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“Months without an update, and all you give me is a little tip for using a Firefox extension that’s only of interest to Web Developers?”. Yes, we’ve been busy.

If, like me, you spend a lot of time inspecting websites with Firebug you’ll have got into the habit of clicking the little bug in your status bar, clicking “HTML” and then clicking “Inspect”.

But, in the most recent versions you can get there with just one click, all you have to do is add the toolbar button!

You can find the button in the View menu, under Toolbars > Customize…. Drag it onto your toolbar, and inspect away, with two less clicks to get there.

The icon is awful, and doesn’t blend in with the new Firefox 3 theme on the mac, but it looks slightly better when you install the GrApple theme.

Yesterday Microsoft’s Virtual Earth blog announced a whole host of new features for their Live Maps service (that’s their version of Google Maps) and Virtual Earth 3D (that’s their Google Earth competitor).

For me, the key feature of the announcement is “Neighbourhood Subscribe via GeoRSS” which provides an RSS feed of your area, aggregating geo-located content that Live Maps has scraped off the web. Sounds great!

But, when I tried to actually use Live Maps, by clicking an example link to Virtual Globetrotting sights in Spain, I found myself at the homepage of multimap.

Surely I must have clicked the wrong link? Nope, turns out any UK visitor to maps.live.com gets “helpfully” redirected to multimap. The Multimap blog explains how, since being acquired by Microsoft, they are now “the lead consumer mapping experience for Live Search in the UK”.

This would be fine if Multimap was just a re-branded live maps, but in fact it only offers just a small subset of the Live maps features! All the information in that Virtual Globetrotting link above is ignored and you end up at the useless homepage.

The Multimap blog acknowledges that “it may have been a while since you last used Multimap.com”, but there’s a reason for that - it’s rubbish. Adding a few of the Live maps features only makes it slightly less rubbish, and for UK visitors breaks every link to a specific map.

For now, you can around the redirect by going to this Live maps link or by adding “mkt=en-us” to the URL parameters, but that’s not really enough.

If the goal is to lure visitors away from Google Maps then Microsoft are going about it the right way with Live maps, and the very, very wrong way with Multimap. Hopefully they reverse this decision sooner, rather than later.

Updated: Well everyone shouted and eventually they listened: Live Maps UK has been restored.

Tony Farndon’s fantastic Minimap sidebar has quite rightly won a grand prize in the Extend Firefox 2 contest.

Tony presented the plugin (originally as a Flock extension) during last year’s Refresh Edinburgh event, and we were very honoured to see that he’d even built in support for Google Sightseeing sights to be easily loaded into the map.

Since then he’s ported it to a Firefox extension and added even more features. I’ve been using it for months and it got to the point where I’d forgotten it wasn’t a standard part of Firefox (which may explain why I took so long to write this post…)

You can install the plugin from its homepage.

I’ve just managed, for the very first time, to get my Google Reader unread count down to zero. And I’m very proud of this achievement.

I’m not the best at keeping on top of my 257 feeds, and having recently moved house I’ve been without the internet for a week or two. So the unread count was waaaaay over 1000, which is where Reader just calls it “1000+”. This is presumably because it thinks you’ve given up trying to read everything.

The reason for undertaking the mammoth task of actually reading my feeds was today’s announcement that top Mac newsreader NetNewsWire has been made freeware, along with web based access via Newsgator and syncing between computers.

I wanted to move my reading to NetNewsWire, but OPML (the standard file format for describing feed subscriptions) doesn’t support keeping a track of what I’ve read. So to make the jump I had to get everything read, and then start afresh. Which is what I’ve done!¹

Oh dear, NNW tells me I have 20 unread posts in the time it took to write this post…

Last night James (the Oxford branch of Google Sightseeing) did a very quick, but thoroughly entertaining, presentation about Google Sightseeing at this month’s Oxford Geek night. You can watch the 5 minute video of his Micro Presentation in mp4 format directly via this link.

Oxford’s premier tech event returns tomorrow night, in the form of Oxford Geek Night 4.

Building on the success of the previous events the night is set to feature many excellent talks on a range of geeky topics including Web frameworks, MythTV and Perl.

I’ll also be giving a short “microslot” talk about Google Sightseeing where I’ll quickly show a couple of my favourite entries from the archives.

We’ve recently been toying with the idea of hiring one or more staff writers for Google Sightseeing, so we’re asking around to see if anybody is up for the job.

We’re looking for someone who has a genuine interest in the subjects we write about on the site, who is interested in researching and writing one or two quality posts a week, which we’d expect to take about 2-4 hours of your time. Obviously you’ll have excellent written English skills, and we’d especially like to talk to you if you’re also a fluent writer in any language other than English.

Is this something anyone would be interested in doing? We’re not looking for any commitments right now, we’d just like to know if you’re interested. Rather than comment here please send an email to james at this current domain name or use the GSS Contact form.

That’s right, Google Sightseeing is the 452nd most popular blog in the world! Well, according to those fine ladies and gents over at Bloglines anyway.

Thanks to everyone who reads us via bloglines, we appreciate every last one of you

Simon, who drew our Heelan Coo logo for us, now has his own Spreadshirt Shop, where you can buy a t-shirt with our logo on it! Go forth and get yourself a “coo” t-shirt if it floats your boat.

Update: A lot of the information below is irrelevant due to the release of WP-OpenID: a complete, working plugin for OpenID comments on Wordpress.

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OpenID is a “decentralized identity system”, which is like a single login that you control. You authenticate to a server which you trust, and then decide which details that trusted authority passes onto the site you’re trying to access.

The OpenID website recently relaunched with a Wordpress powered blog, which (of course) accepts OpenID logins for commenting.

If you’d like to add OpenID comments to your WordPress site, then I’ve outlined a couple of your choices below. Be aware that I’ve only tested these plugins with Wordpress 2.3 on PHP 5, so your results may vary!

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