I absolutely love Google Reader but sometimes it really knows how to get on my proverbial tits.

Being a "Labs" product, I realise that the product is still being tested and therefore is still a little buggy but sometimes those bugs are irritating beyond belief. Take today's problem for example. Everytime I click on a RSS feed link to subscribe to a blog, Google Reader opens but doesn't add the RSS feed to my subscription list. No amount of clicking on the RSS feed changes the fact that I cannot get Google Reader to subscribe to the feed I want. That means I then have to bookmark the blogs and try again tomorrow to subscribe - if I remember to. I read approximately 10 new blogs a day. By tomorrow, any thoughts I may have had today of subscribing to a blog will be long gone. Who suffers from this? The blog owner of course. If Google Reader users can't automatically subscribe to the blog feed (and these days, everything HAS to be automatic otherwise people lose patience) then it's the blog owner who loses out on new readers.

The other major beef I had with Google Reader was that it was refusing to let me unsubscribe from feeds I was no longer interested in. I would click the unsubscribe button repeatedly to no avail. Or if I wanted to see a full list of my feed subscriptions (for the purposes of editing the ones I don't want anymore), it would give me half the list then stop.

When is Google finally going to get off its ass and get Reader out of "Labs"? If anyone from Google happens to be reading this, get these bugs fixed otherwise I am going back to My Yahoo. I try to be a cheerleader for all things Google but sometimes it is difficult to get enthusiastic about a product which sometimes irritates the hell out of me.

One of the most efficient ways to get your website and / or blog into the search engines quickly and efficiently is to create a sitemap which lists all the links on the website. Then the bots that patrol the Net indexing everything in its path will find the sitemap full of links and will start indexing you like crazy.

My first sitemap was a real slap-dash affair where I threw together all the links in no particular order on a webpage. As there was no particular order to the links, it meant that updating the links and clearing out the old ones became a hell of a job.

But now things have become easier. Google offers Webmaster Tools where you can upload a XML sitemap and sites like XML Sitemaps will generate a sitemap for you at the click of a button, which you can then instantly upload to Google Webmaster Tools. It's so easy even I can do it.

Plus the really good thing about a XML sitemap is that, because it is technically a RSS feed, the sitemap will update itself as you update your website / blog. So you never need to worry about keeping your sitemap up to date - it's automatically done for you.

My roll of creativity continues without a hitch! Hot on the heels of re-designing this blog, I decided to finally tackle getting a HTML signature into my Gmail. Normally this is not possible but with the help of a Firefox extension, you now can. Instead of plain text in your signature, you can have an interactive linky signature instead.

First you need to install the Firefox internet browser (if you haven't done so already). Then you need to install the Firefox extension Better Gmail, which was made by Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker. Better Gmail basically takes all the other scripts that have been invented for Gmail and combines them into one extension. So if you have the same scripts installed as Greasemonkey scripts then you can remove them. This extension covers all those scripts - and more.

When the Better Gmail extension is installed, go to your settings in Gmail and in the signature section, you will now see an option which says "Allow HTML in signature". Tick that and write your HTML code inside the signature box in your Gmail settings. When finished, save everything and you're done.

One blogger suggests writing in a combination of CSS and HTML as well as enclosing everything in a table, but I disagree. I think you can get just as good results using plain HTML code. Plus it is much easier and less of a headache concentrating solely on HTML. I even managed to get a Skype call button included too!

I have always been split on how I feel exactly about instant messaging. On one hand, I like it because it instantly connects you to people such as friends, family and business clients and decisions can made instantly. On the other hand, I sometimes hate having my privacy invaded by pop-up chat messages from total strangers asking me for "a/s/l" (if you're a chatter, you will know what that means). I also don't like my valuable time taken up with mindless small talk (unless it is a good friend who is chatting to me).

Despite my continual hesitation to fully embrace instant messaging, I still maintain chat accounts on all the major chat networks (AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and Google Talk). At the very least, it makes good business sense to have this avenue of communication available to any potential overseas clients who may be reluctant to telephone Europe from say the US. Since chat accounts are totally free of charge (at least for now) then it's a win-win situation. I can keep the account active and if I use it then great. If not, what have I lost? Zilch.

But then the problem arises that if you have too many chat programs open, your computer CPU goes through the roof. Too many chat programs running also makes it difficult to sort all of your contacts and keep chats organised. So for many years, I uninstalled all of the individual chat programs and instead used Trillian which enabled me to open all of the chat programs under a single interface. But I was never really happy with Trillian - to me, it was (and still is) a very basic "no frills" program and I often had connection problems with it. I also couldn't attach Google Talk to it.

Then I discovered Pidgin which used to be known as Gaim (until AOL objected). It allows you to attach Google Talk and I think the interface is smoother and more aesthetically pleasing. Connections to the various chat networks are also never a problem. There's even a portable version for my USB stick and lots of neat plug-ins to make your Pidgin client even better. The various individual programs are uninstalled (saving both hard-drive space and CPU usage) and everything is organised in one central contact list. Perfect.

Some very interesting Google-related news came up recently which I thought I would briefly touch on here.

First of all, they are apparently working on an extremely interesting project which identifies people in a photo as either male or female, based on a pre-defined set of parameters. This would lead to more accurate results in their image search feature. But I am sure that international law enforcement agencies, for example, already have this kind of technology so why does it need to be "invented" by Google? Can't the companies who supply facial-recognition software to the police also supply the same software to Google?

Secondly, and this is slightly Orwellian, Google in Korea is planning to install an age-verification procedure so that under-age minors don't have access to porn. This would work by entering their national identity card number which proves they are an adult (children must obviously not have these cards). A good idea in theory but two downers - one, what self-respecting enterprising kid won't "borrow" their parents' ID card number? Plus secondly, and the blog post points this out, the age-verification measure will mean that from now on, a person's search history will be connected to their ID card number - which makes it easy to connect a certain search to a certain person. Gross invasion of privacy? You bet.

Next up, Google Maps is allowing users to save map searches with an alias. So if you searched for say a pizza takeaway, you could save that search under the alias "pizza" (for example). This would enable you to find the map location again later more easily. I am not a big Google Maps person but this is still a neat little resource.

Search Engine Journal is reporting that Google is banning Adwords applications from companies who write essays and term papers for students. The universities and colleges are overjoyed but the companies concerned are understandably hacked off. I don't really blame them. They're only offering a service. OK, that service is morally dubious but it is still a legitimate service nonetheless (no laws against it) so they are entitled to internet advertising. I would have thought that Google, with their focus on their financial bottom line, would let it slide. Who are they to judge who is worthy of receiving internet advertising and who isn't?

That's the Google news for today. Now here's Brenda Baps with the weather......

One of my immediate go-to sites each day is Google News and I always keep it open in a Firefox tab, letting it manually update itself every 15 minutes or so. But being an information junkie and a researcher (hence my nickname, "Mr Google"), there are specific news topics that I like to constantly keep tabs on and it would normally take up so much time in my day to manually check out each search term in Google News. Hence Google News's RSS feed capability is an absolute lifesaver and it is a cinch to set up.


Basically first enter the search term in Google News. For this example, I am using "Putin" (as I do a lot of research on Russia and Russian politics) :

I often get asked by friends and sometimes by strangers what my favourite pieces of software are and what my favourite webtools are. These days, there's so much to choose from online which means that personal recommendations are often best to separate the wheat from the chaff. People often gravitate to me for recommendations because I am ALWAYS testing new software and webtools. I am a complete sucker for gadgets and beta software. I love seeing what is around the corner, internet-wise. I love seeing the rapid advances being made. At the same time, I am also extremely fussy and my attention span is extremely short. So for something to survive on my computer, it has to be GOOD, it has to be USEFUL and it has to WORK. Nothing irritates me more than something that doesn't work (such as the Wordpress fiasco the other day). The program / tool must also help my productivity in some way and make my life better as a result.

I am going to start a little series of posts on what I consider to be "essential tools for your PC". Please note though that if anything goes wrong on your computer by trying these things out, I am not liable! It worked for me and I like it. That's the extent of any guarantees I am willing to offer!

OK, to start this little series off, I am going to start with Del.icio.us :

For those of you who are not aware, Del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo and it allows you to bookmark websites in an online central location (the Del.icio.us website). Whereas the late 1990's were all about information being stored on your computer (with programs such as Outlook Express), the new millenium is now focused on the much-overused phrase, "Web 2.0" - social networking websites, user-driven content and encouragement to move everything online (Google being a big proponent of this with their Gmail and Google Docs), the main benefit being that you can access your weblinks no matter where you are and what computer you are using. Del.icio.us covers all these areas. All bookmarks are stored on the Del.icio.us website, you can access them on any PC with an internet connection, and users can see how popular a link is by the number of people that have also linked to it. Users can link to one another so you can see any new links that the user posts and you can arrange your links in various ways (more on that later).

Del.icio.us offers various ways to post links, once you have created an account but I personally like the Firefox extension (although NOT the new one that automatically synchronises your browser bookmarks). If you have Firefox installed, then I can't recommend the "classic Del.icio.us extension" highly enough. It makes posting links an absolute breeze.

You can find old links later by tagging each one as you post them. So a bookselling post which deals with the business aspect of bookselling would get the tags "books" & "business". Or a Star Trek wikipedia site would get the tags "wiki", "reference", "star-trek", "sci-fi" and so on. When you want to find a link, you can just click on the relevant tag or you can use the Del.icio.us search engine. Be cautious though about how many new tags you invent though as your tag list can very quickly get cluttered. Only make very general tags which can be used for countless other posts. So make a "books" tag instead of a "Leo Tolstoy" tag for example. Every few months or so, it pays for you to do some spring cleaning and delete the tags that are no longer needed.

As well as cleaning out your tags every now and then, you can also make your tags even neater by bundling them into categories. So all your history-related tags can go into a "history" category for example. This is something I have only just started doing myself as it is quite time-consuming!

One of the things I REALLY like about Del.icio.us is that other sites such as Feedburner offer blog owners the ability to have their newly posted Del.icio.us links added to the blog's RSS feed every day. So if you were to subscribe to my RSS feed then every day, you would get an extra post in your RSS reader with all the new del.icio.us links that I have posted in the past 24 hours. Del.icio.us also offers some services for bloggers and webmasters which enables you to publicise your links.

You could probably work out more just by viewing my del.icio.us page itself. It's all fairly self-explanatory. Oh and feel free to add me to your network. I post nearly every day. After a while, posting all your links to Del.icio.us becomes second nature and dare I say it, slightly addictive?

How do you use Del.icio.us? Do you have any tips about how to use the service better? Leave your views in the comments section!

The next entry in "Essential Internet Tools" will be tomorrow. Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don't miss it!

The British Sunday Times is reporting that paedophiles are taking advantage of a "loophole" in Skype's technology to prey on under-age children.

The loophole is that there is no way to monitor what goes on between two Skype users because Skype uses "peer-to-peer" technology (p2p). This means that the two users are connected to one another via an encrypted link and there is no way for a third-party to monitor what goes on between the two users. This is in direct contrast to say Yahoo chatrooms which are monitored by volunteers and who are able to bar / report users who leave legally questionable messages. There's simply no way to monitor Skype calls and chats and so as far as the paedophile is concerned, "anything goes". Their user details are secure and so are their chats to underage children.

This is of course a very serious matter but it's just like spam mail and sex websites. For every ten you stop, another hundred pop up. You simply can't stop it from happening. There's no quick fix or magical solution. This is just unfortunately one of the darker seedier sides of the internet.

Politics seems to be taking a bit of an outlandish unreal slant at the moment. Dour Scotsman Gordon Brown, who has as much charisma as my garden gnome, has launched his campaign to be the next British Prime Minister (is it just me or does Mrs Brown look a bit tarty in her chosen attire?). I don't know why Gordy is bothering - no-one serious intends to challenge him (only a couple of loony left-wingers who have as much chance of winning as I do) and so King Gordon is 99.99% certain to get the job on June 27th. So why not just cut all the nonsense, such as "democracy" and just coronate him now? Why bother with something as trivial as a leadership election? I got a huge laugh the other day when they screwed up his speech where he announced he was running for the leadership. They placed the teleprompter in front of the television cameras so the end result was that no-one could see Brown's face. This guy wants to run the country but he can't even get his team together for a successful press conference?

If Brown becoming the next Prime Minister wasn't bad enough for British politics, I then read that Alex Salmond is on course to be the next Scottish First Minister after he made a deal with the Greens. Bloody Greens, they always bring the loonies into power by the back door! I also read though that King Gordon of Downing-Street-Land is said to be rather lukewarm about the idea of Scottish independence and he has been making a few thinly veiled threats to Nutter Salmond. So in that respect, Gordon may not be so bad after all......anyone that puts Nutter Salmond back into the cupboard is good enough for me.

Across the pond, Toby Harndon of the Daily Telegraph opines that a campaign is being quietly set up to allow New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to run for the US presidency in 2008. Although if the blog reader comments are anything to go by, Bloomberg doesn't have a chance in hell.

I've been spending the past few days attempting to move the blog over to Wordpress. This is something that I have been kicking around for a while but I knew it would take a while to move everything over so I was procrastinating and finding reasons to put it off. However, the other day as I was watching Tony Blair finally announce that he was quitting, I decided on impulse to start the moving over of the blog.

That's not to say it hasn't had its fair share of hiccups. For a start, I couldn't automatically import my posts from Blogger because the Wordpress importer hasn't caught up yet with the "new Blogger". That meant tediously copying and pasting all my posts from Blogger to Wordpress. That more or less went OK and it actually gave me the chance to sort through my posts, delete the crap and generally clean up.

But the one thing that really annoyed me was that I couldn't get any HTML blog features to appear in my sidebar. Wordpress runs on CSS and it didn't seem to want to accept my HTML code. Then the blog disappeared completely from my website, YouTube videos made the template explode......people say that Blogger is very buggy? I would say that Wordpress is even worse!

Which is a shame because I had a really cool template all set up and ready to go.....but if I can't get the bugs straightened out, then I will have to ditch Wordpress altogether..... :-(

While doing my regular routine clean-out of my computer hard-drive, I realised why I was losing so much hard-drive space so quickly.

I love new software programs and new gadgets and so I am often installing new programs and tools to test them out. But I have noticed more and more that when you install a program (even from a big well-established "name" on the internet), you often get a lot of crap that comes with it.

Take programs such as Skype. When you install Skype (or if you've installed it already), take a close look in the Skype folder on your hard-drive where the program is located. Apart from the actual program, you'll also find a multitude of Skype wallpapers and avatars - which you will probably never use. Just pick your best five and delete the rest. Or take a Google program such as Sketch-Up - upon installation, you'll find "README.txt" files, log files, and even PDF manuals.

Most software programs these days automatically add lots of "txt" files to your computer as well as PDF documents, weblinks, Word documents.....the list just goes on and on. So I recommend you do what I do and go through each folder carefully and delete all the dross. You may be surprised at how much hard-drive space you'll free up in the process. But be careful though not to delete anything that will crash the program. The old adage applies in this case - if in doubt, leave it alone.

Oh and if you uninstall a program, make sure that the hard-drive folder is actually deleted. I am also noticing that when I uninstall a software program, the original program folder is left in the C Drive along with some files that were not deleted. So it pays to keep a watch on that too.

I am currently playing with my new toy - Joost! For those of you who don't know what it is, Joost is a groundbreaking software program which plays streaming television programmes over the internet. It's made by the same people who invented Skype.

Being a total sucker for gadgets, I found someone who already had Joost and I asked nicely for an invitation. That was yesterday and I was at first disappointed because Joost wasn't working properly yesterday evening! For a while, I thought that I had to reconfigure the computer ports and firewall for Joost to work. But I tried again this morning and it works fine! Being a beta product, it must have its fair share of ups and downs.

I will write a full review of Joost sometime in the next week when I have given it a thorough test-run! Right now I am watching Total Recall 2070 and earlier I was watching a wrestling match! So I am too busy right now to be writing any reviews! ;-)

If anyone would like an invitation to Joost, just leave a comment here on the blog post with your email address and I will email you an invite.

I've been hearing many mixed reviews about the new Spiderman movie so I thought I would give my two cents worth. We went to see Spiderman 3 on Tuesday night.

What did I think of it? I actually really liked it which means a lot because I am notoriously difficult to please when it comes to movies. Movie-wise, I have a very short attention span so for me to watch a movie right to the end, the story needs to be well-written and engaging. I can probably use the fingers on both hands to name the only movies that I can truly say I liked and would watch again. 95% of what comes out of Hollywood these days is just pure dross (and probably 95% is a very generous figure).

Anyway, back to Spidey. Most films that make it to the second sequel are struggling to come up with original ideas. Sam Raimi doesn't have that problem here. To me, Spiderman 3 is very well-written, the criminals are great, the humour is crackling and Tobey Maguire once again is rocking and rolling.

What really gets me are people that post reviews on the internet and criticise the "stupid plot" or the "overuse of CGI effects". Well here's a newsflash people - Spiderman is a COMIC-BOOK! So being a comic book, of course the plot is going to be a little strange and of course Raimi is going to use CGI - how else can you get the Sandman on screen or have James Franco flying through the air on a hoverboard? When it comes to comic book adaptations, you HAVE to use CGI effects to make the movie work and you DO have to suspend your disbelief when it comes to the plot. I mean, do you read a comic book and criticise the plot? Of course not. When you buy a comic book, you know it's just some escapist fantasy fiction. Why should the movie version be any different?