On Goofing Off With a New Toy

Since I was out with a nasty and virulent cough today, I spent the day huddled in bed, watching The Tudors.

And napping.  Because you know what?  Naps are good things.

I also discovered that AOL gave Netscape a brief reprieve.  It was to have passed into the great beyond at the end of January.  It is now the end of February.

So I downloaded what will, in all likelihood, be the final bugfix for Netscape, before it passes into the great beyond.

And then, because the Netscape blog recommended it, I snagged Flock.

Yes, just what I need.  Another web browser. :/

And just what I’d use.  A web browser based on the Gecko codebase. :/

See, my complaint with Firefox has always been that it’s just too slow.  You use Opera, and its speed is beyond amazing.  I don’t consider myself an Opera power user by any stretch of the imagination.  An intermediate user, maybe.  Maybe.  But I can’t imagine working on the web without it.

But enough about Opera.  No need for that sales pitch here.

So I downloaded Flock.  Which is a web browser, based on the Mozilla code, with a bunch of fancy bells and whistles.

One of those bells-and-whistles is a built-in blogging interface.

This post is an experiment to see if it actually works.

If this post shows up in my blog, then it does work.  If this post doesn’t show, then it didn’t.

One problem.  If this does work, I have the nasty suspicion I’m going to be showing lots of HTML tags that should actually be used, not shown.

As for the Flock browser itself, it’s a browser.  It has social networking features.  RSS news feeds.  That sort of thing.  It’s trying to be more useful than the typical browser, by giving the user an immediate portal to information when they start up the program.

In truth, that’s not a bad design decision.  Journeys have to begin somewhere, and giving users a launchpad for their journey into the wilds of the Internet, especially with breaking news and the like, can be a great help.

Would I use Flock everyday?  Harder to say.  I’d have to goof off with it more.  I do like the interface.  Firefox has a downright ugly interface.  Flock’s interface is much more vibrant.  (In truth, Opera also has an underwhelming interface.  Which is why I use the Phoenity graphics set for Opera.  Makes it beautiful.)

So, new toy.  Let’s see if it works. 😉

ETA: It did work. Right from the Flock interface, it posted this. Without having to go through my WordPress admin panels. I did have to clean up the HTML tags, though. Flock was even able to pull my WordPress categories for me to select from. Y’know, I might actually keep Flock around, just for this.