TechnoCloud

In my role I give a lot of presentations which involve demoing multiple sites in a browser.

To have all the URLs preloaded when I start the presentation, I’ve experimented with a number of tools:

What I need is a painfully simple and reliable way of opening multiple tabs on any PC.

Step forward URLOpener. You simply paste in a list of URLs, click submit and it will open them as new tabs. Done.

Put any better ideas you may have in the comments section below.

Google has unveiled its SearchWiki product which adds a familiar social media flavour to Google’s clean search engine results page.

When signed and opted-in, the changes recall elements from Digg, StumbleUpon and most strongly Wikia search, the community-powered open-source search engine from Wikipedia. It allows for comments, influencing of the results (personal rather than community in Google’s case) and the good old rate up/down.

It’s no bad thing to use social media technology, but my gripe is with the clutter on the page. Google has made a fantastically successful search business on the back of its clean, uncluttered pages, that deliver you (usually) where you want to go with a minimum of fuss.

Google is always testing tweeks to their page results and this is a rollout of one such test, but the clutter to Google’s simple formula seems a test too far. Time will tell how univeral that opinion will be.

In an attempt to improve the bounce rate on the blog, I’ve finally added a related posts plugin which exactly what it says on the tin. After some experimentation with the Wordpress plugins, I settled on the amusingly named ‘Yet another Related Posts Plugin‘ which is anything but yet another plugin.

With a simple install and a very handy options menu accessible via settings, it now displays up to five related posts at the bottom of individual posts (although unfortunately not by default on the category, monthly or homepage aggregation of posts).

It judges a related post by title, body, tag and category and you can even adjust the sensitivity through the ‘match threshold’ (I settled on 3).

If you can’t see it (see above brackets), then click on the post name. I’ll report back if the bounce rate improves.

Something strange is happening on one of my archived posts, Pimp my blog.

The majority of non-spam comments that I get on the site are relevant and informative, but for reasons unexplained that post has now attracted a request for help with SQL, a test message, a joke, a business article and even a comment on the randomness itself.

Given it doesn’t contain spam links I can only assume it’s developed into someone’s test page, but for what I’m less sure.

Theories and more random comments below please…