Over the last couple of weeks I decided to do a few quick changes to the Gamercast website to make it a little bit more swish for Internet Explorer 9, which was released in beta form yesterday. With support for border-radius and box-shadow from CSS3 it was really a no brainer to make use of them (if only it supported multi-column too).

Unlike Chrome and Firefox, Internet Explorer 9 doesn't need to use proprietary extensions to make use of these features. Which is why they're not showing up in those browsers properly, standards aren't standards when you're adding -moz and -webkit before everything.

Simple but effective.

More importantly however was implementing support for Internet Explorer 9's ability to pin websites to the Start Menu or Taskbar. Gamercast has always had a fairly high-resolution icon, so that wasn't much of a problem. You can drag any website you want to the Taskbar, but out of the box it'll behave like a standard shortcut, bar the "branding" differences that will happen to IE9, as per the screenshot above you can see the back and forward icons have taken colour from the icon, as well as having the website's icon displayed to the left fo them. This is specific to websites being launched from the Start Menu or Taskbar, and doesn't happen to websites browsed to more conventionally.

Adding support for jumplists was however pretty easy, and I'm sure with a bit more time I can do something a lot more fancy with this.

As you can see from the screenshot, the pinned website looks like a native application running on Windows 7, with a bunch of options provided in the jumplist providing quick access to subscription options, Twitter, or jumping straight into some content be they videos on YouTube, or just seeing what the latest news is.

For a basic jumplist all you need to do is place the following in the webpage's header:

<meta name="application-name" content="Name" />
<meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="Text for tooltip" />
<meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="Default URL"/>
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Example;action-uri=/path/;icon-uri=/icon.ico;"/>

For more fancy stuff such as subheadings you can use a bit of script:

<script type='text/javascript'>
function customJumplist() {
window.external.msSiteModeCreateJumplist('Example heading');
window.external.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem('Example', '/examplepath/', '/icon.ico');
window.external.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem('Example2', '/examplepath/', '/icon.ico');
}
customJumplist();</script>

If you're using IE9 head over to Gamercast and drag it into the Taskbar and check it out for yourself.

With a fair bit of hype Google launched their "Instant" search yesterday. Well Catherine was getting it, it wasn't showing up on my machine despite being behind the same router and using the same browser. Today it is.

Google describe it as:

The new experience transforms search, delivering results instantly, in a way that has never been done before. Now, results appear automatically.

Very nice. Basically it returns results for every character you type, well less so if you type fast. At the moment it's being pretty slow here, and only kicks in after I've typed a word or two. Was a bit faster yesterday so I assume their servers are under more load than usual due to all the coverage.

But Long Zheng in about two hours put together the same thing over a year ago with Bing's AJAX APIs.

Never been done before? Get real Google. You also lose points for using the word "magic" in your little marketing video.

I'll stick to using Bing as my default search engine, I only ever copy and paste things into Google, such as error messages as Google seem to do better in that regard and as such Google Instant isn't much use to me.

Earlier this year Microsoft discontinued security updates for Windows XP with Service Pack 2, and Windows Vista with no service packs. I'm still seeing a lot of machines out there without the latest service packs installed, most of which are now out of support.

Users running Windows Vista without any service packs have not had any security updates for over four months now. That should set some alarm bells ringing. Those on Windows XP SP2 might have noticed this month's patch Tuesday being somewhat quiet. That's because you're not getting your updates!

I generally recommend people to install service packs as they're released. However I do come across other IT support people recommending people to "wait". Of course in reality they end up waiting so long they forget to install it and reach end-of-life for their version, blissfully unaware that their machine is now vulnerable to dozens of exploits with more increasing every month.

As of this post Windows XP's latest service pack is version 3, and Windows Vista's is version 2.

How to check with Windows XP

Click Start
-> Right-click My Computer
--> Click Properties in the menu

That will open the following window:

Your service pack version will be indicated within the red box. If you have less than Service Pack 3, or no service pack is listed you should upgrade now.

How to check with Windows Vista

Click Start
-> Right click Computer
--> Click Properties in the menu

That will open the following window:

Your service pack version will be indicated in the red box. If there is nothing listed there, then you do not have any service pack installed. In that case you should upgrade now. Service Pack 1 is still supported, however I'd still recommend upgrading.

How to upgrade

The fastest way to do this would be to check Windows Update. On Windows XP or Windows Vista you can click Start -> All Programs -> Windows Update.

If for some reason Windows Update isn't listing any service packs, check to make sure the update hasn't been hidden, on Windows Vista you can do this by clicking 'Restore hidden updates'. If it still isn't showing up, then download the full installers manually. Here's Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP2.

So do yourself a favour and just check to make sure your machines are up to date.

A new beta build of Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 was released yesterday. Like the previous Wave 4 build, conversation view was plagued by an annoying advert, yes you could close it to make it go away but it was an annoying extra click.

Yes, well annoying. Microsoft have however also added an option to turn it off. This only effects the conversation view, not the Social or Contact list views. It is fairly well hidden in options. If you make your way to Messages and down the bottom under Conversations is an option called "Show expanded footer in conversation windows" uncheck that and the advert will be hidden by default.

Sorted. My main issue has been resolved, now if only we could get handwriting support back.

Those following me on Twitter will know I've been away with Catherine to the Lake District for a few days to enjoy the odd walk and bike ride here and there, and also to enjoy the dark (but mostly cloudy) skies and hunt for Perseids.

I'm in the process of going through the photographs I took for use with Photosynth and getting them uploaded. For starters here's Buckle Yeat. Don't forget to press P to toggle through the different point cloud options, press F to make the viewer fullscreen.

We stayed at the Buckle Yeat Guest House in Near Sawrey, approx 4 miles south west of Windermere. More Photosynths to follow over the next few days, including some landscapes.

The other day we got Gamercast listed on Google News, however we had a bit of trouble getting our news articles correctly indexed so I had to find a Google News sitemap plugin or skin for b2evolution.

After 30 minutes of searching I came up empty handed. So I just modified the existing _sitemap skin to do the job.

You can download it here.

There are a couple of things you'll need to do to get it working. First up you'll need to specify the publication name, language and any Google keywords in the file directly. I didn't pull this information out of the blog because the blog name might be different to the publication name on Google News, plus Google recommends specific keywords. So yes this may cause issues if you run multiple blogs on the same backend which you want listed on Google news, however as a workaround you can just use multiple copies of the skin. There's also some fields not used by the skin, such as the tags field or the subscription options.

You'll then want to upload it to the b2evolution skins directory into a folder of your choice, for example _newsmap. You can then check to see if it is working by visiting yourblog.somewhere/?tempskin=_newsmap that should show articles from the last two days. All you'd need to do then is submit if via Google's webmaster tools.