Inspired by Stuart Hamilton's post I got my first time practice today with Mozilla XUL extension programming: hacked together a working extension for firefox to enable right-click subscription of feeds. The context menu extension for Internet Explorer is already implemented and will be available with the next Rss Bandit release.

These extensions work the same way: if you have a default feed: Uri scheme handler registered, this handler will get called via the extensions. So it should work not only with Rss Bandit, but also with SharpReader, NewsGator and other popular aggregators that support the feed: Uri scheme!
Here are some screenshots:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox (tested with Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8)

Peace!

Update: the link to the extension should now work...

So you should surf the net more careful today. Some special news:

• Archäologische Sensation: Geheimnis der Spinx von Gizeh enthüllt [schockwellenreiter]
• Keine Scherze: Punkte fürs Telefonieren und Falschparken, Zur Kasse, Bürger [stern.de]
• ByteTorrent, 800% faster than BitTorrent [Don Park]
• Ben found some [Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent]

Read this article about the serious origins of April Fool's Day. 

Last saturday we invented customers and partners to our every year PROCOS AG ski event in Lenzerheide, Valbella (Switzerland):

Click the image for some nice pictures of the event. For me as a "Lowlander" it was a amazing day: I'm a skier for just one year now and thought I'm well prepared (had a class last year), but that wasn't the case: not accustomed such long descents. And so the next day was mainly for relaxing and sleeping...

But overall: a very nice day! Thanks to all my colleges, the custumers and partners for sharing.

In response to Dare Obasanjo's post announcing the beta phase of Rss Bandit I setup a poll to make or decision for a new name (replacement to RSS Bandit) a little bit easier:

Vote for your favorite name!

So go on and vote, please!

What to write about blank? An empty post? Nope. Today I want to ask a simple question: why does Windows starts always Internet Explorer if you provide the pseudo-url about:blank on the command line? At least one user complains about that in Rss Bandit. I used the following line of code to start the configured default browser:

Process.Start(url);

That works fine as long we have a valid url unequal to about:blank. I'd never configured my default browser over Setup Program Access and Defaults, thought it is not needed because the browsers detect that state by itself. And it seems, some of the web browsers does not handle it well: configuring Firefox over it's options only as the default browser seems to be not enough. IE gets called for about:blank. Switching via Setup Program Access and Defaults does it well: Firefox get's called also for about:blank. What is the save way to handle such cases? A user expects if he says open url in default browser to get it opened in the correct browser, also if it is a empty blank page. So I really have to read/deal again with the registry? The hive HKLM\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet seems to play the role to store the settings of dialog Setup Program Access and Defaults. No other way around this?

I added some tasks related to UI Translation at sourceforge.net:

http://sourceforge.net/pm/task.php?group_project_id=34629&group_id=96589&func=browse

So to get an idea what languages are offered by contributors and how it progress, have a look there. I added also some contact data of the contributors offered the translation there, so if you cannot wait and want to distribute/help by yourself: contact the contributor(s). Currently on the list: German (done), Polish, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese and Russian.

Today I stumbled on a project posted by Matthew Hazlett. He wrote a tool that convert the feedlist.xml to .opml. It may help you to setup scripts to sync. with other tools that support .opml anyway without having Bandit running (you know we have already build in export your feeds to .opml file). Would be cool, he would also support the way back...

Feedster offers some balm for my soul, thanks!

Formula I now has a (german) blog: feed://formel1blogg.de/rss.xml  [via PlasticThinking]

If you think, three parts of LOTR are long enough and and we did not get a follow up: you are wrong! Great news: they are doing the Hobbit! So like starwars saga we get a episode zero: LOTR: The Hobbit.

Today I finished my task to localize RSS Bandit to german. Here is, what you will get:

Any other voluntier out there to grab the other 1xx languages? Borg and Klingons are also welcome...

to Bob Dylan [Flash alarm!], also a nice vizualization I want to have in Media Player 9 !
[Scoble]

As Dare Obasanjo states: information overload is a real problem for aggregator users. Intelliseek's BlogPulse Web crawler provides a intelligent way to scan the blogsphere for relevant things, e.g. a feed:bursty phrases digest.

www.codeproject.com has now a feed. Subscribed [feed://www.codeproject.com/webservices/articlerss.aspx?cat=1]

Bandit users know about the feature to search content on feeds via feedster. They may also know, that the search result can be returned as a RSS feed (see search engine configuration and use a additional url query parameter type=rss). A few weeks ago as I added support for this I used a different search url that includes also a parameter limit=10. But bad enough: it does not had any effect to the returned resultset and I think, it is also true for the current searches. Then surfing the feedster pages and looking around I learned: I had to visit the feedster preferences page and modify the item named "For any search, retrieve this many results per page (limited to 100)" to a higher value than 10 to get more results (no page feature from within Bandit). Don't bother if the value reset to display 10, after you submitted the page, you should get more results now.
But: isn't that a bit difficult? Why does this setting influence my search result in Bandit? AFAIK we did not send any cookie info along the line. Wouldn't it be much better feedster listen to the limit parameter for RSS typed searches? The Web Preferences are good for Web Users, but should not influence the behavior of aggregators.

Today I had a bit time to experiment with the blogging plugin for MS Media Player. Started w.bloggar, opened File|Settings|Media. Checked some options there: no success :-( OK, maybe restart the player..., no success. Why it does not work? Back to File|Settings|Media of w.bloggar: aaah, I need MS Media Player 9! So downloaded the 13 MB, installed. Start the player, select my Audio CD, start listening. Restarted w.bloggar: Taa Taaaa! Here it is: