Last year I made an attempt to move from Firefox to Chrome – as much as I love Firefox, Chrome is a lot quicker in use. However, after living with Chrome for a few days, I’ve moved back to Firefox again.

There was always the issue over searching. I love having a little search box in the corner so that I can do a quick Wikipedia or IMDB lookup. The Chrome equivalent is not as convenient.

However, that would never be make-or-break.

I like the fact that Chrome, when synchronising bookmarks, now looks up the favicons and populates them (it doesn’t synchronise them as Xmarks does, though).

No, what finished off Chrome for me is the total lack of control or visibility with synchronising. Chrome has synchronisation of bookmarks, etc, built in. I therefore imported them from Firefox on one PC to allow it to transfer over to my other installations Sadly, after a number of days it had only made a vague attempt to synchronise a few bookmarks and not much else. All Google offer is a line on your profile settings page to show how many it’s synchronising. No control. Nothing else. Why weren’t my bookmarks moving across? I’ll never know. The thing is, on each machine I could have imported them from Firefox. BUT how can I trust Chrome to correctly then keep them in sync with each other after that? Simply put, I can’t.

I also don’t like the fact that Chrome has no way of displaying separators in bookmark lists.

Maybe I’ll try again later next year. Until then, Firefox remains my browser of choice.

I’ve just launched version 2 of my Artiss Draft List plugin for WordPress and if you’ve not tried it, it’s really worth a punt. In a nutshell, it lists on your blog any posts (and/or pages) that you have in draft. This can provide an ideal, and unique, way to promote posts before they are published. Output is in text so will be picked up by Google, adding SEO advantages (see below).

But let’s get back to the plugin. Once installed you have option to use a sidebar widget, use an in-post (or page) shortcode or even just manually call it via PHP. A new templating system allows you to define exactly how the results are output – yes, you can output a list of draft posts, but what about adding an author name, word count or date of last update? All of this is possible.

It’s all cached so takes as little resource as possible and you can even exclude certain posts from being included in the list (this is done in the editor itself). Finally, you can make sure that the list only includes drafts for a particular time period – for instance, any created in the last month.

Scheduled posts are not excluded either – these can be included and can be indicated via an appropriate icon.

So, how does this help SEO? Well, let’s take a live example from my site. I recently had a product review post in draft. Searching for that product in Google, gave the following result (click to see a larger view)…

As you can see all the top results in Google are for my site – even though the review hasn’t been published. Instead the fact that the text is in the list of drafts within the sidebar has already attracted attention to my site and getting me listed. Of course, this is quite an obscure product so don’t expect top billing in Google for anything as a result. But it does help with your SEO and it give your readers a helpful insight as to what to expect soon.

Download Artiss Draft List from WordPress.org.

Since the Galaxy S2 launched earlier this year no other phone has come near to its capabilities – and that includes, I think, the iPhone 4S. As far as I’m concerned the S2 still reigns supreme.

So, I’ve been excited by the launch of the Galaxy Nexus – the newest release from Samsung, sporting Android 4 as its main highlight.

Other than Android 4, it’s other big thing is the screen – 4.3″ inches at 720×1280. Although the screen physically is bigger the whole device is apparently on a par with the S2 as the screen is taller rather than wider and this extra width takes the place of the buttons at the bottom.

However, ignoring the OS and screen resolution for a moment, when you start comparing the rest of the phone specifications it suddenly starts to look a little more disappointing…

• The Nexus has a Super Amoled screen. The S2 has a Super Amoled Plus screen. There is a difference, and it’s important.
• They both sport a 1.2Ghz Dual Core processor.
• The S2 weighs 116 g, whereas the Nexus is 135 g.
• There is no removable storage option on the Nexus, compared to the Micro SD on the S2.
• The Nexus lacks USB On-the-Go and Wi-Fi Direct.
• The rear camera on the Nexus is 5MP and the front 1.3MP. On the S2 you get an 8MP rear and 2MP front camera. However, the Nexus does give you a twin LED flash rather than the single on the S2.
• The headphone socket is on the bottom. Really? Because when I have a set of headphones plugged in and my phone in my pocket, I really want to have it upside down. No news yet as to where they’ve sited the USB socket.
• It’s a personal preference but the Nexus has more rounded corners, looking like one of its cheaper cousins, and I don’t like it.

One thing I’m not sure about, comparison wise, are the GPUs in the 2 phones which are very different. However, forum discussions would suggest that the S2 might edge it.

One thing that I can find on the Nexus which is better than the S2 is the battery, which is 1750 mAh, compared to 1650 mAh. Extras, the Nexus has a built in barometer. Really.

So, a higher resolution screen, a bigger capacity battery and ability to know if it’s about to rain in the next few hours. But you get a poorer set of cameras, more weight and a load of features missing. Or have I missed something?