Couple of things for us kids to play with: a Favorite checker from FurryGoat.com and an RSS reader for SmartPhone 2003 devices.

The CheckFav utility is nifty because I – like so many other people, it seems – have a long long list of Favorites for IE. When I find a site that catches my eye (for any number of reasons) I nick the URL and put it into a multi-tiered list of Favorites. The problem is that sites go down over time and I might not check the URL for weeks or months a time… with this, I can at least keep the list down and weed out dead links. Out of over 200 URL’s over 20 of them were dead this morning.

The other nugget of bits is an RSS reader for SmartPhone 2003-based devices. RSS readers are “all the rage” with blog readers these days, because they give you a list of headlines and article synopsis across multiple web sites, but without reading the web site itself. The idea is that you get one window to aggragate multiple news sources (and blog sources) and you would use this application like you use Outlook – to read email from multiple sources. This would be key on a phone where there’s not much in the way of screen size and you can bypass pesky images and ads in some cases.

There’s just two issues with this particular RSS reader. One, and this is common to all RSS readers, is that a number of sites – at least the ones that I read – have nothing but shit in their RSS feeds. If you go to their home page you get 10 to 15 articles with a nice blurb on each article – from there you’ll know if you want to read the whole thing. Their RSS feed, however, might be as small as one sentence or the first 80 characters, which tells you nothing about the article. “Mix Music With Music” tells me nothing – I open the article and viola! it’s about AARP’s playing two stereos at once. That takes more time to do than it would have to just read their home page in the first place. So, until authors start to put more information in their RSS feeds, I don’t bother to use them.

The other problem is particular to this SmartPhone 2003-based RSS feeder: no one has a SmartPhone 2003 phone in America yet! Both of the current phones from Verizon and AWS are SmartPhone 2002 based so they can’t run this package. Looks good otherwise.

Can ya tell I’m still locked out of the office?