philwilson.org

PDF reading and CoComment starts being useful

20 July, 2006

It’s really nice to see Foxit PDF Reader get a bit more recognition (this article about it is on front page of Digg, no matter how briefly). I’ve been using it for a few years now, and there’s now way I’d move back to Adobe Reader now. It doesn’t require a proper installation – it’s just an .exe that runs. Foxit loads really quickly and I’ve never come across a PDF that it can’t read, I definitely recommend it.

In other news, CoComment has started being actively useful. The service only used to keep track of comments made by people with CoComment accounts but they’ve now implemented a crawler which actively retrieves comments from platforms with well-known page structures. In their own words:

If you make any comments on platforms such as WordPress, Typepad, MovableType, Blogger, Flickr, digg, Kaywa, Blogsphere, Kulando, ExpressionEngine or tblog, all subsequent comments in that comment stream will be viewable in the conversation thread on your “my conversations page” – whether they are from registered coComment users or not.

Finally! I gave up using CoComment after a few weeks when it became obvious that only other total nerds were adding any value to it, and not the people I actually wanted – people actually in the conversation. Now, using the Firefox extension, tracking my conversations should become totally transparent and easy! Here’s hoping!

See other posts tagged with general and all posts made in July 2006.

Comments

Rod Begbie
21 July, 2006 at 01:09

Ooh, I hadn’t seen the Firefox extension. OK, it might actually add some level of value now. Giving it a shot with this comment.

Easton Ellsworth
21 July, 2006 at 17:15

Rod, good luck with it! Phil, I’ve responded to you and 21 other bloggers at my own blog. I think coComment is great, and hopefully by pooling together some of the collective feedback we’ve all got going, it’ll motivate the coCo team even more.

Pip
21 July, 2006 at 17:48

Thanks Easton.

So far, even thought it’s early days, coComment is looking much improved and far more useful now than it was before.

In fairness, I’ve not tried co.mments, but there doesn’t seem to be a Firefox extension which automatically picks these things up, which is the killer feature for me.