Well, it’s been a few weeks since I bought the Acer, and I thought I’d update on how I’m getting along with it.

And, overall, I’d say pretty good and I definitely think I made the right choice.

The battery life is better than I was expecting, although the lack of power management software from Acer is disappointing. Also, the lack of restore disks from Acer is pretty poor (but apparently done to get costs down). The AA1 (as it’s called) does have a recovery partition – which I’ve already used, thanks to a bit of inappropriate panicking by me when I lost wireless connectivity the other week – but in the case of a major disk crash this would inevitably be lost.

The screen quality is superb, and you hardly notice the small Netbook-standard resolution. However, it is a glossy screen so picks up dust and smudges very easily. The keyboard is excellent for the size.

I regularly get people coming up and asking me about it when it’s in use, and I think that says it all!

What I have been able to do is compile some useful Netbook utilities, some AA1 specific, and others not, and I will be blogging about those later.

I’ve been busy and updates have been made to the Simple Wakoopa List and Simple TTIW List WordPress plugins!

Simple Wakoopa List

This has been upgraded to version 1.1 and includes the following changes..

1. Performance enhancements
2. Migration to the new Wakoopa API
3. New feed functionality

The last change needs further explaining (although all details can be found on the plugin page). A new function has been added that returns the URL of the RSS feed for your request – this allows you to add the feed to your site as well (as demonstrated if you cast your eyes to the left of my site).

Simple TTIW List

Ok, I only released version 2 a couple of days ago and now we’re on 2.1. This was because the performance improvements I made to the Simple Wakoopa List plugin, I was able to make on this as well.

I also made an additional change in that the <LI> tags don’t appear if you request only one item to be displayed – this allows you to display your most recent addition directly in the middle of a sentence.

Again, full details can be found on the plugin’s dedicated page.

“Simple TTIW List“, a plugin to display wish lists on your WordPress blog from TheThingsIWant.com, has been upgraded to version 2.

Yes, it’s quite a leap of version numbering, but I’ve had to change it quite substantaly due to inconsistant XML filenames being used by TTIW. I took the opportunity, however, to add lots of new features so all is not lost.

However, if you added version 1 to your site then you will need to update your code before upgrading to version 2. Sorry.