Ben Allfree

Pluck is an RSS Reader, Bookmark Manager, Blog Reader, and News Reader. I like the version that works in IE, but they have a web edition that I haven’t tried.

Pluck’s revenue model seems viable: they intersperse ads with the content that they feed to you. Moreover, Pluck itself is a valuable tool. Using Pluck, you can create persistant serches (“perches”) on keywords of interest. It will scan Google, eBay, and other sites, but most notably, it will scan your own RSS feeds. This is like having a poor man’s custom RSS feed based on keywords.

As you can see, I have a lot of perches going:

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ComponentArt’s WebUI looks slick until you get down to the nitty gritty details, and then you realize you have to swap out the component for something else if you ever hope to have something that works well.

For example, you can not highlight text when the tree node is in edit mode. And they say they will never fix it.

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Context menus are not and never will be supported in Safari. (Maybe this is a Safari problem, but to be fair, it doesn’t do me any good to hear that “most” features are compatible with Safari).

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The menu component API is difficult to use and writes what seems like extremely bloated JavaScript that could be refactored. The smallest I can get this page is 180K. That seems rediculous just for some handy Ajax features.

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I love this panel control. It’s easy to set up, includes antialiased corners.

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Maybe some day I will add a gradient to it. I like the gradient used on the Technorati site:

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I like server-side controls that hide the client-side JavaScript/CSS/DHTML, and to duplicate this look, it seems to me that it would need the following properties:

* GradientStartColor
* GradientEndColor
* GradientStart (where does the gradient start changing)
* GradientWidth (how many pixels wide is the change)
* GradientOrientation (horizontal, vertical)

And reasonable defaults for each of these

Especially in the world of e-commerce, you end up with a lot of data feeds that come to you as tab- or comma-delimited text because your suppliers are using data systems that started in the world of mainframes. When I have to make automated nightly import jobs that need frequent tweaking, I prefer mySQL’s features over SQL Server.

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