David Sim writes… A bit of a technical one this….

If you’re using Internet Explorer 8, you might be aware of accelerators. They allow you to select some text and search for it, map it or send it by email or to your blog. Quite useful all round, and a great new feature. I’m trying them out to see what use we can make of them to enhance use of our database systems. One idea could be: a database administrator selects some text on a member’s web site. An accelerator could automatically add the text to the information we hold on the member in the database, without cut / paste / search for entrant.

To try out the technology, I’ve created an accelerator for the social networking site, Twitter. Select some text on a web page, right click and it will post the text and the URL of the page to Twitter.

If you have IE8, you can install the Twitter Accelerator.

IE8 is due out later this year and we’re already testing our client’s sites to ensure compatibility – it’s a major change for Microsoft and therefore many sites that worked fine in Internet Explorers 6 and 7 won’t work propertly in IE8.

We’re continuing to support Firefox too, and we use that in the team. Give me a call on +44 (0)1309 678100 or email david.sim@openbrolly.com if you would like to discuss, or add a comment.