Toluu Review

There are many feed aggregators out there, but Toluu.com does some unique things with your RSS feeds. For one thing, it's not an aggregator at all. It doesn't deliver news items to your desktop or your browser. Instead, it keeps a list of all of your feeds. What makes it special is what it does with the data.

Toluu is, at it's heart, a feed recommender. It compares your list of feeds to other Toluu user's lists. It then algorithmically determines other feeds you might want to read based on the feeds you already like to read. There's a social element as well. You can find people who read similar feeds and add them as friends. When your friends add new feeds, you are notified.

You can import your current feeds through OPML. You can also add feeds manually, or use a bookmarklet.

Toluu is currently in private invite-only beta. I currently have six invites for anyone who wants one. Just send me a tweet on twitter (user name: dOgBOi).

You can see my profile on Toluu by clicking here.

Personas for Firefox

The default Firefox theme is pretty bland, and the ability to change the theme using the add-on architecture is nice. But sometimes, you want to change a whole lot more than just the buttons.

That's where Personas for Firefox comes in. It's a lightweight theming engine for Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta. What it does is allow you to quickly and easily change the look of your browser without a restart. It doesn't change the buttons or layout. Instead, it adds graphical elements to the top and bottom of the browser.

A picture being worth a thousands words, here's two:





As you can see, the effect isn't very subtle. But it is very fun, and allows you to customize your browser quickly and easily. You just hit the button in the bottom left of the browser that looks like a fox in a mask, choose the theme, and instantly your browser is changed.

I haven't noticed any performance hits from using Personas, either on the PC or the Mac. I've used personas for months now, and I've been very happy with it. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a quick and easy way to modify Firefox's look.

Comments

Because I believe in free speech, I have a policy here. If a comment is not generally offensive to the community at large, whether I agree with that comment or not, even if that comment is a personal attack, I'll approve it. If someone believes in free speech, that should cross into every area of their life.

Someone commented here today, anonymously. They commented on an older post, which still has the old commenting system (pre-disqus). Since it's buried weeks back, I thought I'd share the comment and my reply, in the interest of transparency, not to mention because I find such things amusing.

So first, the comment:

Anonymous said...

... You blog sucks... i hope you get cancer, fat bastard.

Hmm, it's so nice that he cares. (How do I know it's a he? Because it's been my experience that commenters like this are generally teenage boys. I'm making a huge assumption there, but I'm rolling with it.) I just love ellipsis abuse, not to mention the clever use of "You" as an alternative for "Your". It's the little things that give me pleasure.

Of course, this was just begging for a reply, which is probably wasted, since I imagine that the commenter stumbled here and will never return, but hell, it gave me something to do for a few moments.

So here is my reply, in it's entirety.

dOgBOi said...

I shouldn't have approved this, nor should I dignify it with a response, but I couldn't resist an opportunity to get snarky.

So dude, to paraphrase Molly Wood, "the ellipsis is not a period." And it should be "Your blog sucks", by the way. But then, I wouldn't expect someone who has the time to leave anonymous rude comments on someone's blog to have had the time to complete a basic High School English course.

And if you're going to leave a rude comment, at least have enough balls to leave your name. Hiding behind anonymity when insulting others is cowardly, and morally reprehensible. (Uh oh, is that word too big for you.)

I love constructive criticism. Something more helpful than "You blog sucks" would be nice.

I don't know why. This whole thing just made my day.