This post isn’t directly related to finances however because of several developments I’ve come across in the last little while, my surfing productivity has increased greatly which allows me to cover more financial ground when I’m on the net.
First of all – until about a year ago I used to surf exclusively with Internet Explorer. Good application, does the job, however because I can read faster than most pages download (which isn’t that fast) I normally opened up multiple browsers with different pages loading in each, which is not that easy to do with IE. You can imagine my joy when I discovered the FireFox browser. It has a tab feature that allows you to open up multiple pages in the same browser. What really made things easy for me is FireFox’s ability to open up all the links in a bookmark group at the same time in different tabs. By grouping similar websites in a bookmark folder I can open them all up by selecting the “Open All in Tabs” option.
Great stuff, but when I finally figured out the whole RSS feed/Blog reader thing a few weeks ago I really hit the jackpot. By setting up a Google Reader account and linking to the feeds of all my favourite blogs I can keep up with all their latest posts and comments regardless of how frequently or infrequently they post. One complaint is that it sometimes takes a while for the posts/comments to show up on the reader but that’s not a big deal. Another complaint is that a lot of blogs don’t seem to have comment feeds. This seems to be exclusive to the blogspot type of blogs – do these not have comment feeds available?
Anyways, if anyone has any suggestions on how I can improve my surfing experience then I’d love to hear it!
8 replies on “Surfin’ Stuff”
If you like the features of Firefox and are looking for another web browser alternative to Internet Explorer, you might want to try Opera (opera.com).
Many of the concepts found in Firefox and now IE originated with Opera. I find their “Wand’ feature particularly useful for saving passwords to various web sites. It also offers built-in mouse gesture recognition which is pretty handy.
Thanks WE I’ll check that out.
I visited your blog – looks like a good start. I’d be interested in seeing your entire portolio ie asset allocation – how much is in stocks, funds etc. How long u hold stocks for…
Mike
Most wordpress blogs have a comments feed:
http://www.milliondollarjourney.com/comments/feed/
Just add /comments/feed to the end of the domain name, and it “should” represent the feed.
Thanks MDJ. It’s more the free blogs that I can’t get the comments from. ie blogspot, blogger etc.
Mike
You might want to check out StumbleUpon (its a whole different way of surfing, basically instead of searching, like minded people “recommend” pages to you – its collaborative filtering if you’re familiar with the term).
I really like Firefox’s adblock extension (cuts through all the ads and helps you get to the content).
I’m not a convert of RSS feeds yet (I’m a bit of a purist for the xperience of stumbling upong stuff I like, as opposed to having it filtered to me) but I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of your post.
Firefox > Explorer. I don’t even have Explorer installed on my computer anymore. Any virus issues I’ve ever had, I’ve always been able to trace them back to IE.
I tried Opera for a while but it didn’t take. I came back to Firefox.
GIV – my experience with RSS feeds is that you select where you want to get feeds from so if there is a blog you like to follow you can set it up to get all the posts from that blog. There isn’t any filtering going on.
I also prefer to do the surfing myself but for things like comments or infrequent posters, it’s just a lot more efficient to do the feed thing.
Mike
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