I find myself reading quite a bit these days. Granted much of the reading is online. It's still reading. And... well what's the point of all this reading?
- Learning
- Enjoyment
- Up to Date-ness
- Procrastinating
I enjoy reading, but I think I REALLY enjoy doing things. MEh, I don't quite know what I'm trying to say here. But it would be nice to point at some things that I have done, even if it is just writing book reports. Somehow reading for escape, seems to be losing its charm.
Let's do something.
My main take aways from this book. - Layout, Try and make your layout make sense so that the most broad thing effectively contains everything beneath it and every subsequent thing falls into a visual hierarchy that doesn't require significant brain power to follow - Tag Line, Have one and make it good, obvious, short, sweet. - Tabs are nice way to let people know where they are and what to do next. - Breadcrumbs should use the ">" symbol to show you where you are. - Try and make it obvious what to do next
I'm prone to saying the content is the number one thing on the web, and I probably won't stop saying that soon, but, this book has helped me to see that you can REALLY help yourself and your visitors by having a website that makes good sense.
After the ViaTec Awards last night and the interest and awards that the Flock Browser received, I thought I better give this Flock browser a try. 
What is it? Well, its a browser that makes your online life a little easier by bring a few things to you. Like what? Well like it will show me when new pictures of my friends are put on facebook, it will let me know when new feeds are available from my news feed reader (not sure if that is a good thing really!!)
it let's me update my facebook "what I'm doing" without actually going to facebook. Anything else... yeah it makes blog posting a lot easier. By putting the tools to do the blog post right into the browser. So... Now that it is supposedly easier to blog I should be more than a once-every-two-weeks poster.
The browsert is built on Firefox so it will still let me use the AdBlock Plus plugin that I can no longer live without.
Is it time to give in to social networking and actually be a part of what's going on. The problem has always been what an incredible time sink it is. So maybe, just maybe this makes it fun AND not too time consuming.
We shall see.
One thing I will say for Flock is that the News Reader could use a little work.
The minor. The autoviewing functionality is a little bit... difficult. It views a whole page of articles at once. Long before I've read them all AND the really long articles well it doesn't auto-mark them as read. No big deal you think. But if you're the kind of person who loves to see nothing left in your news reader to read, it can be a little frustrating.
The major. The number one thing that is really bugging me about flock's newsreader, is that it doesn't connect with Google Reader. I'm switching computers all the time, from work to home to the laptop and back. My choice is either, reading the news in flock means that I have to also go and "read" them in google reader or flock on any other computer. This isn't working for me.
I just deleted all my news feeds in Flock and hope, that at some point, Flock and Google Reader will make beautiful music together.
Until then you can find me at www.google.com/reader