Many of us cut out articles from the newspapers if we find them interesting. Think of Web Slices to be cuttings from Web sites. But with a difference. If these cuttings (web content) are updated on the respective web sites, you will be notified, as well as your cuttings will be updated. Technically, you “subscribe to a Web Slice”, instead of saying cutting it off which may offend the webmasters

The latest post on my Blog is Web Slice enabled (or say, it is a Web Slice). In fact, it is Web Slice enabled since some time. Perhaps, some of you (who are using IE 8 ) would have noticed it.

Other web sites which are Web Slice enabled are digg.com, ebay.com, facebook.com, msn.com etc.

How to subscribe to a Web Slice

To slice out the latest post or to subscribe to the latest post on my blog:

• Download and install IE 8 from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx
• Once installed, browse to my blog at http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com.
• Wait for the site to load up completely.
• Once loaded you will notice, the “Subscribe to Web Slices” icon (the second icon, after the home icon on the top right) turns green as shown in the screenshot below:

A green icon indicates Web Slice(s) on the page

• Clicking on the green icon, will show you a dialog box which prompts you to add the Web Slice. Clicking the Add button, on the dialog, will place a bookmark on the Favorites bar.
• Alternatively, if you move your mouse over the latest post, you will see a green border around the latest post, and a green icon on the left, as shown below:

Move the mouse over the latest post to subscribe to the Web Slice

• By clicking on the green icon you can subscribe to the Web Slice.
• Clicking on this bookmark will show you the preview of the Web Slice (the content of my latest blog post), as shown in the screenshot below:

Web Slice Preview

• Clicking on the arrow (->) icon on the preview window will take you to the full blog post.

How does it work ?

If I write a new blog post which, upon publish, becomes my latest post, the Web Slice bookmark on your IE will turn bold. By default, the Web Slice is checked for any updates once in a day. Upon an update, the Web Slice bookmark can turn bold or even play a sound.

Right click on the Web Slice bookmark. Click on “Bold on Update”. This will make the bookmark bold, upon an update.

To play and sound, right click on the bookmark and select Properties. Click on the Settings button under “Update Schedule”. Check the box labeled “Play a sound when a monitored feed or Web Slice is updated.

Notice the numerous other options in the Properties window. Note that you can setup when to check the Web Slice for updates – which is by default set to 1 day.

How to enable Web Slice on your site

Refer to the URL http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc848871(VS.85).aspx. Read the section titled “Creating Web Slices”.

The rules are:

1. The Web Slice Block: You should have a HTML tag (like a <DIV>) enclosing the content that you want to Web Slice enable. This <DIV> tag must have the CSS class name set to “hslice” and must have an id. If you view source (the HTML source) of this blog, you will notice: <div id=“latest_post” class=“hslice”> Note that this <div> has the class set to hslice and id set to latest_post. The id must be unique. That is, no other element or tag on the page must have the same id. If you search for latest_post in the source, you will not find any other element with the same id.
2. The Web Slice Title: The title of the Web Slice or the content should be enclosed within a tag with the classname as entry-title. On my blog, I have given this class name to the anchor (<a>) tag which encloses the title of the latest blog post.
   
3. The Web Slice Body/Content: The content should be enclosed within a tag whose classname is entry-content. Earlier the content of the latest post was enclosed within a paragraph tag (<p>). But giving the <p> tag, the class name as entry-title did not show the preview of the Web Slice (as shown in one of the screenshots above). Changing the <p> tag to a <span> tag showed the preview. Note that on my blog, the content of the latest post is either the full content (in some cases) or a part of the full content. In the latter case, clicking on continue reading shows you the full content. In the latter case, the Web Slice will be marked as updated only when I update the part of the content which shows in the latest post.
   

To summarize, following is the markup structure of my latest blog post which is Web Slice enabled:

<div id=”latest_post” class=”hslice”>
—
—
<a class=”entry-title”  href=”…”> the post title </a>
—
—
<span class=”entry-content”>
the post content
</span>
—
—
</div>

Issues with Web Slices

Though Web Slices seem to be easy to implement, I thought of the following issues with them:

1. For an existing site it may not be always straight forward to implement Web Slices if there are issues like <p> not working (as explained in point 3 in the above section). I would like to have no structure change to use Web Slices.
2. If you go through the link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc848871(VS.85).aspx, you will notice a line which says “The Web Slice preview window will not always display content the exact same way it appears on a Web page; some of the formatting is stripped away”. I could not find the documentation on what formatting is stripped away. I can see that, the Web Slice preview magically removes the continue reading, comments and category links (which are at the bottom of the latest post). And it magically redirects to the full post, when clicking on the -> (arrow) on the preview button. How come, it is detecting the first link as a useful link and discarding other links. I like magic but would like to read the documented logic behind it.
3. Web Slice only works with IE 8, officially (read “Web Slices with Firefox” below). Perhaps, RSS still remains the cross browser standard which works well to notify about updates.

Web Slices with Firefox

With Firefox 3 and a plugin called Webchunks, you can use Web Slices in Firefox! It is very similar to using it in IE. First install the plugin from the following link http://disruptive-innovations.com/zoo/webchunks/webchunks-0.30.xpi. This is the direct link to the plugin. So launch it in Firefox 3.Once installed, it will ask for a Firefox restart. After restart, if you navigate back to my blog (or any other Web Slice enabled) site, you can subscribe to the Web Slices in a very similar way as shown in the screenshots below:

Clicking on the blue icon (on the left) will allow you to subscribe to a Web Slice (if any) on the page

You can also subscribe to a Web Slice by moving the mouse over the content, as in IE 8

The Web Slice preview in Firefox 3

To sum up, I do like the visual slicing out (e.g. by moving the mouse over on the latest post) of content from the web pages. It is like I’m indeed cutting and taking off something from the website

Update:

“And it magically redirects to the full post, when clicking on the -> (arrow) on the preview button. How come, it is detecting the first link as a useful link and discarding other links. I like magic but would like to read the documented logic behind it.”

Found the logic behind this one. It follows the link (<a>) which has rel=”bookmark”. My latest blog post has two links (the title link and the continue reading link) whose rel=”bookmark”. Both of them point to the full post. So Web Slices is picking up one of them, either the first one or the last one.

1. Easy installation
2. Sleek top menu bars give more real estate to the web pages
3. Shows thumbnails of most visited pages as the default page
4. Less configuration options
5. Robust Incognito window (porn mode)

Cons (so far)

1. Not available for Linux
2. No built-in RSS reader
3. Limited configuration options
4. MS Silverlight based applications do not work
5. Cannot leverage the plethora of Firefox plugins

After lots of news and attention since yesterday, Google’s very own web browser called Chrome is finally available for download now, but only for Windows.

To start with, since I’m on Linux (Fedora 9), the download page http://www.google.com/chrome, did not show me a download link but instead prompted me to subscribe (with my E-mail) to get alerted when Chrome is available for Linux.

I subscribed to the alert and then quickly launched Win XP SP2 in VirtualBox (a VMWare or Virtual PC like virtual machine) from my Fedora 9 laptop. Went to the download page and, this time, was greeted by a download link for WinXP/Vista. Downloaded the installer (about 400KB in size). The installer when run, in turn, downloaded the browser (took about 3-4 minutes on a 2Mbps link). Following is the first look of Chrome when it got launched (automatically) after the installation:

The first launch

I should have been in the first or in one the first batches of people to download (started downloading @ 00:55 hrs IST) and run Chrome. I was regularly hitting the site when suddenly the Chrome’s page (earlier was a 404 message page) showed up Writing this line from within Chrome . Will explore and write more about this new kid in town. So do visit back! Okay, Im continuing to write about it now:

Quick Notes

• Installation, no questions asked: During Chrome’s installation, no questions were asked on where to install, what to install, what to import and what not to. The only prompt I got was when Chrome could not import Firefox’s bookmarks because Firefox was open. It imported Internet Explorer 6’s and Firefox 3’s bookmarks.
• No “default browser” nagging: Thankfully (very thankfully indeed) Chrome does not nag to make it a default browser, not even once. If you indeed want to make it the default, you can click on the “Customize and control Google Chrome” icon on the top right and then click on Options. There you will find a button to make it the default.
• Tabs are Windows:Chrome, as a norm these days, has tabbed browsing. But what is interesting is the location bar, back, forward buttons, bookmarks, tools/options menu and everything else is below (or inside the tab), as oppose to being above or outside the tab. The latter is what we see in IE and Firefox. This gave the impression that the tabs are like independent but “placed together” windows. It is a kinda  MDI (Multiple Document Interface  application.
• Non intrusive “remember password” prompt: To continue writing this post from Chrome, I logged into my Blog and Chrome displayed the remember password prompt on the top without stopping the loading of the blog admin page (the page after login). That is, it did not pop-up a box saying “do you want to remember the password or not” and did not wait for me to say yes or no to continue loading the admin page. This feature is already showcased by and present in Firefox 3.
• A Beta with an uninstaller: It was glad to see the beta with an uninstaller. Sometimes beta applications do not ship with an uninstaller but Chrome does. Though I’m in no mood to execute the uninstaller
• Installation Location and size: No, Chrome does not install in Program Files. It installs in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome, where <user> is the Windows login name of the user who is installing the application. This means that Chrome installed by one user will not be available to any other user of that system. I think this is rather a thought of location for a beta application. Perhaps the final version will install in Program FIles(by Administrator) and be available to all users. The installation size (basically the size of the folder) was about 46MB! I’m assuming that it did not install files elsewhere.
• Placement in quick launch menu: This is an interesting one. Chrome’s shortcut was placed on the quick launch bar – the first icon from the Start Menu. As far as I remember new shortcuts are placed towards the end of the quick launch menu (unless you move it) . Hmm has Google done some trick here ? As said above, I installed Chrome on WinXP SP2
• Built-in Spell Check: Chrome has built-in spell checker, just like Firefox. The spell checker underlines (in red) any misspellings in the typed in text in textareas (rectangular text boxes) on any webpage.
• NO RSS ???: Chrome could not detect RSS feeds in websites. Forget that, it could not even display RSS feeds in a formatted way like IE 7 or Firefox 3. It just throws the entire, unformatted text between the RSS tags. There should be a good enough reason for this. I can only think of its beta status.

So after writing this much (as above) I went to sleep (@ 05:00 hrs IST) so that I can browse with Chrome on a fresh new day.

Started my day at around 11:00 IST and started browsing through Chrome while in bed. Now sitting at my office and what I saw and seeing, is what I’m writing:

Chrome’s default page

The default page, when Chome is launched or a new tab/window is opened, is now changed to look as follows:

Default page after some browsing

That is, the default page changed to show me the most visited sites using Chrome. Visiting my favouite website is just one click away! Makes all the sense. One may tend to visit his favourite/most visted site when he launches the browser.

But the issue is, if I want to avoid one or more of my “most visited” site from showing up, I can’t. The only option is to delete the entire browsing history. Take this scenario as an example. I’m amy be giving a presentation, I launch Chrome and everyone sees a porn site as one of my most visited sites on the projector’s screen . I would like to delete just the porn site from the most visited list. While there is a way to avoid the recording of  browsing history (which I will write about a little later), but on a day to day basis one may forget to use it.

Coming back, so the default page is the recently visited sites. But there is an option in the “Customize and control Google Chrome” menu (lets call it the Tools menu hereafter), to enter the URL and make a webpage as default. You can find this at Tools>Options>Basics (tab)>Home Page>Open this page. This webpage then shows up when you launch or re-launch Chrome. But when you open a new tab or window, Chrome still shows the most visited sites. But if you check the checkbox which says “Show home button on the toolbar”. This shows a Home button (like in Firefox). Clicking on this button will open the default page that you have set.

Next as a developer, I thought occured to me. What about all those links on websites which say “make this site your default page”. Will they work ? Went to in.yahoo.com which has the link (on top left) to “Make Yahoo! India your homepage”. Clicking on this link showed!:

When I clicked to make Yahoo my home page

Instructions for Firefox!. It asked me to drag the link to the home button – but the Chrome’s Home button did not accept a drop of a link. This brings us to two questions:

1. Is a JavaScript function or some other method required for Chrome to make a website the default page ?
2. Why is Yahoo detecting Chrome as Firefox ?

Answering the first question, I feel it is not required. It makes sense that your most visited pages compose your default page.This means the websites should detect out Chrome and hide such links to set the default page.

And Yahoo is detecting Chrome as Firefox because Chrome identifies itself (via the useragent string) as a Mozilla browser. Following is the useragent string for Chrome:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Plugins

Installation of Flash plugin is easy and does not require a manual downloading. Once installed, for the first time, the page which demanded Flash plugin automatically refreshes to show the Flash objects or movies

Trying to browse some Silverlight apps at www.silverlight.net prompted to download and install the SilverLight plugin. The plugin installation refused to install at the first go saying that the browser or the operating system (Win XP in my case) may be incompatible. Manually clicking on, to download the Windows version, installed SilverLight 2.0 Beta 2. Henceforth, upon trying to browse SilverLight applications, showed some glimpse of the SilverLight 1.0 and 2.0 applications which were very slow and unresponsive. To summarize MS SilverLight does not seem to work with Chrome. But there should have been a clear alert by Chrome stating the same, rather than users expecting for something to happen, after seeing a glimpse of something happening and waiting for it to happen (forever).

Also just, indeed just, tried my luck by trying to install a Firefox addon (namely Sage-Too) but didn’t work. No complains though, after all Chrome is not based on the Gecko engine (which Firefox uses). Chrome uses WebKit

For Java applets, if you have installed Java Runtime Environment on Windows, Chrome shows the applets.

Porn mode a.k.a. Incognito

Like IE 8’s (Internet Explorer 8)  in-private browsing (also popular as Porn mode), Chrome features Incognito window. It can be launched from the “Control the current page”>New incognito window menu (the icon before the Tools icon).

The Incognito WIndow

It launches a distinct window with an detective wearing goggles icon on the top right – giving you a go ahead to do something goofy. As you can read in the Incognito window, this window will delete any cookies or browsing history. It still stores cookies while you are browsing. So this means it will not hamper a continuous browsing session if Cookies play a role (if any) in it. That is: your browsing experience will be as usual as before. But features like “remember me” against login boxes on websites will be useless because ‘remember me” typically remembers your login and password via Cookies. But these Cookies are destroyed when you close the Incognito window.

Since Chrome claimed that the Cookies etc. gets destroyed when the Incognito window is closed, I tried to trick it as follows. I launched the Incognito window and browsed to a site with login and remember me. Checked “remember me” and then logged in. So at this point, the Cookie would have got stored on the hard disk. Next instead of closing the Incognito window, I just closed my virtual machine, simulating an abnormal shutdown. When I booted in back, and went to the login site in the Incognito window, it did not fill up the username and password. So i could not trick the Incognito window . Chrome must be performaing a clean up on start up too.

The interesting bit is, in the Incognito window, the URLs get auto completed with the URLs you have typed in the non-Incognito window. But if you have used, for example, the remember me on a Website, the password is still not remembered in the Incognito window. So it is kinda, while the Incognito window can pick up the browsing history from the normal window, it does not pick up the Cookies. Is this an unconscious miss out or a deliberate distinction ?

–Will continue to write more, watch out!—-

Thanks to Wordpress Mobile Edition plugin (http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress).

I tested it on Windows Mobile 6 PDA device (on my I-Mate 8502). While browsing the mobile version on the PDA, I clicked on the link “Exit the Mobile Edition” (near the bottom of the page) and it showed me the  desktop edition/page (with blue background, images). However, to go back to the “Mobile optimized page”, I had to clear the cookies. This can be done as follows on Pocket IE (Internet Explorer).

On Pocket IE, click on Menu (on the right) > Tools > Options > Security (Tab). Next click on the button labeled “Clear Cookies”.

Browsing back to the site or a refresh showed me the Mobile optimized page again.

Also asked a friend of mine, who owns a Blackberry to browse the site. On Blackberry, “Exit the Mobile Edition” was reported to not working. It shows the the mobile optimized page even after clicking the link. Will need to check this further.

Update:No need to do delete the cookies in Windows Mobile. If you are browsing non-mobile optimized page (or the regular page), there is a link under each blog post which says “Return to the mobile edition”. Clicking on this link shows the mobile optimized page again. Missed this link in the cluttered regular page on the mobile screen.

Update (May 30, 2009): Have upgraded to 3.0.4. with the Carrington Mobile theme. Refer to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-edition/ Following is a screenshot of how my blog looks on a Android phone (Android Dev Phone 1):

WordPress Blog on Android Phone