The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

Today, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl weighing in at 3,276g. Both she, and her mother are well. This also answers Kim's question about my sleeping patterns : I count on getting no sleep in the coming months...

When I first started spawning ideas about an RSS reader that would print the articles as a regular newspaper, I had a tough choice to make between output formats . My main options were: HTML with CSS Microsoft Word Adobe's PDF format There are also other document formats (RTF, etc) I considered but quickly rejected. Let's look at each of these formats in order to see how I came to my final decision. The main factor guiding my choice was having the result look professional, with justified multicolumn paragraphs for instance. The thing is that I would love to be creating an HTML page with CSS styling because of the portability. Basically the full published issue would be contained in one HTML page (with a few hyperlinked image files). This package would open on any computer with a decent web browser. Also, page br...

As I have mentioned on the blog before, the big project I am working on right now is a feed aggregator in the form of a paper newspaper. This application is currently being developed using the .NET 2.0 framework. By using this development environment I automatically qualified to enter Microsoft's $10,000 Made In Express Contest where the idea was picked along with 11 other finalists. I have previously used the name "RSS Star" for the project, but from now on the name will be FeedJournal. Information about this project is available at www.feedjournal .com - and as part of Microsoft's contest I will also be blogging at http://spaces.m sn.com/madeinex press6

I got an e-mail from Microsoft letting me know that I will be one of the 12 finalists in the Made In Express Contest. That's way cool! I will keep a blog updated at the contest site but I intend to double-post the entries hare as well. I am thrilled to get the privilege of competing as a finalist in the "Made In Express Contest!" with my vision of an RSS aggregator in the form of a paper-based newspaper or magazine. What is most exciting for me is the opportunity I am getting to build the project within this contest, with all its opportunities of making it visible to the public.

Microsoft called me up on the phone today to discuss my submission for the "Made In Express Contest". The newspaper project I submitted for the contest seems to have grabbed their attention, and I am now a finalist candidate. Apparently we are down to 30 contestants now, out of the original 1500 submissions. The finalists should be published in about a week and a half, if everything goes according to plan. Anyway, this is a very good sign that my newspaper project can find a niche in the market. Now, I just have to wait for Microsoft to make their final choice...the suspense is unbearable!

One of the most useful Firefox extensions I have installed must be ViewMyCurrency , which helps me to convert currencies inside the browser. Basically you define which currency you want all prices to be converted into and then many major world currencies will automatically be converted and displayed along with your own currency inside any web page. If you regularly browse sites with prices not in your preferred currency you will greatly benefit from this extension. I have been using it for several months now both at work and and at home, and I can't imagine surfing without it. Highly recommended, and of course free!