First stop was the OS. I'm currently on Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.1 is out, however it doesn't look like there's any upgrade for my PDA (Dell Axim X51). Okay, that wasn't a major issue. I then looked at the next two important things, an RSS reader and a decent browser. I used to have an RSS reader on there but when I switched to Google Reader I just used that online, however now I have all of my feeds at Newsgator which allows you to read feeds online and offline and syncs the two (best of both worlds). In the last year I've been very lazy with feeds and not kept up to date with reading them, so I pruned my feeds in my account down to those I considered worthwhile of keeping and added a few new jQuery ones.

Newsgator comes with its own software for the PC, however after a quick look I found it also has software for the Windows Mobile OS. This is quite similar to their mobile online version however it does the synchronising which is great as it means I can download the feeds, sit on a train or take them away with me, read them and then just sync it when I can get online again and I don't see the same post twice.

Newsgator requires the .NET compact framework, so I had to download this from Microsoft.

Next job was a decent browser. The Internet Explorer on the PDA is a bit basic and I longed for tabbed browsing. Firefox used to have a mobile browser called Minimo, but this is no longer maintained, and instead have progressed to Fennec, but that's for Windows Mobile 6+, which is no good. Then Martin sent me a link on twitter for Opera Mobile. I have this on my mobile, however that doesn't have tabs, but it is quite nice so I figured it was worth a go. I used to have Opera installed however it was charged for back then so I removed it soon after, but now it's freely available which is handy. After a quick install I opened it up and discovered that it does have tabs and it's a really nice browser on the PDA too. It's got a nice screen and makes full use of the screen. My only gripe is that to scroll down you have to slide your stylus up the page (as if you're dragging the bottom of the screen up), as the scroll bars don't display. It's a bit confusing when you're used to sliding the scroll bar down!

Opera Mobile also comes with Opera Widgets, one of which is a Twitter app, although I'm not sure if it's as good as Dabr.

A couple of other pieces of software that I've tried out and recommend are SoftX FTP Client which is a simple but useful FTP client to access sites, and then a Pocket Text Editor to edit the files. Useful if you need to make a quick change or fix whilst away from the PC.

Now all I need to do is work out how I can make the PDA connect online via my mobile when I'm out and about!

Another nice point is the ability to run Windows and Linux scripts side by side, which is something I needed back in January for a site that needed Windows to auto update the database nightly into MSSQL (a supplied program from the database provider) but PHP to allow me to write the code, as I've long since forgotten ASP!

Finally, the additional bandwidth costs on this type of hosting are a lot less than standard hosting, around 50% of the cost. A friend who runs a popular entertainment site recently had a shock when a trailer they were hosting became a bit of an internet sensation sending visitor numbers soaring. The only problem is their 24 hours in the spotlight racked up bandwidth bills of almost £700 on their shared hosting account, and that bill was reduced by the hosting company in good faith. If they'd been on cloud hosting then that bill would have been around just half that.

As I mentioned Cloud Hosting is quite new to me, however a good friend of mine has started selling it through his hosting company who I recommend for all types of hosting. The packages are sold on a monthly contract and you get an inclusive bandwidth and space in that price, then any extra you need is charged for at the end of the month, a bit like our pay monthly mobile phone contracts.

So if you've got a site that can go up and down in bandwidth, or have large bandwidth bills, or you need to be able to run PHP and ASP together, then take a look at Cloud Hosting.

Crucial is a fantastic site. The main site is for the US but in the top right you can switch to the UK site. They do free shipping for 3-5 days after purchase, which is fine by me (although I ordered this yesterday and it arrived in the post today!). And if you're not 100% certain on your equipment you can go to the site using your laptop/desktop and just use the system scanner. It will tell you what you already have and what RAM is suitable for you. It also does graphic cards and sells a few other peripherals but RAM is what it started with and its main focus. It's a fantastic site, so easy to use and you won't leave there with the wrong kind of memory for your machine.

My only other experience of buying RAM wasn't so great. I had an old Packard Bell that had about 64MB of RAM so I called up Maplins, a local electronics shop (they're a chain shop, not a one man band). I told them exactly what I had and was sold 256MB RAM for the laptop. I went over to pick it up, got home, pulled the cover off the laptop and took a stick out the box. Hmm the stick was twice the size of the slot! They'd given me desktop RAM not laptop RAM. So another half hour round trip, and this time I took my laptop with me so that they could fit it in the shop. I wasn't impressed!

Anyway, if you've got a spare slot or not running to your full capacity (or you don't know what the full capacity of your machine is) then go over to Crucial, run the system scanner and see what it comes back with. The memory is so cheap now it's worth maxing out your machine.

* No I don't work for Crucial, there's no even affiliate links in this post. I was just very impressed with the prices we got yesterday, and the speed and efficiency of them.

First impressions are great. It's much quicker at rendering pages. I love when you log in to a site it doesn't pop up asking if you want to save the password but instead a bar along the top of the page appears asking instead, leaving the page to continue loading. This allows you to check and see if the page logs in (ie. the user details are correct) before clicking Remember (you may be able to do this on Firefox 2, I've not really tried it though!). I've often saved a username and password several times before I get it right! Another great little feature is that on the page info window you can view all the passwords stored for that particular site/domain. This will come in very handy after the amount of times I've scrolled through my saved passwords, searching for the correct username/password combination for a particular page or site.

At present very few of my extensions work, StumbleUpon, Stylish, Server Spy and that's about all. Even my theme doesn't work with it, but the default theme isn't so bad. They've tidied up the icons along the top a little which looks quite cool. I've also found one client site that has a couple of items in the wrong place, so not sure about their CSS support with Firefox 3, but I'll leave Dave to worry about that when it's officially released (plus it may just be a bug).

The great thing about this at present is that things that stopped working correctly on my installed version such as target _blank pages opening in the same tab as the page I was on, so every external link in Google Reader had to be Ctrl+Clicked, plus my spell checker, are now working again. Probably some extension issue, but it's nice to have a few defaults back, even if it'll just be for a short time until I manage to break them again

There is also a new folder on the bookmarks toolbar, called Smart Bookmarks, which seems to offer a frequently visited list of sites, a list of recently bookmarked sites, and also a recently tagged list. Not sure about the latter and how that works just yet. I've also noticed that I can't seem to manage my bookmarks (unless I'm being totally blonde and missing where to click!).

Finally, they've also improved the drop down on the address bar. It lists both the page title and URL, and as you type in your address it not only lists the recently visited addresses that match that, but also any from your bookmarks too (don't ask why I would type in an address if it's in my bookmarks, I just do!).

So all in all, looking good, and can't wait for the release of Firefox 3

Doesn't seem I'm the only one noticing the spam today. Jason has also posted about it today, how his wife says it's just the right size!

Usually I would set up various filters to help block obvious words within the subject or body of the emails, however I'm an unfortunate position in that one of my major clients sells (genuine) swiss watches and another runs Pharmacy recruitment! I guess I can't really justify blocking 'watches', 'rolex' or 'pharmacy' from my incoming emails.

What frustrates me is that all this spam gets past the spam blockers, yet I tend to find my own emails get blocked on route to the recipient. Whether this is due to the mention of Web Development, or another obvious reason, who knows.

I think I'll spend the weekend building a filter list blocking every russian character I can find

Now it's rolled back to Internet Explorer 6. What's that all about?

At present the main difference is that any URL added is checked against a frequently updated phishing database to ensure that the URLs being used aren't going to scam you of stacks of money! The extra features that should be added soon sound great from what he's told me, potentially including the ability to edit your URL at a later date and statistics information too.

Anyway, he explains it better than I do so pop over to his site and read his Creating Short URLs post on the subject

PS. Have a good weekend, I'll be back on Monday!

Today I went into town and after seeing prices of £80+ for wireless routers, I finally found a Belkin G+ Wireless Router for £40. Bargain! The range is meant to be further too which means that the whole house should be covered by it now hopefully. I got back to the house and set to work setting up the new router, wires everywhere! After an hour I was getting pretty frustrated and fed up as it just didn't want to work. I figured I'd do a hard reset and start from scratch again. Picking up the unit I noticed pen already on the reset button. The whole system had already been sold and returned in the past! So after dinner we drove back out to the shop (thankfully open until 8pm) and got it exchanged.

Take Two! I plugged everything in, within seconds it found the internet connection and worked instantly. Clearly the difference between a faulty unit and one that works! So now I've disabled the wireless broadcast on the old unit and just have the modem running on that, then connected that to the new router via a network cable and the new router is putting out the signal. So far so good. I've got a pretty strong connection where usually I would keep dropping it, which means I get to sit on the couch with my feet up instead of in the dining room, directly below the router

The first feature is the look, the style of it. This can be controlled by you, if you have the time and knowledge. Using the Firefox extension Stylish, you can create your own CSS stylesheet for it, change the way it's laid out, change what is displayed and hide anything you don't use etc. Alternatively I highly recommend Jon Hick's stylesheet for it, which can be found at UserStyles. This is a really nice change in the design in my opinion.

Google has recently added some new features to the reader, such as a search box, allowing you to search the feeds for specific information. It's not something I've used or would necessarily use, but it may prove handy in the future. You can also star/favourite a particular post for future reading which is handy as I see some posts that look good but I may not have time to read and pay attention there and then!

A new feature that I really like (which may not be new but I've only just found it!) is that you can just display your unread posts. You can display all posts from a feed if you want to, but if you only have time to look at say a couple of feeds then you can read those and happily close the browser down. When you return it will know what you've read and only show you what you've not seen. This was always a problem for me before as I'd get a build up of posts for a particular site, and start reading the first few. If I closed the site down I would lose my place, so I've often leaving the browser open for up to a week, with the reader undisturbed, allowing me to try and catch up (and often just hit the Mark All Read instead!). Now I don't have to worry about this which is fantastic!

Of course you have standard features such as organising into categories, renaming feeds to suit yourself etc. If you're considering trying it out then I honestly urge you to. It saves so much time, looks good and is great to use.

So if anyone's using Jon's stylesheet and suffering with a broken display then I recommend trying this one out until Jon has time to update his own.