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I just stumbled across aideRSS. It is a site which helps users find the best posts from a particular RSS feed by providing a “PostRank”.

Because blog posts are often their author’s random streams of consciousness, it is hard to wade through the many posts to find the few where an author was particularly clever. This is where aideRSS steps in. aideRSS helps you determine the signal to noise ratio of a particular feed.

They use an algorithm based on relevance, content, and people’s reaction to it. For instance, it shows how many times a particular post is referenced in digg, del.icio.us, or Bloglines (They should add Diigo to the list.

I think this will help me find the best posts from a particular feed and also, determine whether it is worth it to subscribe to the feed at all.

This is a great idea that I think will only get better. For instance, it would would be nice if user’s could rate posts. However those ratings should only be a portion of the formula, otherwise spammers and group-think could skew results. Also I think I would like to be able to subscribe to filtered feeds. The posts may need to be delayed a couple days, but that would not bother me, if I could get a better ratio of quality content.

Beyond that, they use sparklines in their UI, which you gotta love.

• Posted in General, Information Architecture
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I use the Firefox browser and Internet Explorer 7 at a ratio of about 60% to 40% respectively. The plug-ins really make Firefox sing.

Here are the plug-ins I use:

• Firebug indispensable add-in for web developers who need to debug JavaScript, examine the HTML source of a page, examine CSS and modify it on the fly, and much more
• All-in-One Sidebar much more robust tool panel
• ColorZilla excellent tool for snagging the HEX values for colors in a web page; it will send the RGB values to the clipboard in a variety of formats
• Firefox Showcase provides thumbnails view of all tab content
• Netcraft Toolbar provides information about a site’s hosting company, server OS and web server as well as site uptime and more
• Professor X quickly view a consistent presentation of the head section of a web page include title and meta-tags
• SEOpen includes many tools for analyzing a page with search engine optimization in mind
• Forecastfox provides compact access to weather information in the status bar
• PicLens provides a sweet slide show view of Google image results as well as other image feed sites like Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, and more
• SafeCache isolates your web cache on a site by site basis so sites can’t pilfer your browsing history
• User Agent Switcher changes how your browser appears to a website; Some sites change content based on user agent; For instance, a site might let the GoogleBot browse the site but deny IE and Firefox
• View Source Chart provides an alternate visualization to reveal nesting complexities in a web page’s HTML
• Diigo provides annotation and bookmarking capabilities right in the browser; It can also send you comments and links to other bookmarking sites as well as to your blog

Internet Explorer 7 has some nice plug-ins as well.

• Web Accessibility Toolbar helps reveal how accessible your web site is; reveals problems with color selections, compatibility with text readers, and more
• Microsoft Developer Toolbar provides many powerful page manipulation and analysis tools
• IE7Pro makes IE as usable as Firefox; My favorite features include, in-line search instead of that annoying window, weather, undo close tab, spell-check, save page to image, user agent switching, disable MySpace clutter, and more.

I am sure there are others worth noting. Feel free to pass them along in the comments.

• Posted in General, User Experience
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This is a fascinating illusion that was new to me. Amazingly, the squares labeled A and B are both the same shade of gray. Click the image to learn more.

Here are some other related fun links:

• Archimedes Laboratory
• More Demos

• Posted in General, Design, Cool Posts
• 2 Comments