Friday, December 22, 2006

Speed up Yahoo! in old browsers

Get your Yahoo! mail quicker and slicker by pretending to be a PDA.

Just go here: http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/ and navigate from there. It's stripped down to fit on PDA screens, but it will also make the Yahoo! experience that much better on older, slower, less-capable Web browsers.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Netscape 4.8 for Mac is here

(Crossposting to This Old Mac and This Old Browser)

Even though you're supposed to need Mac System 8 to install Netscape 4.8 (and since I can't seem to get a clean copy of the 7.6.1-friendly version from system7today.com), I found another source for the elusive NS via www.pure-mac.com (go to www.pure-mac.com/webb.html for the site's browser selection).

It led me to Netscape's FTP site, and this file: ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/english/4.8/mac/complete_install/Comm4.8_Complete_US.bin

My first attempt to dowload a clean, unstuffable copy in Netscape 4.7 failed, and IE 5 wouldn't let me do it at all. I gave 4.7 another try, and I got a good download. After unstuffing, the install program said I needed System 8-point-something to do the install. So I went into the Netscape Installer folder and clicked on the Netscape Installer icon ... and the damn thing ... installed. Brought all my preferences from 4.7 along with it.

Everything looks just as it did in 4.7, but it seems a tad faster (could be the long day). I'll have to keep testing.

In other news, I installed Outlook Express 4.5 ... didn't work with DSL Extreme or Gmail. I haven't bothered to try Gmail with Netscape, but I just might do that. It's amazing that of all the programs out there that run on System 7.6.1, Netscape is the ONLY one that works for e-mail. I did get Usenet news through Outlook 4.5, but it didn't organize it as well as Netscape, and if OE can't do e-mail with today's servers, it's good for nothing. I suppose there are POP mail services out there that will work with these older programs, and I'm not saying  I won't investigate, but if DSL Extreme won't run on it, I'm in serious doubt that much else will, either. (Even Yahoo lists Netscape 4 as being compatible with its POP service .. not so for OE 4.5 or 5).

Monday, December 18, 2006

CTRL-B won't bold on IE 5 in the Blogger Beta

I didn't expect it to work, and it doesn't. The fact
that it works at all is a minor miracle. I guess I
shouldn't hold it against Google that Google Docs
doesn't work in IE 5 or even in Safari.

There's a wait between posts

But nothing too arduous.

The pages might not have loaded as quickly ...

But Blogger Beta will play with Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. And as I wrote previously, since you can't code HTML automatically as you can with IE 6 and Firefox, It's almost as easy to send e-mail posts.

One thing you can do, even in IE 5, is select and create post labels. Does it do bold? I will find out.

E-mail to Blogger -- instant gratification

My e-mail post made it here in seconds. Works great, less frustrating.

So even if this new Dashboard doesn't play well with IE 5, I just might move everything over anyway.

And did I mention that there's no wait after publishing a post because new entries are saved to a database, and the blog itself is built on the fly when someone accesses it. I can't call it an improvement just yet. It is different. It does make posting easier. But how does it affect the reader's experience? I'll have to check on that.

I have to admit, those post labels are pretty cool

... and easy. In Movable Type, you have to create a
post label and then select it for that specific post.
Here you just type as many in as you want, separated
by commas, and the software takes care of it for you.
Easy, intuitive and simple.

Now, this is an e-mailed post. Will it go through
instantly? Bounce back? Spin around for a day or so?
The answer ... as soon as I have it.

This Old Browser

There doesn't really need to be This Old Browser, because I cover these issues in This Old Mac and This Old PC. But since the subject at hand is ... old browsers, I felt it appropriate to begin a blog about old software on a platform built with new ... software, namely Blogger Beta.

Since I can actually use the old, non-beta Blogger Dashboard on IE 5 for Macintosh (the most up-do-date, stable browser for System 7.6.1), I didn't want to move my four Blogger blogs over to the Beta until I knew more about compatibility with a) This Old Browser (namely IE 5) and whether the e-mail-to-Blogger bridge was not an unholy mess -- which it has been in the old Blogger. When I do e-mail in a post (one of the great things about Blogger ... when it worked), some just disappear, most bounce back, some appear a day or more later.

And as I've said before, there are some nice improvements in the Blogger Beta, but nothing that compells me to make the switch. Eventually it'll be mandatory, but until then I won't move anything until I'm somewhat sure that I won't be screwing myself (and getting screwed by Google) prematurely. You can put "labels" on the posts, which I'm trying to do here. That's one of the biggies that Blogger has been missing.

That said, it's nice that Blogger is a free service, and I can see in a somewhat roundabout way how Google could be making money from it, but it's way more roundabout than explicit in its profit potential.

That said, I've used Blogger quite a bit over the past couple of years,