New Google Reader Firefox Extension

Saw a link to this little beauty on the Mozilla Links site. It is just a simple little unread article counter that resides in the Firefox status bar. The original article can be found here, the extension here.

Enjoying the weather before the next storm (Pt.1)

Or, a quick look at a few of my favorite pages which have sprung up with all of this web 2.0 nonsense. The Google "Suite" were just going to be a part of this article, but there are so many I've decided to split it up into two parts and devote the first half just to the big G:

Gmail - Perhaps the first mainstream appearance of the web too point oh, and frequently referred to as "web mail done right" Gmail features massive storage space (and seems to increase it at a rate of ~1 gigabyte per year) a great search function, handy dandy labels, an excellent filter system (and I don't just mean spam), unobtrusive advertising, free pop and smtp access, and idiot-proof integration with the google chat service, Google Talk, in an easy to use interface. Everyone should have gmail. Seriously. Call your congressman, send a letter to the UN, something. If you have more than one gmail account, I highly recommend the firefox plugin "Gmail Manager" which acts as an account manager and mail notifier, allowing you to monitor both accounts and access them quickly, in addition to allowing sendto: links to work with gmail.

Reader - Google Reader is an aggregator for rss feeds. In addition to plugin-free integration with firefox (2.*) this reader features a sharing function, allowing you to create your own rss or html feed of articles selected from your aggregated feeds. I swear, it's as neat as a snake eating it's own tail, and from what I hear the practically-trademarked super-slick minimalist google interface is up for improvements in the near future. I'm not sure how they intend to improve on perfection, however.

Docs and Spreadsheet - I'll roll these two together, even though they are two separate services. Spreadsheet was google's baby and docs, if I am not mistaken, was birthed after the acquisition of startup http://www.writely.com/. Regardless, this is stone simple office document creation right here, although simple may be a deceptive word. I admit that my needs are generally simple, but I have yet run into a feature here that I needed but couldn't find. I think that the sheer brilliance in this user interface, when compared to MSOffice, OpenOffice, or even my favorite, Gnome Office, comes from its inability to hide features in the menu bar. Everything just has to be there on the page. Again, collaboration and publication is built in so that it feels down right cozy. Have to wonder why Google Docs is missing the discussion tab that Spreadsheets feature.

Pages - I am sad to say that while I like Google Pages, it is the most poorly implemented service I have tried. As far as Google services go, I mean. The interface is smooth and clean and well thought out, everything I would expect, but the layout/editing engine seems buggy as hell. Seriously, it reminds me of Microsoft Word circa 1996. At least with Pages, I can go to the code and fix those little bugs as they arise. Still, I would expect more from a wysiwyg interface, even one as advanced as this. There is also a limited selection of templates, considering the tech powerhouse that is backing this home page service. What I would really like to see are theme generators, a la the proliferous myspace layout generators. The ability to make your Google page your Google Wiki should be there too. Not a full blown world-writable Wiki mind you, but an invite only affair. Google is really pushing collaboration in all of their other services, I'd like to see Google Pages catch up.

Calendar - This is a very functional, clean, standards compliant, and easy to use service-- Although I have to admit that sharing your calendar feed should be easier. This is another service made all-the-more valuable with a Firefox plugin. While there is no official plugin, the aptly named "Google Calendar Notifier" is quite effective and adjusts well to personal preference. Having said all this, Calendar is seriously hurting for some Gtalk notifications, a la Remember the Milk.

Notebook - If you have ever tried Microsoft's OneNote office application, Google Notebook will seem familiar. I'm really not using as often as I should. The Firefox plugin (recently overhauled)for this is the one thing that really makes it worth having in my opinion, although it can act a bit of the insect at times. As someone who constantly saves snippets here and there from various web pages, it should be essential for me. Still a little hooked on notepad though... this essentially makes notes into a scrapbook for the web, and like most of Google's other offerings, you can make your notebook publicly viewable and search-able.

Blogger removes the hassle of remembering yet another - The new non beta blogger is quite nice indeed. Those rat-bastards who designed myspace should really look at how the new template editor works (while taking extensive notes) and then shoot themselves in the head. The fact that I can now use my Google loginusername and password, too. Unfortunately, The interface still seems a little out of place with the rest of the minimalist-yet-hyperfunctional offerings from Google. Integrating the editor into the post management page would go a long way toward fixing that though. BTW: looks like you can now post to blogger directly from Google Docs as well as Reader.

Groups - Oh, man, Newsgroups. Nothing can quite pique fond memories of those early days of the web like newsgroups. Ok, so they were mostly used for porn and posting copyrighted material for public download, but at one point newsgroups were *the* forum for expressing our simian ideas. Google groups manages to capture this wondrous past and breath new life into the service whilst making the whole shooting match indexed and searchable.

That's all for now kiddies. Did you learn anything?

Firefox Extensions 2006-09-13

A quick list of firefox extensions I'm using right now:

adblock - blocks elements in pages, can be selective or general.

adblock updater - updates blacklist from several third-party lists of adservers.

all-in-one sidebar - Gives you a few goodies in addition to opening common popup firefox windows (like downloads, extensions, themes) in the sidebar. Comes with url tools toolbar button, which lets you look up the current url on archive.org, whois, or the google cache. also suplies you with a vertically oriented toolbar that can collapse to a thin "grippy".

autohide - gives you a little more control over the fullscreen appearence of firefox, including, as the name suggests, autohiding toolbars.

chatzilla - Ah, this one brings back some warm memories of the internet around... 1998? I forget now. IRC client, useful, lite, small. unfortunatly, i can no longer open in a tab or the sidebar... damn.

crash recovery - in the event of a crash in firefox, crash recovery will open up all of the old tabs when you restart.

deepest sender - a blog composer for several different blog formats including blogger, wordpress, and livejournal.

downthemall - a download manager, one click access to emmbeded or linked objects.

flashblock - blocks flash and shockwave, replaced by a play button.

foxytunes - control your audio player from the status bar. pretty complete controls, as well as the currently playing song. Compatible with winamp, foobar2000, windows media player and more.

gmail manager - check the mail on multiple gmail accounts. supports https.

google browser sync - this is rather cool if you use more than one computer. It stores your currently open tabs and windows, as well as syncing your stored passwords, history, bookmarks and cookies on a server so you can stop working on one computer and pick right up on another. supports encryption for storage and transfer.

google calendar notifier - lets you subscribe to google calendar feeds, gives you one click access to your calendar and posts reminders.

image zoom - lets you zoom a single image or all images on a page.

pagestyle2tab - coppies the body css information to the page's tab. can also copy it to the whole browser.

pdfdownload - gives you options instead of just loading the acrobat plugin.

search plugin hacks lets you remove installed mycroft search engines.

spellbound - a spellchecker for firefox. needs a version bump to work with the current firefox, but works none the less.

translate - translate the current page into english. supports 12 languages including korean, japanese, chinese, and russian.

ubuntu forums - a toolbar menu for ubuntu forums. links to forum categories, searches, and adds context menu search for the forum, compiz forum, the wiki and other pages. Needs some customizing though, no options are available.

undoclosetab - another extension that needs a version bump, but otherwise works fine in the current firefox 1.5.*. right click on a tab and get "undo close tab" works like undo usually does, with a chronological history.

unplug - download embeded movies, including flash. Unlike video downloader, it doesn't connect to a third web page to do this.

News and an Extension

So, I'm (hopefully) writing this post from deepest sender, a firefox plugin that gives you the ability to post from the firefox sidebar. This, unfortunately, is due to avg antivirus recognizing portable firefox 2.0 as a trojan. And not the ribbed kind. DS is not 2.0 compatible yet, so I'd had it on a back shelf and was using performancing-- which BTW is teh suk compared to DS.

Hopefully this will encourage me to post more often. I hope to write a couple of entries here later, but for a quick status report:

The GDM theming tutorial is stalled at about 75-80 percent complete. I'm still not sure how glorious of a finish I want to give the instructional GDM theme. More on this later.

It looks like the Xubuntu team didn't care for either of my gtk themes, and have chosen to go withGTK a murrina-based theme. it's cool in that it's different, but the engine just leaves the themes looking too hard for my tastes. More on this later (film at eleven!).

Not only have I figured out how to get my Ubuntu box to play adultswim's fix, but I've figured out how to save them locally to... ahem, so I can, uh, play them without the lag of streaming. More on this later.

The supremely, nay, divinely simple GDM theme that I posted on gnome look now has it's second derivative posted there. I couldn't be more proud. the first was 22lips, and has a fantastic svg wallpaper of... two tulips. The second is part of a meta-theme/style pack for arch Linux.

My first theme, sunergos blue, should be breaking the 5,000 downloads barrier sometime today. Mind you, that's just from the two sites that I can keep track of, I've seen it posted (by others :D) in at least five theme sites, as well as on my sunergos homepage. That, in my opinion, is really fucking cool.

Hopefully, I will be gainfully employed again by the end of this month doing something that is a hair's breadth from my dream job. It's the first job Ive wanted to study up for, so I'm hoping things go well.

Well, that's all for now, hopefully this will post and not be eaten by the entarwebs....MFL &<

Alternatives

Well, allpeers, while not being bad per se, didn't live up to my expectations. In all fairness, after all this buildup it would have been nigh on impossible to meet my expectations. Anything short of printing out pure Au would have failed. On the bright side however, Psyc has released psychzilla (wiki), which comes oh so close to my dream of a distributed peer-to-peer social network with chat, mail, homepages and filesharing. I really thought that I was going to have to embed torrent binaries in rss pages, broadcast them with feedtree, and pull it all together with a Firefox extension, a torrent extension and jabberzilla or mozchat(now called mango). Whew. Now you see why that wasn't such a good idea. more later.

Why am I surprised

that allpeers has gone public beta and writely has started accepting new users again, and I had no idea?

The Socialized Net

After years of dreaming and more time searching than I care to admit, I seem to have found something very close to that for which I was looking. I have long dreamed of a decentralized "social network" that would allow users to communicate and exchange data. The Socialized.net is probably as close as I will get without writing it my own damn self. It would appear that there are four components implemented at the moment:

The TSN dameon A Gaim TSN plugin A firefox search (mycroft) TSN plugin An Azureus torrentsearch TSN plugin

Using the TSN dameon, you connect to the decentralized network. You can then chat with other members using the Gaim plugin, search for arbitrary content with the firefox plugin, and search for torrents witht he Azureus plugin.

in search of the firefox instant messenger

XMPP Client Daemon: cross platform development environment for XMPP based applications. http://wxxcd.sourceforge.net/index.html Jabberpresence: verify the presence (online status) of your Jabber IM contacts. https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/867/ XUL jabber client http://jabberzilla.jabberstudio.org/ JabberXM is a set of bindings and components that can be used together to build a Jabber client in Mozilla. http://jabberxm.mozdev.org/ Jim is Jabber IM client written only in XUL and Javascript. http://jim.mozdev.org/ Nareau What is it? http://nareau.mozdev.org/what_is.html Email is too hard, so lets junk it. http://nareau.mozdev.org/messaging/index.html