Flocking great !!!

The other day I sent the port maintainer of linux-flock an e-mail reminding them that flock 1.1 had been released and thanking'em for maintaining the port.

Did a csup of ports and updated flock *my way*:

dixie# fastest_cvsup -c us -q
dixie# vi /root/ports-supfile   # make sure the server is set correct
dixie# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-flock ; ls
Makefile        distinfo        files           pkg-descr       pkg-plist
dixie# less Makefile      # confirm it's 1.1 in ports
dixie# pkg_delete linux-flock-1.0.3
dixie# make install distclean
    ...

Fired up flock from another aterm logged into my regular user account so I could see any messages that popped up on stdout/stderr, all good and even got the "Successfully updated flock" page.

Checklist:

Settings unchanged --- yes
(Linux) Flash player plugin v7 --- works
(Linux) Mozilla MPlayer plugin --- works, using FreeBSD MPlayer build ;-)

And I can see that Flock has finally implemented the one feature I really wanted from them, the ability to customize the 'My World' page. I removed the new friend activity widget and put back the favorites sites window, popped off the multimedia panel too. Because I don't really use it, got my RSS feeds there.

The RSS|Friends|Multimedia layout I got on first start of 1.1 added a scroll bar at my typical window size (~1240x500 or so I'd guess by eye), which losing was one of the nice things of the style changes from flock 0.9 to 1.0. I'm really looking forward to more advancements in the My World page concept and to be honest it is an improvement over Operas "Speed Dial" feature which I used and abused back when I used Opera regularly.

I remember when I installed flock the flashplayer setup from PC-BSD worked out of the box, not very important to me but good to have. My great dislike for every thing Adobe remains but I lifted my 'ban' on them after Flashplayer 9 was released for Linux. I had installed the linux-mplayerplug-in port some time ago but it never worked and crashed flock with an error about loading files, I figured it was an issue of using a linux browser plugin but only having MPlayer compiled for FreeBSD installed. So I removed the stuff from my profile and solved the problem.

Earlier today I was surfing the web and saw the MPlayer plugin load up and I was like what the heck !? It works!!! So now I can listen to my favorite radio station without having to open a konqueror window for it ;-), I'm used to keeping flock loaded 24/7 on my laptop any way because its still a heavy weight program even if it runs faster then firefox 3 alpha and 2.x, seamonkey 1.x, and (Linux) netscape 9 did on here. I actually prefer the mozilla plugin to the KMPlayer plugin in konqueror which IMHO is not even as good as the Kaffeine plugin. This is actually a good thing for me, I don't have to swap to konqueror to multimedia files -- which is why I tried installing the linux-mplayerplug-in port in the first place xD

I think I will take a the new GMail / Yahoo! Mail integration features :-)