Lee's Lounge

FeedGhost Reading Tip

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:00:11 +0000

I normally read my feeds first thing in the morning, I have approximately a 100 feeds I'm currently subscribed to so I like to optimize my reading experience for speed... Part of my reading habit includes saving some articles (normally news ones) until the end of my main reading frenzy, I achieve this by firing up a new tab for each article I want to read later, the example image below shows two article tabs ready to be read in my copy of FeedGhost:

Under normal circumstances to fire up an article tab you double click on the news article in the list view or under the river view you click on the article title. The big problem with this however is by default focus is instantly taken to the new tab, forcing you to click back to the subscriptions tab to continue your main reading. FeedGhost comes to the rescue here with two solutions. The first solution is by keeping your finger on the left alt key whilst invoking the article tab the focus is kept with the subscriptions tab. The other solution is to change the default behavior; under the options dialog there is a check box option "Don't switch to the new tab" via the "Reading" tab:

If you check this then focus won't be set when a new article tab is created, conversely the alt key behavior mentioned earlier then changes to put focus on the new article tab when pressed.

Source Control bindings in VS, who needs it?

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:27:45 +0000

At BinaryComponents we use Subversion in conjunction with Tortoisesvn for our source control needs. With companies I've worked at before we've always used the Checkin / Checkout method when changing files, the idea being before you can change a file you must check it out, then once finished you check it back in again. Since both me and Stu work from home we needed a cheep or even better free, server based source control system we could both access from home, we opted for Subversion and haven't been disappointed. With Subversion there's no concept of checking out and then checking in as you might have been accustomed with Source Safe or TFS, you just work on the files and then when your finished you can either see what files you've changed by looking at modifications or you can just commit them.

I've always in the past accepted as part of the job the initial pause on opening non-trivial Visual Studio projects as Source Control downloaded whatever information it needed to display checkout states etc. Throw in the more complicated source control options going from Visual Studio 6 to 7 it always felt like a bit of a bind especially when working disconnected. We didn't bother with Source Control bindings with Subversion, mostly because at the time I couldn't find any decent plug-ins, I was initially worried about having to remember to add files to source control that I'd created in Visual Studio but I haven't found this to be a significant problem.

With Subversion you have a server component and also a client side component in our case TortoiseSVN. Our Subversion server component sits on the server using Apache and WebDAV to communicate with TortoiseSVN which is a shell extension that fits seamlessly into explorer:

Downloading source from subversion using TortoiseSVN is simply a matter of checking out (initial download) the project into a directory and your ready to go, make changes to files and a little exclamation mark will appear next to file and its parent folders telling you the file is dirtied. You can then click on Check for modifications and all the changed files will appear in a dialog. Using TortoiseSVN in file explorer works really well for us. Tortoisesvn also has nice diffing tool built into it:

CodePlex and TFS

This brings me onto CodePlex a open source hosting service which I use to share Superlist, a list control I wrote for FeedGhost that we've made available for all to share. The service uses Team Foundation Server, not surprising considering CodePlex is run by Microsoft. So I thought initially I had two choices when using its source control system, Visual Studio Integration and TeamPrise Explorer, both of which (out of the box) use the afore-mentioned checkout / Checkin methodology. After using both I plumped for Visual Studio even though it had the painful habbit of asking me for my username and password every time I opened a project.

Then a fellow developer pointed me to SvnBridge an awesome piece of software that tricks Tortoisesvn into thinking its communicating with Subversion, allowing me to use my favorite source control tool :-) I've also started to use VisualSVN which is a plugin for Visual Studio making use of Tortoisesvn menus that so far is working really nicely, you can see in the image below that it shows what files have changed as well. You can also access diffs of files as well as the standard source control commands you come to expect using TortoiseSVN. There is also no noticeable delay when starting Visual Studio and another boon is it doesn't ask if I want to work disconnected when I'm on my laptop with no connection...loooovellllly!

You'd have to drag me kicking and screaming before I would use any other source control solutions :-)

Installing Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (KB937061)

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:50:07 +0100

OK whose had problems with this? Last night Windows Update prompted me to install the above update, it said it was successful and then within minutes asked me again to install it...It seemed to be in the Windows Update equivalent of GroundHog Day grrr. Anyway for those who are still suffering, the knowledge base article doesn't help at all. I rang MS support and with their help it seems to have been sorted out. I had the same problem with my laptop and doing the following things (subset of what MS said) seemed to fix it as well:

Before I begin however, If you do the following steps it's entirely at your own risk, I take no irresponsibly:

Stop services "Automatic Updates", "Background Intelligent Transfer Service" and "Cryptographic Services"

Delete the contents of temp and prefetch directories. You can find them by typing %temp% under run command and then the run command gain with prefetch typed in. Explorer will start up in both cases under the target dir.
Rename 'SoftwareDistribution' to 'SoftwareDistributionOld' under the Windows directory and 'CatRoot2' to 'CatRoot2old 'in under the System32 folder.
Restart the services in point 1.

What a waste of ~3 hours!

Superlist on CodePlex

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 08:49:17 +0100

As per title I've setup Superlist on CodePlex, this is the control we use in FeedGhost for the outlook reading style. I've been posting bug fixes on the site that people have found whilst using the control via the CodeProject article I wrote (plus some bugs I found myself). So if your looking for an Outlook style list or feeling lucky and want to contribute then head over to the site.

Superlist Control Posted on CodeProject

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:36:37 +0100

As per title I've posted an article with the code to the Superlist control on CodeProject. We use this control for article lists in FeedGhost.

When try/finally doesn't work

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:42:28 +0100

Whilst developing the latest version of FeedGhost we needed to move search processing for new RSS articles from post-tree insertion to pre-tree insertion. Because processing articles for search can take time I created a queue that new articles got added to. A Thread Pool worker item would then process the queued items placing them on a "processed" queue, from which the primary thread would take them and add them to the feed tree:

I had a counter that got incremented and decremented when the worker method started and exited using a try / finally block. Like every conscientious programmer I debugged through the code and noticed that on program exit the counter wasn't being decremented. Further investigation in no small part helped by the CSharp Google Group led me to the fact that threads marked as Background can just cease to exist with try/finally and using blocks not completing. This may have implications if your using ThreadPool workers to do lengthy tasks that could get corrupted if they are halted in mid-flow, in which case it might be better to switch to using a thread rather than a ThreadPool worker.

Vista: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:26:55 +0100

I’ve been using Vista since last November and thought I’d share my personal opinion of it with the blogosphere. I took the plunge early on with all the pain that inevitibly happens with new software, but I needed to test our new feed reader that me and a friend have been developing, testing all the glass effect code we had put in plus installation and general usability bashing under Microsofts latest OS incarnation.

Over the past months I’ve been compiling a list of the things I like and dislike about vista.

Copying Files (Very Bad)

Copying files seemed to have taken a backward step in Vista, the process of copying has slowed both visually and in reality; by visually I mean the progress doesn’t seem to be as sensitive to the overall process as the old XP progress bar was. When copying the file it initially displays “calculating time remaining”, for what seems like an age before the progress bar judders forward.

In reality is was also slower, I did a few tests using Virtual PC running an installation of Vista and XP:

Copying a 500 Mb file under XP it took an average of 47 seconds to copy whilst under Vista it took 61 seconds.
Copying a 1000 small files took XP 13 seconds and under Vista it was 48 seconds.
Unzipping a file is slower too; I uncompressed a 150 Mb file and Vista took an average 26 seconds compared with XP’s 21 seconds.

Microsoft must sort this out, it's probably one of the most irritating things I've found with Vista.

Windows Explorer (Ugly)

Under XP one of the things that annoyed me was that favorites were shared between Windows Explorer and the IE browser. I actually like to keep them separate; I achieved this by using Firefox bookmarks for my web favorites and the Explorer’s favorites for my computer and local network centric resources. With the Vista version of Explorer, Microsoft have done away with the menu and relegated the favorite links to a collapsible section above the tree.

Adding a favorite is now a painful exercise; in XP adding a folder favorite was one menu item click away, under Vista I have to:

Copy the folder I want to add.
Right click on the favourite’s area to bring the context menu up and select the “Open Favorite Links Folder”
Paste the item as shortcut.

I normally have the 'favorite links' section collapsed at the top to make as much space for the tree as possible; so in reality I have an extra step of opening the favorites up first. I know Microsoft have to cater for lots of different users but surely they could have made this a little easier! Maybe they have and I haven’t found it yet...

Start Menu (Very Good)

Initially I hated the start menu. I was used to clicking the start button and then using menus to navigate around; with Vista you have to drill into the menu folders for programs. This part I don’t like, there’s no visible history of where you came from compared with normal menus under XP, so you have to click the back button and start again if you want to go back. Then I noticed the “Start Search” box at the bottom of the menu; as you type in the search box Vista searches the computer for related programs and documents in real time. Normally within a couple of keys pressed you can find what you’re looking for. This is my favorite new feature by far! The images below show the start menu before I started typing "feed" on the left followed by the image on the right afterwards.

Add / Remove Programs (Good)

One of my pet hates with XP has always been the add/remove programs page via Control Panel. I’ve always found it difficult and very slow to use in XP, so it was a nice surprise to see a much improved version that actually uses a list control (instead of IE) to render the items, making usability a pleasure; also the list of programs fills out almost straight away which XP never did. My only gripe would be that I would have liked to see some sort of search similar to the start menu so I can find programs quicker.

Task Switching (Bad)

As a software developer, I tend to have lots of applications open at once, and consequently like to switch around them quickly. I was hoping for a much improved way of doing this with Vista and to be honest I was very disappointed. Under XP there are two main ways of switching between applications, the first being the Task Bar, normally found at the bottom of your computer, and the second is Task Manager which you invoke by pressing alt-tab. Task Manager is the way I usually switch applications as it’s quick to access via the keyboard. In Vista we have an added third way of navigating around the applications which I will go into later. Here’s my current screen of standard task switching under Vista:

As the selection cycles through each application instance, the title of the application is displayed at the top middle of the screen. I find this totally useless, if I have a couple of Word documents up, the only way to know which one I’m after is to tab through each of them looking at the title. Sometimes I overshoot and have to cycle all the way around or press control down to work backwards through the list.

The third new way of navigating your open applications is with a the new 3D interface:

So does this look cool? Well I have to say for me it’s a gimmick, great for selling Vista in PC World, but in the end a waste of time. I can’t make out what the window is just by looking at it in small view as it whizzes around, it takes too much time and just doesn’t work for me.

Instead I use a third party tool called TaskSwitchXP which is brilliant, it shows me the application captions in a vertical list that I can read quickly and navigate to without the risk of over shooting; also as an added extra I get the screen thumbnail as well. I can also use the mouse to select an item...This is one of my favorite third party tools that I use; It’s a shame Microsoft couldn’t have added something like this to Vista. Currently TaskSwitchXP doesn’t install on Vista so you have to go through a few hoops to install it, all of which is explained on the application’s web site.

Volume Shadow Copy (Good)

Vista automatically makes shadow copies of changes to your documents, folder and files, allowing you recover files you've have accidentally deleted or overwritten. Accessing previous versions is as simple as clicking on the properties of the folder or file of interest and selecting the “Previous Versions” tab.

Aero Look (Goodish)

If your graphics card is up to it then you get some nice graphical touches to windows like transparency around certain areas. Vista lets you change the tint of the glass windows, but annoyingly, they always have a blue edge to them -- so unless you choose a blue tint, they're always going to look odd.
Aero is all very nice but for me it’s just garnish; I like it but if it were gone I wouldn’t particularly miss it.

Security (Good)

One big change in Vista is that by default you run in a limited account mode, meaning that you can’t do anything Microsoft considers dangerous without first being asked to confirm the action. This should mean that malicious programs trying to gain a foothold into your system should be brought to your attention first (assuming your antivirus program doesn’t stop it beforehand). The way Vista does this is quite striking in that the whole screen goes dark and you get a dialog confirmation asking your permission to continue. It would've been nice if the transition to dark was a little less dramatic, maybe the dark fading in, rather than the almost epileptic inducing switch that it does currently. When I first heard about this feature I thought I’d be annoyed by it to the point of disabling it, but I haven’t so that can only be good thing!

The Clock (Ugly)

I would have thought Microsoft could have done more with the clock in the system tray. When the mouse is hovered over the time, the current date is displayed with a fuzzy image of what looks like a calendar month next to it. I would have much preferred a proper calendar control instead. I know there's the calendar on the sidebar but I don’t usually have that visible.

Wireless Internet Support (Good)

After coming out of sleep mode Vista connects to my wireless network much faster than XP ever did, I don’t know if this is just a driver improvement or something in the OS that’s changed, but it’s welcome none the less.

Windows Ultimate Extras (bad)

With XP, Microsoft released plus packs that you could optionally download and sometimes pay for; with the advent of Vista the only way of getting access to the extras is buying the Ultimate version of Vista. I can see that Microsoft needs to add value to the Ultimate addition but they could have at least allowed other users of Vista to buy the extras.

If you’re lucky enough to have the Ultimate addition of Vista then you get access to the exclusive extras area, where you can download extra programs to the OS. Currently you can download Windows Bitlocker Drive Preparation tool, Hold’Em Poker, Windows DreamScene (tm), Secure Online Backup...

The extra that interested me most was Windows DreamScene (tm); it's just a preview which I guess means the' re still working on it but it certainly looks promising. It allows you to play videos as wallpaper, unfortunately the examples that come with it are rather boring and ill fitting; however I found a really cool site that has some nice videos called DreamsceneVideo. Currently this extra is a bit too flaky for my liking, it's crashed a number of times and the deal breaker for me is it eats up too much CPU. Still it's only a preview so hopefully Microsoft can fix these issues.

Would I Upgrade?

For me it’s not worth the pain of upgrading, there’s just too little to prise me away from XP let alone the cost associated with it; if however I was buying a new computer with it preinstalled, then I would use it. If my views are indicative of most other users then I think it’s going to be a while before Vista is all-pervasive around the world.

Trials and Tribulations of a JavaScript Noob

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:47:39 +0000

Before I forget I thought I'd write down the fun I had implementing the gadgets feature. The idea was pretty simple, adding a little bit of HTML into your web page would show your latest tagged items; there would be a customization page allowing the user to pick different themes and the number of items to show etc... If you change any of the customization options the preview to the right of the options changes accordingly; the page can be seen below:

So how does it work? When the user changes an option a function gets called that adds a script element in the preview area; if a script element is already there its URI is changed with new parameters. The preview gadget is effectively the same script that you see in the edit box, all pretty simple; however things didn't work quite as I expected. Under IE when changing options it would literally crash (not a good start) and under Firefox, well, nothing happened.

Tools of the Trade

I needed to see what was going on under the hoods of both web browsers, I wanted to look at the underlying elements that were changing dynamically; so I downloaded Developer Toolbar for IE and Firebug Firefox. I also used Visual Studio to debug the JavaScript for IE and FireBug for Firefox.

Debugger woes

To debug JavaScript running in IE you need to enable debugging in its options dialog:

So that's what I did, I unchecked the relevant boxes and sat in Visual Studio waiting to put a breakpoint on my code.....Nothing happened, I had another look in the IE options dialog, looking for a setting I might of missed and found to my surprise, that the boxes I'd previously unchecked had magically checked themselves again. I noticed that if I set the Internet options via Control Panel the check boxes stayed unchecked, but as soon as I fired up IE they were set again. Using the registry monitor RegMon I could see that the registry entries for the check boxes were being continually set whilst IE was open. I had a hunch that a piece of software I had installed called Spyware Doctor was causing the problem, so I uninstalled it and the problem went away. I'd spent the best part of two hours on this waste of time; I sent Spyware Doctor support a email telling them the problem; I got a reply saying I should disable it whilst doing debugging, needless to say I uninstalled it. Its a shame I paid good money on it :-(

To crash or not to crash? That's the question

Internet Explorers answer was "I'm going to crash", I debugged into IE using Visual Studio and there wasn't much info I could get out of just the hex information via the stack so I setup Symbol Server (Instructions here on how to install): Now the call stack looked much better:

This gave me a clue what I was doing wrong; of course IE shouldn't crash so I'll be raising a bug with MS about this. What I was doing wrong was inserting a script element as a child of a div and then replacing all the contents when the script ran with the widget HTML...I got around this by creating another div and inserting the dynamic HTML into that instead, keeping the script element separate. If your interested you can see a small example I knocked up reproducing the crash here, once downloaded you need to unzip the contents in c:\CrashIE and then run the test page (I couldn't find out how to do relative file based paths).

Don't forget to split your script element

I had a weird error that made me scratch my head for a few moments; I had the following bit of script (in italics):

element = "<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"" + uri +"\"></script>".

This code snippet was used to insert a script element into the document; what I found happening when running the associated web page was that some of my script was actually appearing as text in the page; basically if you have </script> even in a text literal then the HTML processor treats it as the end of the script block. The solution was to split the text up like "</" + "script". You may also notice that I explicitly close the script element with a closing </script> element rather than <script type=\"text/javascript\" src="..." />; the answer is the the latter doesn't work, for a better explanaition than I could give go here.

Whatever happened to Document.write

In the very distant past when I wrote a similar gadget for MyDigiGuide I used document.write to insert dynamic HTML, but it doesn't work when the document is XHTML. The alternative I use is to find the element I want to insert the HTML into, and then set the innerHTML attribute with my gadget HTML. This is the reason that the snippet the user gets to put into their website has a div with a unique identifier; Document.Write had the nice feature of placing the output where the script was, which we don't get when using InnerHTML, so I use the div identifier as the insertion point.

Two bugs with the same symptoms working in unison against me

When I initially wrote the customization page for the gadgets I noticed that whenever I changed an option the preview didn't change...After much faffing around I found that for some reason Firefox seemed never to finish downloading the page when requesting against Visual Studio development web server; when requesting against an IIS version it worked fine. I don't know if the bug was with the Visual Studio Development server or Firefox. The result was that the script never updated.

The second bug was with Firefox itself; if you changed the src attribute of the script element Firefox didn't re-evaluate the element. My solution to this was to remove the script element and re-add it. Solving these issues was a right royal pain in the behind as the symptoms were the same for both bugs...

Wrapping it up

So there we go, a relatively simple thing I wanted to do took quite a while and some hair pulling because of bugs and the idiosyncrasies of working with Javascript and HTML; I dread to think of other *issues* that lie in wait using AJAX :-)

Cheers

Lee

Ipod Flea

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 11:49:50 +0000

A very funny video; a must watch :-) I'm gonna get me one of them!

Another RSS Tip

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:32:59 +0000

I wanted to keep a tab on any new articles that appear about FeedGhost without having to manually search, so what I was looking for was RSS based search results. My first port of call was of course Google; having looked around their website I couldn't find anything that would allow me to digest results via RSS, so I gave up on them.

I sat for a second wondering what to do, and then thought of Microsoft Live search, I typed in FeedGhost and searched ; low and behold a little RSS symbol appeared in the address bar giving me an indication that there was an RSS feed. So i took the address and added it as a subscription in FeedGhost.

If your thinking of doing something similar, it's worth keeping what I did in mind!

Job Done :-)

Baby Daughter Born Today

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 09:53:12 +0000

Well the title says it all really, she's a beautiful 8.5 pounds in weight and was born (in a birthing pool) today at 6:36 GMT. Jackie started feeling contractions at around 12am and by 3.20am we were in Honiton hospital. Jackie done amazingly well during the birth, only having gas towards the end. We haven't settled on a name yet but are gravitating towards Grace currently. Anyway here are some pictures hot off the press (Click on the images to enlarge):

Don't try this at home folks

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:44:41 +0000

Video of a laptop battery overheating. I never new they went up like a roman candle; it makes you think twice about have these things on your lap :-)

Another Cool Use of RSS

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:37:12 +0000

I was looking for new or newish M5000 Smartphone on eBay a couple of weeks ago, and found that eBay supported RSS. Once you have made a search there is an RSS link that gives you updates on the search. I found this really cool for keeping an eye on good deals for the M5000 via FeedGhost. I'm making use of this feature looking out for a dummy case for my old phone, so that I can give it a newer look and hand it down to one of my son Sam. The case in question doesn't come up very often, so using the RSS feature I'll get an notification when one becomes available.

On a side note I had a little poke around in the XML produced by eBay and noticed that they add some extra fields (auction ending, price etc) that would be really nice to appear as columns in the news list when the subscription node for eBay is clicked. Currently we can't do this in FeedGhost, but it's something I would like in there...

Coding The Space Shuttle Way

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:45:27 +0000

Here's an interesting article on the process of writting software for the space shuttle....Line for line it's one of the most expensive in the world, but the results are they find 85% of coding errors before formal testing begins, and 99.9% before the program is delivered to NASA. I have to say the process sounds quite stifling, I'm not sure I would be cut out for that level of formalisation :-)

My FeedGhost Setup

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:53:21 +0100

Most RSS Readers follow the traditional tri-pane look as can be seen below, and indeed is the default layout that FeedGhost uses:

In the above setup we see the subscriptions tree on the left followed by the news list and the articles pane. I rarely change my subscriptions, so once I've set them up I like to the have the tree collapsed, and instead I make use of the News Lists grouping functionality grouping by Date and Feed. This gives me a semi-tree view as can be seen below:

Because I have lots of subscriptions and consequently lots of news items to read, I like to flip the News List and article views so that are stacked left to right. This allows me to speed read the News List and read the articles that interest me on the right:

One last tip, I like to keep focus on the news list as much as possible, so when I want to scroll the article view on the right, I press the alt key down whilst pressing the up or down arrows (depending which way you want to go). This scrolls the article whilst leaving keyboard control on the news list, allowing me to move onto the next article without leaving the keyboard (You need the build 167 for this alt key behavior).

Lee

What's There To Miss From MFC

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:59:14 +0100

I've been using DotNet now since 2001 and before that I was an MFC fan; looking back I’ve only missed one thing, and that is having the source code to some of assemblies that I use, in particular the Windows Forms assembly! There's been so many times when, if I could have just stepped through the code I would have understood the behavior of Windows Forms much faster. MFC for all its unpleasantness was great for being able to understand by simply debugging into the code.

So what has brought this post on? Well last night I had fun and games trying to get a child control of our SuperList to stop keeping focus. The child control is our ribbon control that handles customisation options; whenever I clicked on it the focus would be lost from the parent (SuperList) and never returned. The only way to get focus back was to click away into another control and then click back again in the SuperList.

Initially I didn't know if the cause was Windows default behavior or some code buried inside Windows Forms. After lots of mucking around trying different approaches, I got out my trusty copy of Reflector, allowing me to peer into code of Windows Forms and find the offending area. Reflector if you don't already know decompiles the assembly into source code, it's not perfect but does an amazing job, it’s one of those tools you just have to have and it’s free.

In the end the solution was to change the super class of the ribbon from a UserControl to a ContainerControl. The UserControl had some fun code in its OnMouseDown that set focus to it when activated which I needed to stop. I wish Microsoft would release the Windows Forms assembly’s source code, I would make life a little easier for me. Microsoft have released some of the source code to the framework, why not more?

Rules For Third Party Components

This brings me to the rules that I have when considering using components especially from third parties in my projects:

Treat third party components like Candy

When I first started out programming in a commercial environment (VB3) I saw all these lovely controls I could use and I was like a boy in a candy shop! Then a year or two later Microsoft released VB 4. The company I worked for at the time was moving to it, and I had the unpleasant task of converting my candy filled project over. I had a nightmare finding new versions of the controls I had been using; even when I did find them they weren’t exactly the same. In the worst case scenario there wasn’t a “direct” replacement and I ended up having to rewrite sections of code. Moral of the story, Components are like Candy, there fine in extreme moderation but too much and they’ll rot your project :-)

Stick to out of the box components if possible

Leading on from my first rule, when I did convert my old VB3 project, the components I had less trouble with were the vender ones (Microsoft in this case). I figure the reason for this is they had legions of developers who could concentrate on making the upgrade process as painless as possible, whereas other components didn’t have that luxury.

Must have good support

The whole point of using someone else’s component is to make your life easier, so under this heading I lump good technical support, documentation, and examples. If your buying the control then is their support line any good? Do you get helpful answers to your questions or comments in a timely manner? If not I’d steer clear. If it’s a free component make sure it has a community who is willing to help.

Make sure you have access to the source code

Leading on from earlier, having the code makes life easier when trying to debug an issue; also if the component vender shuts up shop, at least you have the code in case you need to fix something. Some companies don’t give away their source with components, and actively work against you even being able to de-compile their component using an obfuscator; I tend to steer clear of these components and companies as much as possible!

Lee

Cool Post For Getting The Eye Balls

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 21:38:11 +0100

Leading on from my last post about how we intend to start getting the "eye balls" on our new product, Neil Patel has written a very good post on using Digg and Netscape to draw traffic to your site. I'll certainly be making use of this information!

The Low Down on FeedGhost So Far...

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:45:30 +0100

Our Vision

Why yet another RSS reader? To cut a long story short we thought we could write a better reader than the bunch currently out there. Our vision is to deliver the best RSS reading experience by having a slick modern interface together with seamless synchronization across installations; and finally something that didn't look like another done-to-death outlook clone. I think we've achieved that and more :-)

We've spent nearly a year working on FG; all of the controls have been written from scratch with the exception of the IE control and the tree control ,the latter we are in the process of re-writing. This gives us the ability to "mould" the user interface specifically around the news reading experience.

How are we going to get the eye balls?

At the moment we have a a handful of users, and the product is still in beta stealth mode; we haven't shouted about the product yet as we wanted to get the feedback from our close friends getting the product right before moving to a public beta. Having said that if your reading this and are using FG, give us plenty of feedback :-)

So our current gameplan is to target the technical community first; we figured our initial approach would be to put one or more technical articles up on popular coding websites, and hopefully start an ever increasing buzz that will build up in a controlled way. This will give us the chance to test our systems and get wider feedback. We have other ideas as well which i will go into closer to the time.

How are you going to make your money?

We currently plan to offer a flat yearly subscription fee of $20 a year, whilst in beta it will be free to use. Subscribing will entitle the user to the use of all of our RSS reader products that we build (we only have the windows version at the moment). Yeah I know there are plenty of free RSS readers out there and Microsoft are releasing one built into IE not to mention Outlook, but we still think people are going to want a reader that's a cut above the rest. If Opera can survive in the midst of free browsers then i think we have a shot at it too.

My Very First Post

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 11:56:11 +0100

Well like the title says, this is my first post! My name is Lee Alexander, co-founder of FeedGhost and in this blog I will post my musings that hopefully you'll find interesting. I'd like to think of this as an online diary of the trials and tribulations of trying to start a company and hopefully make it successful..