by edvakf

Fastladder is an online RSS reader that come with a very powerful prefetching function. Its interface is well designed so that users rarely feel any delay. The feeling speed is almost incredible compared to Google Reader or Bloglines, especially if you have a large number of subscribed feeds.

The service sells itself with the copy "1000 feeds in your sight", by which they are trying to say "No matter how many feeds you subscribe, it will never slow down." In fact the developper of this service claims that he is reading 7000 feeds, and Fastladder is made for those people like him. At the moment, I'm reading only 164 feeds--of which about 10 are newspapers, 20 are online magazines, and the rest are blogs--but if I export them to Google Reader, it is already quite stressful to use.

It's free, of course. You just need to go to Fastladder.com and sign up or use OpenID/Yahoo ID to sign in. If you are migrating from another feed reader, you can import the OPML file. There is a bookmarklet to subscribe for an atom/RSS as well. In Opera, I use a keyboard shortcut for subscription,

Go to page, "javascript:location.href='http://fastladder.com/subscribe/'+location.href"

How it works is that you look through your feeds with the keyboard shortcuts. As you go down ('j'/'k' for up/down items, 's'/'a' for next/previous feeds), it prefetches the feeds ahead. If you want to open an article, you can either open by 'v' or pin it by 'p' and open all the pinned items later by pressing 'o'. These shortcuts makes news reading superfast. You can still use Fastladder with a mouse, but in that case you have to use a user JavaScript to turn on the prefetching function (I saw this script somewhere and I'm looking for it). By this pinning, I sometimes open over 100 tabs. What Opera is nice about, unlike Firefox, is that there is no speed loss even if you have that many tabs open. I think Opera IS the browser to use Fastladder.


So that's about Fastladder online. Yesterday I saw quite a stunning news. Fastladder now made an open source version which you can install in your local machine. It acts as a local server that you can open in your browser, and has most of the functions of Fastladder online version.

For windows, there is a one-click installer. How to install is described in their blog. On Mac OS X and Linux, installation is a bit harder. You need to have Ruby 1.8.6 and RubyGems (and FreeImage library for Linux) installed. According to the blogs of people who already tried it, the installation is straightforward, a few lines of command.


As I wrote above, the online Fastladder is (or feels, at least) as fast as many of the local RSS readers already. You might want to install it if you wnat to use it even faster (no time lag even using a mouse), or if you need to read non-public feeds in an intranet, for example.

The open source Fastladder is aiming to work on group sharing functions, full text search, etc, which Fastladder is currently lagging behind Google Reader.


See also
Videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C0BRHj0_5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV7qASlEmtw
(Fastladder is originally released as Livedoor Reader in Japan)

Introduction on Life Hacker
http://lifehacker.com/software/newsreader/organize-and-search-your-feeds-with-fastladder-274833.php

User's blogs
http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/2007/08/fastladder-spee.html
http://garbledzombie.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/switch-to-fastladder/

It was long thought that Google's another killer web service Google Web History cannot be used in Opera.

If you go to their page you will find that to enable Google Web History you have to install Google Toolbar, which means, like many other Google services, only IE and Firefox users are able to access this service. But it was not the case. Google Web History stores the websites you visited according to the request for Google PageRank. So even if you don't have Google Toolbar installed on your Firefox, you can get Google Web History with an extension like PageRank Checker.

It's a good news. You didn't need Google Toolbar at all to use Google Web History. All you have to do is to send a request to get Google PageRank for every page you open. In fact, you don't even need to display the PageRank on a page.

Here is a UserJS to enable Google Web History in Opera, written by mallowlabs (his blog entry in Japanese). He says it's distributed under public domain, so I copy and paste it here.


enablegooglewebhistory.user.js

// ==UserScript==
// @name EnableGoogleWebHistory
// @author mallowlabs
// @namespace http://mallowlabs.s206.xrea.com/
// @version 0.0.2
// @license public domain
// @description : Enable Google Web History
// @published 2007-01-05
// @modified 2006-01-05
// @include *
// ==/UserScript==

// see also
// http://www.scss.com.au/family/andrew/opera/panels/pagerank/
// http://d.hatena.ne.jp/amatanoyo/20080104/1199450996
// =========================================
(function(){

    // avoid frame
    if (window.self != window.parent) return;

    var r=function(x,y){
        return Math.floor((x/y-Math.floor(x/y))*y+.1);
    },
    ch=function(url){
        url='info:'+url;
        var c=[0x9E3779B9,0x9E3779B9,0xE6359A60],i,j,k=0,l,f=Math.floor,
        m=function(c){
            var i,j,s=[13,8,13,12,16,5,3,10,15];
            for(i=0;i<9;i+=1){
                j=c[r(i+2,3)];
                c[r(i,3)]=(c[r(i,3)]-c[r(i+1,3)]-j)^(r(i,3)==1?j<<s[i]:j>>>s[i]);
            }
        };
        for(l=url.length;l>=12;l-=12){
            for(i=0;i<16;i+=1){
                j=k+i;c[f(i/4)]+=url.charCodeAt(j)<<(r(j,4)*8);
            }
            m(c);
            k+=12;
        }
        c[2]+=url.length;
        for(i=l;i>0;i--)
            c[f((i-1)/4)]+=url.charCodeAt(k+i-1)<<(r(i-1,4)+(i>8?1:0))*8;
        m(c);
        return'6'+c[2];
    };
    var url=document.location;

    /* create image element */
    new Image().src = 'http://www.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&ch='+ch(url)+'&features=Rank&q=info:'+escape(url);
})();

(Thanks to Google PageRank Button for the request URL computation)

All you need to do is install the above, go to Google Web History, login and enable it! Enjoy web browsing 10 times more!


Having used Google Web History myself for a day now, I think it's awesome! I was using Opera9.50beta's Search History for a while, but it's search function is pretty poor so far. I couldn't even do an AND search. I also like the fact that Google stores my web history forever, not only up to the limit of my browser cache.


Added 2008-1-10

This entry was featured in Use Google Web History Without Installing Google Toolbar. Thanks for visiting!

The original creater has put the script up to UserScript.org. To keep up with current version, please go there (although I don't think there will be further updates).

This is my new blog. Before going anywhere let me introduce myself briefly.

I am a student in Montreal, Canada. I decided to make this blog to share some ideas about Opera with all of you who can read English.

To date, Opera is not the most popular desktop browser in Japan, even though they sell literally tons of Nintendo Wii and cell phones that run Opera Mini. Yet, the user group there is known to be very skilled and equipped with full of passion for Opera.

It is pretty unfortunate that most of you can't read Japanese, just like I can't read Russian. (Actually I speak a bit of German, Spanish and French but that's another thing). I'm quite curious to get some feedback from you on the ideas I will scratch down in this blog. They should be mainly about customizing Opera. Some are my own opinion, some are things I am inspired by the Japanese Opera blogsphere. Anyway I started it today on a whim, I will see how it goes. What I'm certain is that I will not write this with the best frequency all the time, but I am always looking for things to write in here and FEEDBACKS ARE WELCOME!

Oh, last thing, my id "edvakf" doesn't mean anything. I used it many many years ago just because I liked the sound.



To start I write why I use Opera.

I was a Firefox user about half a year ago. Some add-ons I was using with Firefox were really nifty and I didn't even think I could live without them. One problem was my PC at that time was quite an antique one, so I didn't want to push him hard. Firefox was sometimes eating more than half of his RAM. Then I was recommended to use Opera and I did (it's free anyway, and it worked on Xubuntu).

I was impreassed by its speed, the look, the fact that most of my must-have Firefox add-ons' functions were alread there for me to use by default, and most importantly, the keyboard was fully customizable!

I'm a lazy boy. When I browse, I don't want to use a mouse, I don't want to use two hands, I don't want to move my hand from the home position... That's how I'm lazy. So I customized Opera so that I can browse using only my right hand. Now I sometimes browse hours and hours almost with one hand, and with minimum motion.

Two month ago, I bought a macBook Pro with 2GB RAM. I don't worry too much about the speed loss and using up memory by using Firefox. But I haven't installed it on here. I don't know how it is now. I used Mozilla Prism once, it was damn slow. I think I keep loving Opera for a few more years.