Latest Version of Firefox

The latest version of Firefox is out and it’s faster. If you haven’t tried it out yet, visit the Firefox download page and download a free copy/upgrade. You won’t notice much difference on the surface, but in the back-end they’ve streamlined a lot of processes to make it load faster.

One of the reasons I left Firefox was because of it’s slow speed, albeit was faster than IE or the dreaded Safari. Google Chrome is still my preferred browser, although I have to admit that Firefox has done an amazing job with their latest release. The Firefox 10 release looks even more promising, it will include new webmaster tools. (see video below)

Chrome, along with the Web Developer extension, leaves me perfectly content for now despite Firefox’s excellent redemption.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster

Related External Sources: An Overview of Firefox’s Coming Developer Tools

Customized Windows Taskbar Clock

If you are bored with your Windows Taskbar clock then you’ll find this blog helpful. The traditional Windows clock only allows you to display the current time. You may display the time in the AM/PM style or the Military style. But what if you want to display the date and the day of the week? Fortunately, Windows finally got around to displaying the date in Windows 7, but it’s only visible when your Taskbar is set to large icons. Since I’m using small icons in the Taskbar, this new function is useless to me. I’d like to display the date horizontally and directly to the left of the time. Thanks to Stoic Jocker’s T-Clock 2010 you may accomplish this very easily.

Below is an image of my current Taskbar clock. I’ve set it to display the Day, Date and then the time in 24hr format.

Stoic Jocker’s T-Clock 2010

This amazing yet simple program enabled me to customize my Windows Taskbar clock the way I wanted. No more hovering over the clock to view today’s day or date; now I can simply glance at my Taskbar to view it.

The T-Clock program is very simple to use. Simply visit the download page for the T-Clock and follow the instructions on that page to install the program. Once it’s installed you can set it to start up automatically when Windows loads.

I hope you’ve found this blog helpful, if you need assistance with any PC issues and/or PC customization, please visit our contact page.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster

A screenshot of the T-Clock program.
(click the image to enlarge)

stoicjoker.com/TClock/

RSS Feeds, Google Reader, FeedDemon and Multiple News Sources

Web Ventures Plus™ recommends FeedDemon
Image © FeedDemon

Discover RSS feeds and how using them will make your daily news reading more efficient. In the age of information overload, RSS feeds are a godsend. If you get your news from as many news outlets as possible, then you’ll find this article to be of great use. I’ve often found myself bookmarking multiple websites onto my bookmark bar in Google Chrome and attempting to visit them each day. I realized that even with all these great bookmarks I tend to only visit around five of the sites a day. It quickly becomes tedious and often overwhelming to attempt visiting every single news website each day. RSS feeds come to the rescue.

RSS Feeds

If you haven’t heard of RSS feeds before, then you are missing out on one of this past decades most important web browsing and development tools. RSS feeds are .XML files which store website content, e.g., blogs, articles and posts, into a universally readable format. You may view our RSS Feed as an example. Feeds make it easy for webmasters and web surfers alike to embed, syndicate and view website content without having to actually visit/embed actual websites.

An RSS Icon

Subscribing to a feed is quite easy. Simply look for the RSS icon or link to the feed on your favorite website. When you open the feed, it’ll give you the option to subscribe to the feed. Once subscribed you may use your favorite browser, email client (e.g., Outlook or Thunderbird), Google Reader or a locally downloaded application to read them.

Google Reader – we recommend using Google Reader to subscribe to all of your feeds. Google reader is free and will be important later in this article when we discuss reader synchronization. You may sign up for Google Reader here. There are many apps for android and the iPhone which make it easy to use Google Reader. Since Google Reader stores your feeds in their cloud, then you’ll be able to access them from anywhere by simply logging into your Google account.

Work News and Personal News

If you are like me, you’ll have a list of news sources you read related to your specific profession and then other news whether it be politics, entertainment, science, etc. Google Reader will allow you to categorize these into different folders. So each day you can quickly skim through your folders depending on what news you want to read that day.

FeedDemon

While Google Reader is great and it comes with powerful reading tools, there is just something about having a local application on your computer that is unmatched by the storm of cloud based applications coming our way. FeedDemon offers a free version of it’s program which allows you to synchronize your feeds to Google Reader, so you may install FeedDemon on your work desktop and personal laptop, while keeping them synchronized through Google Reader.

FeedDemon makes it very easy to view your feeds, subscribe to new feeds, find new feeds and keep track of your unread and starred (i.e., items you bookmark for future access) articles. It’s like having your very own Future Digital Newsstand right on your PC. The reason I find it so useful is because it’s more user friendly than Google Reader and it is more formal than visiting a website/web-based application. Additionally, it offers an excellent tool for those of us subscribed to many feeds: the Panic button! The panic button is a shortcut to mark all of your articles older than a specified time frame as read. This removes them from your newsstand, helping to keep you from becoming overwhelmed by thousands of potential unread articles. The Panic button is just one of their many great features. Visit feeddemon.com to download the program and learn more about it’s benefits over traditional RSS readers.

At Web Ventures Plus™ we setup RSS feeds and blogs for clients all the time. If you need help setting up your own feed and/or help with any of the above, please use our contact form to request assistance.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster

Google Enables Multiple Users in Latest Chrome Release

The latest version of Google Chrome is now available and it supports multiple users/profiles. Back in October we released a blog explaining how to setup multiple instances of Google Chrome on your PC. I still use this technique today and have found it very helpful to keep my Google business chrome separate from my personal Chrome. Through using Google Chrome’s synchronization feature, one may keep their chromes synchronized across multiple computers, but before this latest Chrome release you’d have to invoke a few operating system hacks to run multiple versions of chrome on a single PC.

Now with the latest release of Chrome, multiple users/profiles are enabled. If you share a computer with someone else, then you’ll find this feature helpful.

How to Add Users

1. Current Chrome Version: firstly, make sure your Chrome is up to date. Chrome automatically updates itself, but sometimes you have to do it manually. In Chrome click the wrench and then click “About Google Chrome.” This will run a check for any available updates and will automatically install them. Please wait until it is complete. Then restart your browser.
2. Accessing New User Tools: in Google Chrome >> click the wrench >> click the options link. Under the optinos window click on the personal stuff tab. You should now see a new section in your personal options which says Users. Click on Add New User.
3. Synchronizing New User: once your new user is setup, you’ll want to synchronize this user to a Google account so you can login to this user from any Google chrome on any computer. You’ll be able to setup this Google account under this same section.
4. That’s it! now when you open Chrome, if you have more than one user enabled, you’ll see a small avatar on the upper left of the browser. Simply click on this icon to change users.

Limitations

While this new feature is certainly great, I have decided to continue using multiple profiles the way that I did previously. There are three reasons for this decision:

1. Privacy: using the new user feature doesn’t actually create a new instance of Chrome. Therefore, locally stored cookies, variables, etc., will be storied in the same place as other users; only separated by a few folders.
2. Customization: using the old method to achieve multiple chrome profiles, you are able to create unique program shortcuts on your desktop and application launchers.
   

   This image above shows how you can completely separate your different chromes in Windows 7, be creating different application shortcuts and icons.

3. Usability: it’s easier to click a single shortcut icon rather than having to open up a new user window by first clicking your regular Chrome shortcut.

We are thrilled that Chrome has enabled this new feature and it should prove very useful to diverse web surfers.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster