Blogging Tools

I've played with a number of blogging tools over the past few weeks, including a very basic site I built myself (www.myryama.co.uk) with a view to find a system that I like and that fits with what I want to do.

Microsoft's Live (myryama.spaces.live.com) has a ton of features and works reasonably well, but it's fairly slow to load and it is blighted by the horrible advert at the top of the page. Not surprising, given the commercial nature of the product, but still an unattractive feature. My own site (see link above) is ok, but it has none of the layout or editing tools that the serious blog sites have, essentially because I've written it myself and it takes a lot of time and effort to add features. I could, in theory, add exactly the features, tools and layout options that I want but life is too short.

Another alternative is to host one of the freely available tools on my own server but this too is fraught with difficulties and would consume valuable gaming/living time. I'll make a choice soon and resume publishing my inane ramblings on only one site...

Browsers

Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox 2 RC1 (which I'm using at the moment), a new improved version of the browser which has taken about a 30% market share over the last 12 months and which prompted Microsoft to launch Internet Explorer 7 before Windows Vista (rather than launch it only with Vista, as was the original plan). I've been using Firefox 2 for a few days and I've made the following observations:

1. It's faster than Firefox 1.5 - switching between tabs is quicker and Firefox 2 appears to consumer far fewer system resources than v1.5.
2. The tabs now have a minimum size; open more tabs than can be displayed in the window and navigation arrows appear at the left and right-hand ends of the tab bar to help you find the tabs that have been shuffled off-screen.
3. It restarts with your last-visited pages! Opera has done this for a while but this is the first version of Firefox to include this feature.

There are other features, but those are the most obvious ones. Is it worth upgrading or switching from IE6? Yes, definitely. Even though the code is still at RC1 it appears stable, quick and reliable.