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After several weeks and much effort, my newly upgraded PC is almost where I want it, with most of the bits of software I use installed and running as I want them.

The computer Canopus ran for four years without needing my attentions so the upgrade came as a huge disturbance, and it took me an awfully long time to get back to where I had been. One of the things which was lost in transition was my browser's history of the websites that I visit on a regular basis.

I had gotten used to typing a few letters into the browser's address bar and for it to suggest a list of sites or pages which fitted in with what I had typed. I would just type out the letters 'the', for example, and Firefox would guess that I wanted to visit The Online Photographer, and fill in the rest of the address for me.

Likewise, when I typed in the letters 'scot', it would bring up the address of Photoshop guru Scott Kelby's informative blog. Without my browsing history, however, Firefox didn't know what sites I wanted to see and I was left wondering whether the address I wanted was kelby.net, kelby.com or whatever. [It's scottkelby.com, BTW.]

I eventually managed to track down all my favourite sites and I thought it would be a good idea if I could find a way of memorizing them in such a way that their addresses won't be lost the next time I accidentally format my hard drive. I also thought it would be great if I could somehow get a list of all my sites that could keep a track of changes at each site and notify me, for example, when a new article appears on one of them.

I was cheating a little bit because I already knew that this sort of thing was possible through a mechanism called feeds, which are built-into more and more websites and blogs these days. Feeds allow you to subscribe to the site and to be notified when new pages or articles are added to it.

I knew that there are a number of feed readers available, including one from Google, and I had decided to take a look at a couple them, when I came across the very cool Alltop site (www.alltop.com). Its purpose is to help you answer the question 'what's happening?' in whatever sphere happens to interest you.

A conventional search engine would be good at helping you answer specific questions, such as somebody's date of birth, but it would be lousy if you wanted to find out what was happening in the world of politics, Apple computers or being a mom, for example.

Alltop aims to help you find out what's happening in a huge variety of topics by allowing you to type in what you want, and showing you a list of websites and blogs which publish information on that topic.

That's quite clever but the really cool thing is that it uses feed technology to download the last five headlines from each site and, if that weren't enough, you can view the first paragraph or two of any story by hovering your mouse cursor over the headline. Clicking on the headline takes you to the full story on the original site.

You would typically go to Alltop and enter whatever you're looking for, such as photography, and browse through the list of sites it provides. The overwhelming majority of the sites I visit regularly were listed and it is a simple matter to see which have been updated since my last visit.

The system allows you register and create your own page at Alltop and use it to list your favourite sites from any topic so that, just by visiting one page, you can quickly see what's happening in any of your spheres of interest. You can find my Alltop page at http://my.alltop.com/allansjackson and you'll see some interesting photo sites are already listed there.

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