influenced dot net

The digg auto refreshing AJAXy queue/spy have been updated, they are now much more functional and aesthetically pleasing

Here’s a list of my favourite extensions (in installed order):

• DOM Inspector This is actually bundled with Firefox itself – very useful for pulling a page apart and understanding its underlying structure
• Adblock Blocks annoying ads! Combined with Pierceive Filterset.G, it stops most ads
• View Rendered Source Chart This one is useful when you’re debugging scripts which modify the document structure.. it lets you view the page as it exists in memory (with sexy colours to boot!)
• IE View I still use IE view on my work machine, IE tab is also good.. I think you know what they do
• Nightly Tester Tools I’ve had this installed for a while as I usually run the latest builds of Firefox and extensions usually lag a few builds behind.. this forces them to be compatible
• Live HTTP Headers This extension lets you see what headers are being sent/recieved from the webserver you’re connecting to.. useful debugging tool
• Tabbrowser Preferences Extra prefs for tabbed browsing
• Web Developer Lots of useful functions on this toolbar, too many to list! A must have for any web developer
• User Agent Switcher I don’t use this much.. sometimes it’s useful for reading forums content when the forums only allow useragents of robots to view them without registration e.g. GoogleBot
• Javascript Debugger Currently disabled as it’s not been updated for a while.. was useful for stepping through javascripts and inspecting variables
• Favicon Picker My bookmarks toolbar uses only icons with no textual descriptions.. Therefore I can’t have any generic icons.. this lets me pick icons for sites which don’t have a favicon.ico
• Google Toolbar for Firefox I hate Firefox’s built in search box, Google Toolbar is a must-have
• Scrapbook Save pages or parts of pages for later review.. I used to use this a lot but Furl Toolbar has come into play more recently
• SnagIt Firefox Extension Capture whole pages, this extension automatically scrolls them to grab the whole thing
• Greasemonkey User scripts! Modify pages to suit you – e.g. Delete button for Gmail
• Furl Tools My Firefox 1.5 Fixed version Bookmark a page and save a snapshot of it so that even if the site goes down you’ll still have access to the original content of that page
• del.icio.us Social bookmarking, superb
• SessionSaver .2 Ever been knee deep in pages? 30 pages open around some random subject? 10 tabs per window, 3 windows? Need to shutdown or reboot? Save a snapshot of your session and reload it later! Also saves snapshots on the even of crash and reloads them at first restart
• Chrome Cleaner Clean out the cruft left by extension install/removal, speeds up Firefox
• Xinha Here! Textbox helper, HTML formatting, etc.
• DownThemAll! Want to download lots of links on a page but can’t be bothered to do them all manually? This is the tool for the job!

I submitted a request to Googlebot on 30th November to remove all pages relating to my /forums/ as there’s stuff still indexed/cached in Google that’s not been there for months

I noticed today that in the past couple of days the status of the request had changed to completed.. so I search google site:www.influenced.net and there’s still a lot of stuff that’s indexed under /forums/ which doesn’t exist.. so what the heck has been completed exactly?

I’m going to retry it via a rule to deny indexing the /forums/ folder in robots.txt and see what happens..

Edit: robots.txt seems to have done the trick

Today influenced.net’s host has had its PHP module upgraded from version 4.x to 5.1.1.. this broke a couple of things, most notably PHP-Markdown

I proceeded to download the latest version of PHP-Markdown but still, the issue remained..

The fix was to modify the _DoCodeBlocks function as follows:

function _DoCodeBlocks($text) {
#
#   Process Markdown `<pre><code>` blocks.
#
global $md_tab_width;

$text = preg_replace_callback('{
(?:nn|A)
((?:(?:[ ]{'.$md_tab_width.'}|t).*n+)+)
((?=^[ ]{0,'.$md_tab_width.'}S)|Z)
}xm',
'_DoCodeBlocks_callback', $text);

return $text;
}

I don’t exactly know why this change worked, it seems something wasn’t being escaped properly

I was pleased to hear that Firefox 1.5 will be released today, however I noticed that furltools wasn’t working with it..

Delving into the code it seems that since recent builds of Firefox 1.5 force xpcnativewrappers=yes by default, so furl ceased to work properly in its current incarnation..

I’ve added a chrome.manifest to disable xpcnativewrappers which lets furl function as per normal with its existing code

The modified furl extension is available here:
furl 0.61

I emailed the furl devs beforehand regarding a new version of furltools but haven’t recieved a response yet (because it was only a few hours ago!)

Hopefully this will fill the void for fellow furl addicts until an official version is released for Firefox 1.5

A problem I encounter many times a day is trying to find some information that I’ve read recently on the net..

• Maybe I bookmarked it via traditional browser bookmarks, but which PC is it on?
• Maybe I bookmarked it via del.icio.us.. but what tags did I give it? The site may be down or moved
• Maybe I starred it in google reader.. but there’s no way to search your starred items (very annoying)
• Maybe I slogger‘d it.. but there’s no decent way to synchronize your slogs amongst multiple machines.. slogger also falls down with frames etc sometimes, not logging the stuff you want
• Maybe I ScrapBook‘d it.. but again – no decent way to synchronize your ScrapBook’s on multiple machines

I know there’s USB sticks etc.. but I want them to be online.. all the time! Instantly accessible wherever I am

Enter furl! I’m angry that I didn’t know about this amazing service early, it truly rocks my socks off..

It’s free to use and you get 5GB of space to store your saved pages.. you can tag them, make them private, share them, visit the original URL, it even has a Firefox extension! magnificent..

I actually started a Win32 tray application today to aid in synchronizing ScrapBook entries via FTP/SFTP/HTTP, but I guess I’ll put that on hold for the moment as furl has currently answered most of my needs..

The only problems I can see currently:

• furl.net might be down when you want the info
• furl.net might stop the service

For me, a furl.net-esque system that could be run on any machine (e.g. private webserver) would be the best thing possible at the moment

Some people have too much time on their hands…

MySQL 5.0 is now out of beta and available for general release

Unfortunately for me the current mysql-noinstall-5.0.15-win32.zip doesn’t include libmysqld.dll for whatever reason (the embedded server). I don’t have MS Visual Studio installed either so I can’t compile it myself… I’ve posted on the MySQL forums though querying it, hopefully someone can direct me to a download which includes it already compiled

Which File Extension are You?

In my second post regarding Google Reader I said that I had been experiencing duplicate articles… however since being queried about it by a member of the Google Reader Team I was thus far unable to reproduce it, until today that is.

This morning around 7am I read 80% of my feeds, specifically I emptied the 9rules group (imported from the 9rules.com OPML) so that it had 0 unread items.

I’ve come back to the 9rules label and everything I read this morning is now unread again! very strange!

At least I know it’s not me who is going insane now…