I know this is a niche blog. Read solely by friends that may or may not have blogs, and the random blogger that happens upon my site. It’s true, it’s true, I don’t try to delude myself. So talking about Flock won’t really be news, just some early fawning adoration over an application that is a giant step in the right direction.
Like any blogger worth his weight in salt(iness), I
- Have a blog (by definition)
- Browse the web with Firefox
- Bookmark sites socially with del.icio.us
- Share my photos with Flickr
- Read RSS feeds with an aggregator
Flock is all of these things wrapped into one.
It’s based on the open source Firefox source code, which means it’s free and come swith tabbed browsing, and all the other Firefox goodies. It stores its bookmarks on del.icio.us so you can access them from any computer, as well as tag them and see what other sites people have categorized similarly. It lets you view anyone’s Flickr pictures in a topbar (as opposed to a sidebar) just by typing in their username. You can blog with the browser by simply highlighting some text and it will insert it into a new post which you can edit. Flock loads XML feeds as well, so you get your daily blog dose with even less effort than usual.
Geek Alert!
Another feature I discovered, which is probably available for Firefox but I don’t have, is the DOM Inspector. It opens a tree view of the website you’re viewing, and lists the HTML tag hierarchy. This is really useful for web developers, and I can see myself using it for AJAX hacking. Mmm mmm, good.
Firefox does have the DOM Inspector you silly goose, it’s in the Miscellaneous tab in the Web Developer plugin. I cannot imagine what I would ever use it for, but it’s there.