Working on the blog agent

I'm working on Phase 2 a little bit at a time because I'm learning how to do this. I want to make the interface easy to understand and use. So I present each blog in a selection list. If the list is longer than the (current) display of up to 10 items, then there will be a scroll bar on the right of the list. For test purposes I am only playing with 6 blogs in the list.

Here is a sample picture.


When the list is shown, there will be an asterisk to the left of the blogs that the agent thinks that you haven't read. This will be based on a comparison of your saved date and title for that blog and the actual most recent post date and title. The list is in a "Courier" font so it looks more tidy. The leftmost column is an asterisk or a blank.

Only one item in the list may be selected at any time (as you can see, I selected "marcelymca"). Once selected, the user can click the "View blog" or "Save blog data" button. When the "View" button is clicked then I may try to pop up a new browser window with that blog (again...still learning). However, since by that point I will have ALREADY collected the blog web page contents, this would be a little wasteful/slow. So, instead I may just pop up a different text window and paste in the web page contents. When the "Save" button is clicked then the most recent post data (date and title) will be saved into the file (and the asterisk should go away, indicating you are current on that blog).

For those of you that are reading this, interested, and get the whole idea/concept, let me know what you think.