came of it. (Rendering charts is easy; laying them out, and taking a bunch of code to a commercial component is trickier).

What I wanted to do was add trends to our search tool. Afterall, we have all the data, available instantly, with archives of everything you've ever read in FeedGhost. Why not add a little graph showing how often your search term appeared per week?

As it turned out, the display actually wasn't very useful for several reasons:

• Most people accumulate feeds as they find interesting new writers. This makes trends look like they're heading upwards.
• It's only useful if you've accumulated an amount of archived articles. Most feeds only have about a month's worth of information.
• Without quite a bit of extra work, there's no way to compare related keywords: want to see whether people talk most about XBox, PS3, or Wii? You can't.
• It was a bit slow. In particular, the soft-shadow effects haven't been used in FeedGhost and so haven't been optimized yet.

I think something like this will eventually make it into FeedGhost, but as a feature in its own right, not just tacked onto search. I'd love to be able to compare the buzz about competing technologies, or find what the hot topics are in the blogosphere, or perhaps even which blogs I spend most time reading.

This feature didn't make it this time, but I'm sure it will be back one day.