Hackszine.com: Firefox Archives

Archive: Firefox

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April 5, 2007

New del.icio.us Firefox extension, super-good

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The new del.icio.us Firefox extension is so good, I'm using del.icio.us again (I stopped for awhile when things just seemed slow/down too much)... The mosst useful feature for me is the bookmark search right from Firefox. Soon I'll add this extension to every computer I use so I have bookmarks across multiple machines. If you want to tune in to our bookmarks on MAKE, check'em out here - Link.

Related:

del.icio.us: making Firefox more del.icio.us - Link.
del.icio.us bookmarks Firefox install - Link.

February 27, 2007

Hacks Authors' Blogs: One Feed to Rule Them All

Hacks Authors' Feed

Ed note: In this guest post, veteran Hacks series author Paul Bausch takes on a challenge that's been on my todo list for a while, providing a solution that should be of immediate interest to all readers of this site and just might serve as a seed for future hacking around here.

I have a shelf full of O'Reilly Hacks books across a wide range of subjects. I contributed a couple in the Web Applications category, but I also have Hacks books about digital photography, hardware, scripting languages, gaming, and operating systems. The series has introduced me to a number of authors who are doing unusual things with technology in their particular area of expertise. I thought it would be interesting to follow each of these authors outside of the Hacks series by subscribing to their blogs, collectively. I figured it would be a good way to keep up with areas of technology that I'm not necessarily tuned into. I have a collection of blogs that I read to keep up with what's happening in Web Applications, but I don't have a sense of what's going on with gaming, for example.

So I went on a mission to gather the Hacks authors' blogs using the tools I know best: Web Applications. I started with an Amazon power query for books by O'Reilly with "Hacks" in the title via the Amazon API, and ended up with a list of 80 authors' full names. I plugged each name into Google by hand, adding the word "blog" (or if that didn't turn anything up, "hacks"). Then I visited the blog to make sure it was the Hacks author I was looking for, clicked the orange feed button in the Firefox address field to get the feed URL, and copied the URL to a text file. I ended up with a list of 40 feeds. (A 50% blogging rate among an arbitrary group isn't too shabby.)

I plugged the feeds into Google Reader, and renamed each feed the author's full name. Here's what the final list looks like (click for larger view):

Here's the list of feeds as OPML if you'd like to try it: Hacks Authors.

I've only been tuning into this list for a few days, but I'm already getting to know these authors in a new way. And I was right—I am finding out about developments in tech areas I don't normally tune into. I especially found Brian K. Jones's recent post about Fighting Specialization appropriate, something I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Related:

February 11, 2007

Tweak the Google with the CustomizeGoogle Firefox Extension

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I'm setting up a new computer all weekend, so that also means adding a zillion tweaks and add-ons to get stuff done as the week rapidly approaches. One of my favorites is "CustomizeGoogle". Check out the image above and the other search engine links, which you're looking for stuff and need to compare results it's super handy. The extension does *a lot* more - from removing ads to forcing a secure connection for docs and calendar. It's a Google world, we just live in it.

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If you use Firefox, check it out and post up your favorite extensions.

More:

CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience -- Firefox Extension - Link.

Firefox Hacks @ the Maker store - Link.

Google Hacks, 3E @ the Maker store - Link.

February 10, 2007

LinkBack: Trackbacks Everywhere and Without the Spam

The concept of trackbacks and bidirectional linking has always been really intruiging to me, but it's such a difficult problem to solve, even if you ignore the spam issue... and that's awfully hard to ignore.

Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext over 30 years ago, and articulated its principles, most of which have been ignored in the triumph of the Web. One of the principle elements of Nelson's vision that was left out of the web is the inherent bidirectionality of hyperlinks. This just means that a link from A to B should be visible, and traversable, from B to A as well. A simple idea, but suprisingly difficult to implement if you start with the sort of document-centric model that the WWW uses.

The problem is that bidirectional linking requires a certain level of cooperation between referencers and referencees. You can't force every publisher of every document to maintain a trackback-style referencing policy or system. Fortunately, however, you can expect that someone will be in the business of crawling and indexing the web, and the topic of references, as any fan of Pagerank will tell you, falls squarely into the search domain.

LinkBack is a Firefox/Greasemonkey plugin that queries Yahoo web services as your browse the web, displaying incoming links for the web pages that you visit. It's pretty much like using the "link:" qualifier in a Google search, except that it does this automatically for you for every page that you visit, showing the results in a semi-transparent floating div over the document you are viewing.

Of course, there are privacy issues with sending all your browsing information to Yahoo, and the results are only as good as the search engine is capable, but it's a step in the right direction, and for the most part, it works. -Link.

January 30, 2007

Free 3 months of T-Mobile WiFi - Just pretend to run Vista

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A few of you sent in how to get free WiFi by changing your browser's "user agent" to be a Vista machine, so here's i-hacked.com step by step...

"For the release of Microsoft Vista, T-Mobile is offering 3 free months of their hotspot service. The catch is... You have to be running Windows Vista. (don't do it)

Here is a quick tip to get three months of free hotspot service at the firm's North American WiFi access points found at Starbucks, Borders, FedEx-Kinkos, hotel chains, etc. Turns out, they only use the agent information for validation... So that enables us to SPOOF IT!

1. Download the firefox extension for spoofing user-agents: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/59/
2. Restart firefox and goto: Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options... \
3. Click "User Agents" and then "Add"
4. Fill out the window with following info:

Description: Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista)
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Platform: Win32

5. Save it, goto Tools > User Agent Switcher > Then click the newly added one. Browse over to http://hotspot.t-mobile.com/vista/ and you should be redirected to a trial sign-up page." - Link.

Un-Snap Your Hyperlinks

Snap

Already tired of the relatively new Snap "feature" that pops up an annoying little preview balloon over every hyperlink on certain web sites? Well, it turns out it's pretty easy to get rid of them, everywhere. Just click here to disable the feature using cookie technology (or, go to the Snap page that discusses deactivation and click the link from there).

Before discovering this little quick fix (thanks, Paul!), I'd noticed the Options menu available in each Snap window, which lets you "opt out" of the feature on a site-by-site basis, or across the board:

UnSnap

I, of course, killed them globally and only reactivated them for the screenshots in this post. My web browsing has been much more pleasant since.

January 26, 2007

Auto-Correct Typos in Your Address Bar

URL Fixer

Tired of typos in your URLs? URL Fixer is an extension for Firefox (and other Mozilla-based browsers, such as Flock) that fixes common mistakes in your address bar caused by careless keystrokes. For example, typing hackszine.con will redirect to hackszine.com. The current version:

will correct common misspellings of .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, and .mil, as well as the protocol (http:, https:). It will also correct errors in country code TLDS such as .com.XX, .net.XX, and .org.XX. By right-clicking on the address bar, you can set it to auto-correct your errors, or you can have it ask you before making any corrections.

Note that the confirmation message shown in the screenshot here is the result of configuration. By default, URL Fixer auto-corrects errors, quickly and seamlessly, which I've found quite handy.

Related:

Firefox Hacks

January 25, 2007

NetFlix "Instant Watching" in Firefox

NetFlix Instant Watching in Firefox.jpg

For all lucky NetFlix users who see the "Watch Now" tab at NetFlix.com (indicating early access to the new Instant Watching feature) but are disappointed that the feature is IE only, Hacking NetFlix has uncovered a fix for watching NetFlix streaming movies within Firefox:

Install the IE Tab Add-on, and in the IE Tab options (Tools menu, IE Tab Options) add "http://www.netflix.com" to the sites filter.

As noted at the end of the post, all we need now is a hack for Mac support (actually, more of us still need the Instant Watching feature too). ... Well, anyone?

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