Sander van Dragt

Google Chrome is too dominating, this is not good for the web. So I'm switching back to Firefox, but it can be pretty ugly by default in places.

I like to apply the following tweaks to make it pretty again:

Increase the Address Bar font size

Edit userChrome.css to make style changes to the Firefox UI. My Profile is located at %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Gibberish>, use the previous link to find the location on your system. Inside your profile create a chrome folder and inside that create a userChrome.css. Add the following line:

#urlbar { font-size: 13px; }

The possibilities are endless but this does the trick for me. Restart Firefox after saving the file.

Remove unwanted buttons and the searchbox

Right click on any of the toolbar buttons > Customize... to bring up the Customize Firefox screen. Remove unused buttons and the search box (search via the address bar instead) by dragging them to the Additional Tools and Features panel --  or the hamburger menu panel to access them with a click.

Make the tabs square again

Firefox tabs have this rounded look to them, which I find displeasing: install the Squared Australis Tabs addon to add square corners instead.

Hide the menu bar

Did you know you can access the menu bar by pressing the Alt key on your keyboard? The menu bar is visible by default but it is not frequently accessed, so press Alt+V or bring up the View menu bar menu and untick the Menu Bar and optionally the Bookmark Toolbar items.

Hide bookmark toolbar item names

You can blank out the Name of a bookmark to have it display just the icon in the toolbar, which tidies up those frequently accessed sites.

#web

I was looking to setup a Flickr account and noticed that it requires you to enter a mobile phone number to sign up. I prefer not to disclose this information to third parties so I looked for a solution. Unfortunatley, a lot of information is out of date as Yahoo! (which owns Flickr, and which is the service you sign up to so you can login) turned off third party signups back in 2014. However I found a way...

To complete this process you will need to have a non-yahoo email address. I recommend you try Hover and register your own domain with email (such as your surname), so that you will never have to change it when your email provider closes up shop.

Follow these steps:

1. Instead of signing up via Flickr, Sign up for a Yahoo!'s account via their website.
2. Notice that a mobile number is required. Follow the I'd rather use my own email address link just below the email address input.
3. Notice you can now sign up with your own email and a mobile phone number is no longer required.
4. Choosing your password and create a Yahoo! account.

Now you can use the credentials to sign into Flickr!

#web

Apple blogger John Gruber started off a new debate about these issues recently, when he noted that a 537-word text post on the website iMore.com weighed in at 14 megabytes. (Fourteen megabytes of text should correspond to about 7m words, or about 10 times the combined length of the Old and New Testaments.)

Gruber blamed iMore.com, but really it’s not the website’s fault, since to a very large degree the owner of the website you’re visiting doesn’t actually control what you see, when you see it, how you see it, or even whether you see it. Instead, there are dozens of links in the advertising-technology chain, and every single one of them is optimising for financial value, rather than low-bandwidth user experience. Many pages, if you’re on a slow connection, simply time out; they never load at all.

When you are a website owner, you are responsible for all the content on your site. If you don't have any control over the ads, then that's a process issue that should be addressed.

Why not band together with a few large sites and create a standardised ad submission and review system that advertisers can integrate into their content tools and websites can set criteria about ads on their sites.

Maybe the bigger problem is that those websites cannot afford to reject ads.

#link #web

Manton Reece has been having very interesting discussions about microblogging and content ownership recently. He's working on an unannounced project in this area and I've been following his progress.

A few days ago he wrote a post about Microblogging with Wordpress in which he describes most of the process of writing your status updates on your own blog first. As I had to adapt his process for it to work with my configuration of WordPress and as I am using Twitter instead of App.net I thought it would be useful to detail how I went about, based on Manton's write-up.

Requirements

• A theme that supports post-formats.
• an IFTTT and Twitter account.
• A self-hosted WordPress installation, hosted using Apache.
• (optionally) the DoNote app from IFTTT for your mobile device.

Step 1: Link a status updates feed to Twitter

In order to post only the status updates to twitter, we have to identify them in both WordPress and for IFTTT.

Create a dedicated category

In Wordpress, if you do not have a category for status updates, create a Snippets category (with the slug snippets). Note the category ID. In addition, create a new category called ifttt-status if you plan to post to Wordpresss from your mobile device later, as I did (this is a workaround to allow WordPress to convert from this category to the status post format).

Setup the RSS feed endpoints

With the category ID, we can now create a new feed by editing the .htaccess file in your WordPress installation directory, see my gist comment on manton's configuration. I had redirection issues with Manton's original setup so I amended it. What we do here is create two endpoints, one for posts without status updates (rss.xml); and one for only status updates (snippets.xml). We then point any requests to /feed (the default WordPress endpoint) to the first endpoint.

Update (26 June): I updated the gist comment after identifying issues in initial configuration. Please reread the gist if you had problems using the initial configuration.

Post new status updates to Twitter

Now create a new recipe that is triggered from the snippets RSS feed, with the action to post a tweet with the tweet text EntryContent.

You can now blog from WordPress to twitter (just leave the title empty).

Step 2: Post status updates from your mobile device

I'm using DoNote to post to IFTTT which then posts to WordPress.

Setup WordPress

Login to your WordPress blog and in the users section create a ifttt user with the role of Author (this allows the user to create posts).

Install the "IFTTT Post Formats & Post Types" plugin, it will convert posts with the ifttt-status category to the status post-format. It will also hide the ifttt-status category from showing up in your template for example.

Link DoNote to WordPress using IFTTT

Back in IFTTT, In the My Recipe's DoNote section, create a new recipe for WordPress (you might get asked to provide the WordPress username and password you created for this purpose) with the action to create a post with the following values:

• Title: (leave empty)
• Body: NoteText
• Categories: Snippets,ifttt-status
• Tags: (leave empty)
• Post status: Publish immediately

You are not limited to using DoNote if there is a trigger for your service, and you are not limited to usin IFTTT at all if there are WordPress plugins for your status update service and WordPress support for your writing app, but these will require similar configuration as detailed in this post.

Hope this helps!

#link #web

I've switched this site to HTTPS, a secure connection, using a ssl proxy service provided for free by Cloudflare, for reasons. Let me know if you come across any issues.

For those using WordPress, changing the settings Site Address and WordPress Address to HTTPS may make your site unavailable. FYI, the solution I settled on is to install the WordPress HTTPS plugin. Then I set the Site Address to HTTPS. Finally, I cleared the cache. All is working fine now.

Update (06/02/15):
I've moved away from Cloudflare as my DNS provider and as a side-effect this means I'm no longer HTTPS for now. Sorry.

#aside #web

Update: ChromEdit Plus can no longer be installed because it's not signed, please see You too Can Improve Firefox.

For a long time I have been wanting to switch to Firefox as my main browser. I haven’t done so before today because I didn’t like two things: The font-size of the address bar, and having a seperate search box.

Today I’ll show you how to fix these issues.

Fix Address bar font-size: Install the ChromEdit Plus addon. Then, under Tools > ChromEdit Plus > ChromEdit add the following code to the userChome.css:


#urlbar { font-size: 16px; }


Press the Save and Restart buttons. Afterwards you can disable this addon.

Remove the search box: right click on a toolbar > Customise. Drag the searchbox into the Customise Toolbar dialog to remove it from the UI.

#web

The best way to write a clear blog post is to paste your draft into a text-to-speech engine such as tts-api.com and listen to the output. If you can't easily understand what is said then that will most likely indicate problems with your sentence structure.

#web

Gervase Markham’s writes about the changes to your Facebook profile, where now by default a @facebook address is shown instead of your own email address:

#link #web

This is a online document creation tool that you can work on in realtime with other people with chat. Good for notes and documentation or getting feedback where the other party can make amendments in realtime. (click frog to start)

via Piratepad Beta

#web

I'm looking for something a bit unusual. Say you are following the instructions for installing a software package (rl example: http://library.linode.com.../webmin/installing-webmin). Now you find out the instructions are outdated, or incomplete.

How do you keep your notes/additional instructions together with the original? Now you have two problems, your instructions and the original can be updated independently. What happens when the original is updated, or a new version of the software is released?

Wouldn't it be great if you could fork the webpage and update it (or even submit a pull request to the maintainer)?

Is there any practical way of working this way - or will I be stuck with a notetaker / blog / bunch of outdated textfiles?

A lot of questions - maybe one of you has the answer.

#development #web

A valuable lesson for anyone running a website:

After working out a few technical kinks and several botched emails, thanks to missing line breaks, we sent out a final test email to ourselves.  Unfortunately, it went out to every user 

fetchworthy notes • What Happens When You Swear At Your Users.

#web

I get asked every now and then if a new online shopping site is reputable or not. As there is no magic way to determine this I have written up these pointers to help you do the same.  Now please I am not responsible for any mistakes in ordering from a site that seems legit and then turns out to be fraudulent!

I'm trying to look at the following things:

1. Do a google search for the domain name together with one of the following words added: reliable, reputable, fraud, scam etc. This might bring up a few experiences, check some links to determine that these experiences are genuine (not written by a competitor for example).
2. Search for the domain name on the Web Of Trust and TrustPilot. Don't just look at the figures, look at the comments, so these seem genuine (have they been written with due care and attention and proper punctuation etc)?
3. View the incoming links for the domain, using Alexa. Are these from genuine sites or things like link directories where people can add their sites just to get higher in the search results.
4. All reputable shops will use social networking for marketing purposes. Check their Twitter replies and Facebook wall comments for happy / unhappy customers.
5. If you know of a community that discusses the subject matter, search there too. They will probably have determined whether or not the site can be trusted.
6. If you are still unsure, attempt a trial checkout and see if the website supports reputable external payment options. If your payment details are not stored with the website then they are safe in the event of a hack / security breach.

#web

This is great for the following reason:

It will help supporting Firefox because there will just be two versions that matter: the up to date version, and the old version (which is any older version).

This simplifies any solution and troubleshooting, it either works in the current version, or Firefox will update - if it's connected to the internet. Which means eventually, Firefox is always up to date and there will no old versions and therefore no issues.

via Features/Desktop/About Version - MozillaWiki.

#web

Really interesting project for online frontend design. You will need to have an existing site live, but from then on WebPutty will speed up making amendments significantly.

via WebPutty: Simple, fast, and powerful CSS editing and hosting.

#web

WorkFlowy - Organize your brain.: Great way to organise and outline information

#web

Sometimes you just need a favicon to stifle angry apache logs.

via http://blankfavicon.com:80/">A Blank Favicon.

#web

You know how every now and then you want to revisit a page in a while to see what's changed? Perhaps review if something has been added to a discussion? Maybe you're waiting for a beta to open or you have posted to a forum that doesn't have topic notification (or it is a regular website).

Simply click the reminder bear bookmark and customize when you want to get an email reminding you off the page. It's like a disposable bookmark, and lets you get on with more important things. I find it very liberating, try it out yourself.

#link #web

splotchy ==> You are a great conversationalist. One of the best I've seen.
jabberwacky ==> So are you. Especially since I can correct your statements to my liking.

via http://www.yiransheng.com:80/2010/03/bot">Yiran's MBA Experience|A Conversation between Two Chat Bots.

#web