R.I.P. George Carlin. The world will laugh less with your passing.
Year: 2008
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Wrong Movie
“Psst… See that guy over there? He doesn’t belong in this movie.”
“But he played Han Solo.”
“I don’t care. Unless he’s got a frickin’ laser whip, he needs to get off of my dropship.” -
Firefox 3 add-ons I can’t live without.
Today Mozilla officially released Firefox 3. If you haven’t grabbed it yet, what are you waiting for? These are some of the extensions that I now use:- AnyColor – Currently available for the Windows version of Firefox 3 only, this add-on lets you shift the color/appearance of your current theme on the fly. It works really well with the default theme for Firefox 3 on Windows XP. I’m currently using the Dark preset.
- Better Gmail 2 – An excellent extension that allows users to get more out of Gmail. (Updated the link!)
- Color Management 0.4 – Though Firefox 3 has some support for color profiles out of the box, this add-on gives it the ability to read ICC color profiles embedded in images. (This hopefully translates to better and more consistent color fidelity in images on the web.)
- ColorZilla 1.9 – With the ability to sample colors from anything on a webpage, and the ability to grab color palettes from those sites, this is an invaluable add-on to have.
- Facebook Toolbar – If you use Facebook and Firefox, this toolbar is worth having. It notifies you when your friends post anything new, allows you to search contacts, see status updates and more all without visiting facebook.com.
- FaviconizeTab – I just recently started using this add-on, and I can’t see how I worked without it. If you’re like me, and keep several tabs open all day long, this extension allows you to right-click on tabs and turn them into just the favicon only. Not only does this save valuable screen real estate, it allows you some degree of privacy in that people looking over your shoulder won’t necessarily be able to see what’s in all of your open tabs.
- Firebug 1.2.0b3 – If you’re doing any sort of web design or development, you need to have this add-on installed. It’s an invaluable tool for debugging CSS/HTML, Javascript, and much, much more.
- Google Gears – Gears enables you to use compatible sites offline. Google Documents, Remember the Milk and many more sites support Gears, and I’d imagine more sites in the future will work with it as well.
- IE Tab – Another must have add-on for web designers/developers. Quickly toggle between Firefox and Internet Explorer rendering engines with Firefox itself.
- MeasureIt 0.3.8 – This ruler comes in handy when wanting to measure elements on a site, specific images and more.
- PicLens – PicLens lets you browse through photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube and more through an immersive 3D experience. The latest version has integrated Amazon “window shopping”, videos from MSNBC, ESPN and movie trailers and more…
- Prism for Firefox 0.2 – This add-on allows you to create stand-alone applications of websites you commonly use. I used it to create stand-alone versions of Basecamp, Gmail and gCalendar.
- ReloadEvery 3.0.0 – This simple add-on allows you to configure pages to be refreshed on a schedule you set. For example: If you use the web version of Twitter, you could set this extension to reload the page every 5 minutes.
- Web Developer 1.1.6 – Honestly, I don’t use this add-on all that often, but when I do – I’m glad I had it. Simple things like being able to disable all styles and resizing the browser window makes this add-on worth keeping around for me.
What add-ons/extensions are you using with Firefox 3 that you can’t live without? I’d love to know!
Michael Montgomery suggested these extensions:
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Disqus
I disabled Disqus commenting on my site. As it stands now, it just doesn’t integrate fully enough into WordPress for me to be happy with it. I’ll see if I can migrate the handful of comments over to be on my site within the next day or so. I think Disqus has a lot of potential, but I just can’t get used to having it here.
Update: I’ve re-enabled Disqus for the time being. Having trackbacks is a welcome addition.
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Today’s the Day
Today’s the day! Help the Mozilla team set the record for most software downloads in a day by grabbing Mozilla Firefox 3. Firefox 3 will be officially released at 10am PST. (If you’re not sure what time that translates to in your part of the world, consult the fixed time world clock.)
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The iPhone 3G Upgrade Question. “The new iPhone 3G is a surefire winner for anyone who doesn’t have an iPhone yet. It’s not such a sure thing for people with existing iPhones.” Gruber FTW!
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Scraped
Derek Powazek’s article “It’s 2008. I can’t believe we haven’t figured this out.” spoke loudly to me. I’m tired of content scrapers. I’ve had articles stolen, simply because they covered popular subjects I’m still offering full text in my feed, but for Derek, that’s no longer an option. The problem with splogs and spam in general is that as long as there are people stupid enough to click on links on their site on it their emails, they empower their creators more and more.
This has got to stop. Just because someone offers an RSS/Atom feed, doesn’t mean others have the right to repurpose that content any way they see fit. It’s one thing for someone to read a feed through Google Reader or some other feedreader, it’s another to take syndicated feeds, repurpose them and monetize off of content THEY DIDN’T CREATE.
There is a plugin called AntiLeech available for WordPress that ought to help curb some of the theft from occuring. Maybe it’ll help, but it won’t eliminate the problem.
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Google Talk + Yahoo Messenger
The original post is now offline, but here’s the deal:
Just announced today, Google and Yahoo are entering into a partnership where Yahoo may offer Google paid search results as part of its search offering. As part of this agreement, we are agreeing to make our IM services interoperate. From the Yahoo press release:
In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users.