While searching for some information about browser detection I came across Peter-Paul Koch's web site: www.quirksmode.org. Peter-Paul is a freelance web developer whose web site is full of useful information about web technology.

IE has a vulnerability that allows the owner of a page to disguise the location of a page in the IE address bar. In the example this at:
http://www.zapthedingbat.com/security/ex01/vun1.htm
the page appears to a Microsoft page, with the address www.microsoft.com. In fact it's nothing to do with Microsoft.

I must admit using the domain in the address bar to reassure myself before filling in any online forms. I now use Firebird as my default browser. The trick described in the above link doesn't work in Firebird. But maybe some other trick does. Beware!

When I'm working from home, I use PuTTY to port forward from ports on my computer, to ports on the network servers at work. This allows me to do stuff like reading my mail using Thunderbird and browsing the company intranet.

Until now I've been using IE as my default browser, but I've switched to Firebird (for no particular reason except, perhaps, that it's probably slightly less of a security risk, and it conforms more rigidly to W3C standards). However, when plugged in the URL:port for the company intranet, Firebird spat back a terse message saying that that port was blocked for security reasons.

I at first assumed this was ZoneAlarm doing its business. But after digging around in ZoneAlarm and finding no reason why it should be blocking this port on Firebird but not IE, I did a Google search and found the following useful page about Mozilla port blocking:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/PortBanning.html

The port I was using (picked at random) was indeed on the blocked list. I switched ports and it works fine.

In a previous entry I talked about RSS aggregators. I mentioned NewsDesk 1.1 and SharpReader.

Well I tried them out. But the one I went for was Abilon from SisyphSoft. Like most of aggregators that seem to be out there, it's a Java-based program, so you need to have the Java Runtime on your computer. If you don't already have it, you can download the Java Runtime from Sun's website (it 's a quick, click-through install).

Abilon works well, especially if you have an always-on Internet connection. It's really a very simple thing. It has three panes. The left pane is a list of sites you're currently subscribed to. The right top pane is a list of articles for the site you select on the left. The right bottom pane shows the summary for the article that's currently selected. Usually the summary is just a single line of text. It depends what's in the RSS. Russell Beattie's Notebook puts the whole article in the summary, which I like. The Dilbert subscription (which comes with Abilon) has a Dilbert cartoon in the summary, which makes it easy to flick through them.

When you click a link to the article or the site it opens up, by default, in a tab behind the main tab. This is a pain because you have to click to it, rather than seeing it straight away (that extra click irritates me!). You have to remember to close the tabs that are added with each link you click otherwise you're left with loads of them. I'd have preferred it to use the same second tab for all linked pages. A better option is to set it to use your default browser. It then opens a new browser window for each link. Again, I'd prefer it to use a single browser window, but at least, with this option, you're spared that extra click!

Abilon comes preloaded with lots of subscriptions. These are quite good to get you started, and there are some good ones in there. But the first thing you'll want to do is wade through them, dividing the wheat from the chaff and deleting the majority of them. If you don't do this, Abilon will spend ages updating itself with pages you're not interested in.

But I'd recommend it as my news aggregator of choice. I've quite a convert already – if only for reading Dilbert! You can, of course, add this web log to Abilon (or your news aggregator of choice) by adding this URL:
http://www.itauthor.com/notes/index.rdf

I finally finished the home page for ITauthor.com last night.

It's uploaded now and I've tested it on IE6, Netscape 7, Opera 7 and Firebird. I like to think it's an effective, minimalist design – nothing ostentatious, but it does the job I want it to do.

Just for posterity (because I'll probably change it fairly soon) here's how it looks today:

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