Feedfunk is nearly functionally complete — or at least as complete as I want it to be for my project. I’m soon going to start work on bits of Backpack page, and watch as I cross bugs and tasks out.

I am also progressing through my thesis — up to about 35 pages at the last count — which is coming on nicely. I have a problem now because I’ve finished most of the things I consider interesting to write. This means that coding bits on Feedfunk is far more tempting than it should be, given that I still have plenty of thesis to do. I’ll do my best to resist the temptation.

Woohoo: Google maps UK!

Great news: proper alpha-transparency in PNG files. This must be one of the more annoying shortcomings in IE at the moment. CSS support is also being heavily worked on to make in more consistent. All good news for web designers, though how long until IE7 becomes a viable target platform is anybody’s guess…

I haven’t been writing much recently because my thesis is using up most of my writing-energy. It is coming on well at the moment. Around a month left to finish it — not too long to go. After that I’ve finished university! Crazy to think that I’ll be moving into the world of work and out of learning. Exciting times ahead…

If you’d like to be involved in testing Feedfunk — my university project of an intelligent feed reader — send me an email. Ideally I want around five to ten testers. I’m aiming to get a package together for the end of next week.

I’m hoping to get basic classification going before releasing the test version, but I’m not sure how much work that is going to be. Anyway, you know you want to get involved =)

I’ve spent a couple of weeks reading about various methods for document classification, keyword recognition and other methods of automatically working out what documents are about. It seems that my initial idea was over-ambitious. I had intended to take groups of weblog posts and work out what each was about and then present the user with a list of the topics found. This would mean that they could choose the topics that interested them rather than having to read all the posts to find the interesting ones.