Celebrity Deathmatch : newcomer Google Blog Search, old chap Technorati, young competitors IceRocket and BlogPulse. Let's find out which is the most ego boosting relevant.
Read More

SearchFox is a rather new web-based RSS reader, currently under private beta testing, with some promising features.

What makes SearchFox special is their claiming that sources and new articles can be (this is optionnal, of course) sorted by relevance and interest, based on your reading and clicking behavior. According to them : "Initial studies show that our personalization engine surfaces 50% of the interesting posts to the first page after a week of use, and reaches the 90% level after two weeks of use.". This sounds interesting for people who subscribe to more than a few dozens of feeds : you can't read them all, and sometimes you cannot tell from a post title if this is going to be of interest or not.

The whole thing, after a few minutes of test, seems to be well done. The interface uses some trendy Ajax, is fast, and even works with MSIE 5.0. You can import as an OPML file your sources from another reader and start reading some feeds. However, I didn't find out how to re-order feeds from a folder to another.

As for content personnalization, it's too early to tell how effective it is. Anyhow it has already detected that planetOzh was my favorite feed, that's a good point :) So far, this sounds like an exciting feature : content personnalization is something that has really impressed me with Findory, I'm willing to see how it can help with a feed reader.

If you want to try this for yourself, go ahead : this is private beta testing, but beta testers are welcome to ask for an invitation. "We still have a couple thousand beta accounts to give away, but they are going quick.", says Product Manager. Visit their website and simply send an email asking for an account.

This is big news. My Sourceforge alert just told me that Gallery 2.0 is released. No more beta or release candidate, we're talking about stable official release (you know, the one that comes just before a load of bugfixes and "oops we forgot this" patches :)

G2 is something I've been really waiting for. I'm currently using Coppermine for my personal gallery and never felt completely satisfied about it. Out of the box and as is, Coppermine is a really decent product. But when it comes to tweaking its core code, there begins a nightmare of obfuscated PHP code and hard-coded nested HTML tables. Yuck.

Before giving G2 a serious try, I'll start by reading this detailed comparison of G1 vs G2. Then I'll download it, check how clean code looks like and if it looks hackable. Then I'll try to break stuff :)

Some people are six figure bloggers. Not too bad. You know what ? I'm a four figure blogger !

Of course I'm not speaking about my Adsense earnings :) (Should I say "unfortunately" ? Honestly, no, varying Adsense inclusions here are just experiments, I don't need and don't even try to make any money from a blog that costs me no money)
No, I'm talking about something much more important than money : useless, irrelevant, personal satisfaction and egoturbation !

Last night I broke a symbolic barrier on Technorati, where I'm now listed with a rank lower than 10 000 ! Woohoo ! As of writing, I'm ranking 8.671. Maybe I can now brag a bit about this with colleagues who have no clue about what a blog is :Þ

Next goal : become a three figure blogger ! I'm here talking about my feed reader counter which is about to reach 100. Life is so more enjoyable when you can afford being enthusiast and rejoice about inconsequential minor details :)

I noticed a recent improvement on Technorati's Search feature : when you search for sites linking to a blog, they now specify whether results are returned because of their content (i.e. someone wrote a blog entry containing a link to some site) or because the site uses a theme that matches your search query.

Examples : a lot of people use themes by if…else, and upcoming theme K2 by Michael Heilemann is already widely spread.

This is a nice technological improvement : except for K2 that adds some meta data in the <head> ("<meta name="template" content="K2 Beta One r73″ />"), making theme identification quite easy for a search engine, other WordPress themes produce no theme specific content but the link to their stylesheet, pointing to wp-content/themes/yourtheme/style.css. So I guess the Technorati folks built their own list of WP themes so that they can filter search results.

I don't know if this is part of their plans, but Technorati seems to be a few lines of code away from making a WordPress theme list ranked by popularity and number of links. Similarly, you'll notice that use of the WordPress software is highlighted on search results for binarybonsai.com, so we can easily imagine better blog profiling in the next future (blog engine and theme used), and why not blog engines market share statistics (this would make a particularly interesting trend to follow on the long run)

"Code is Poetry" : every WordPress user has read this at least once, on WordPress' official site, as this is their tagline. And I guess most bloggers think "WordPress" when they read "Code is Poetry".

Today, while looking for some food in a local supermarket, I've seen a guy with a black tee-shirt with a huge "Code is Poetry" on it. I was to say something like "hey d00d ok that's cool, but have you got a WordPress.com invite as well ? :)" but, as the guy turned back, I saw the other side of his shirt showing … a Microsoft logo and some tiny text I couldn't read like some place and date for a convention.

WTF. Someone sue them.

Subway Logos: collection of logos from all around the World. Some are weird, some are simplistic, some are quite pretty. All this makes an interesting variation on an otherwise rather boring stuff :)