PubSub: beta testing upgrade to Sidebar

A Consuming Experience

Blogging, internet, software, mobile, telecomms, gadgets, technology, media and digital rights from the perspective of a consumer / user, including reviews, rants and random thoughts. Aimed at intelligent non-geeks, who are all too often unnecessarily disenfranchised by excessive use of tech jargon, this blog aims to be informative and practical without being patronising. With guides, tutorials, tips - and the occasional ever so slightly naughty observation.

PubSub: beta testing upgrade to Sidebar

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Add this post to Del.icio.us, Digg or Furl | Create Watchlist

PubSub, whose "matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription," will "soon" release new versions of their sidebar (which shows your matches live in a sidebar in Internet Explorer or Firefox).

The improvements are said to be:

Auto-reconnect support that reestablishes the session after a network interruption or when the user’s machine awakens from hibernation.
An options menu for configuring user settings.
A new option allows display of the PubSub LinkRank of the currently viewed page.
Automatic detection of LAN proxy configuration, with automatic tunneling through the proxy on port 443, which should enable use of the Sidebar in many firewalled networks.
Backend improvements to ensure faster and more reliable message delivery.
Some bug fixes to improve stability.

Live matching is potentially very useful (though Pubsub now have the Technorati Mini to contend with, which can also be used in a Firefox sidebar and even Opera panel), but on my system Pubsub's sidebar has never worked properly in either IE or Firefox, with zero results even when their feed had content, or results that didn't quite make sense, so it will interesting to check out how much better the new version will be.

Pubsub are asking would-be volunteer beta testers to email them at sidebar@pubsub.com

Technorati Tags: Pubsub, search, searching, search engines, search tools, beta testing, browser, browsers, sidebar, sidebars, Internet Explorer, Firefox, blogs, blogging, technology, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

Add this post to Del.icio.us, Digg or Furl | Email this post to a friend | Edit | New

Links to this post on:

Icerocket -
Blogpulse
Bloglines
Delicious
Google Blog Search -

<$BlogBacklinkTitle$>: <$BlogBacklinkSnippet$>
posted by <$BlogBacklinkAuthor$> @ <$BlogBacklinkDateTime$>

Create link here by posting on Blogger

2 Comment(s):

Hi Improbulus,

I'm Malcolm Pollack, one of the developers at PubSub. I'm sorry you've had this problem with our Sidebars, and I'd like to try to work out what could be the matter. I'd also be happy to have you help us test the newer version.

I've got the email you sent us, and will get back to you shortly. I'm sure we can get to the bottom of the problem.

Thanks for trying our service!

(By Malcolm Pollack, at Wednesday, January 18, 2006 3:33:00 AM) Edit Comment