I recently wrote a review of the elegant WordPress plugin called “After the Deadline”, which is a fantastic tool designed to help you write better articles on your WordPress-based website.
The great news is that this fantastic functionality is now available for writing anywhere on the web through a simple Firefox Extension.
…we’re pleased to announce the release of the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox.
After the Deadline works in text areas on most webpages. Simply push a button F7 or click to check your spelling, style, and grammar no matter where you are.
This add-on has all the After the Deadline features. You can enable the style checker options you use in the preferences and you can ignore errors to prevent them from coming up.
via After the Deadline for Firefox – Released « After the Deadline.
Download After the Deadline for Firefox
Date Added: February 3rd, 2010 | Leave a comment!
Another death-knoll for IE6. Hopefully the lingering user base will continue to rapidly decrease for this ancient browser. The more high-profile sites that continue to drop support for this browser the better.
I will feel more and more confident in placing a warning at the top of sites that is shown to IE6 users only which recommends that they upgrade their browser (there really is no excuse for using IE6 anymore).
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.
via Official Google Enterprise Blog: Modern browsers for modern applications.
Date Added: January 31st, 2010 | Leave a comment!
Recently enough Google has changed their default search behaviour to include a “Show Options” button which brings up a sidebar to narrow your search results by a variety of parameters such as type, time, previously visited pages and so on.
However they haven’t extended this functionality to their Google Custom Search results.
I created my own Custom Search for searching WordPress plugins to make up for what used to be a very poor search functionality on WordPress.org’s plugin directory. This search function has massively improved but I still find myself using the Custom Search I created.
In order to add an option to view by date modified I found this handy tip on Lifehacker which I thought I’d share here:
Google can reorder search and news results from the last day, week, a few months, or entire year by adding a small string to the end of the search URL. Just add this string—&as_qdr=d—to the address bar and hit enter.
via Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick.
Date Added: January 15th, 2010 | Leave a comment!
Ever wanted to know what the first web page ever created looked like?
The World Wide Web project
Thanks to SixRevisions for sharing this and a huge amount more information in their article, The History of the Internet in a Nutshell, a really fascinating look back over the way this remarkable technology has developed.
Date Added: November 16th, 2009 | Leave a comment!
Thanks to Jonas Nockert for sharing this one. The instant I saw it, the image struck a chord, both introspectively and as a commentary on broader society today.
Below I have reproduced the most recent cover of the New Yorker, posted by Design Milk, which says a lot about today’s society. Something of which I know I’m guilty - my face constantly being lit up by a screen of some sort. It is also something which I’ve seen in action at the last stadium concert I attended – the view from the stand seats being one of a sea of camera phones held up to capture the moment, either calling friends during famous songs, or camera-phoning the event.
November Cover of New Yorker
This humorous new cover for the November 2, 2009 issue of The New Yorker says a lot more than it appears to at first glance. For a closer look in case it’s difficult to see, read more.
via Design Milk – The New Yorker Cover by Chris Ware.
This cover also made me think of one of the best articles I’ve read on TechCrunch in a long time – NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web – which I recommend reading, and captures a lot of my own thoughts and concerns about the all-encompassing, always-on, realistically unsocial (at least in the traditional sense) internet world into which we’re drifting.
Am I guilty of a lot of these things – hell yes. My world is now driven by internet-based communication and social networking tools, I’m as bad as anyone. Still, I want to keep it in check and make some changes that result in me having a bit more physical world interaction over the coming years. I think travelling to India and Cambodia will help with this. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s just a natural evolution, but I still think I need to keep it in mind.
Anyway, great cover – wanted to share it out there (I recognise the somewhat ironic nature of using the medium I am slightly knocking to deliver this message).
Visit the New Yorker
Date Added: November 1st, 2009 | Leave a comment!
This is a quite an amusing search quirk on Google. If you search for Google Ireland it doesn’t report the obvious result of www.google.ie as you might expect, but instead returns www.google.co.nz.
Google Error
Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing this one out – this error was first spotted on the 15th October and it’s still returning the same result
Amusingly the second result is for Google Thailand.. um, how far removed can you get really?
Date Added: October 17th, 2009 | Leave a comment!
Many users, myself included, visit YouTube on an almost daily basis. Ever since Firefox version 2.0 implemented the session restore function, when you are watching a video on YouTube (perhaps on other video sites as well, I haven’t really tested that), you may notice a tiny freeze-up of the video every 10 seconds or so. This happens because the session restore is by default set to save all open tabs every 10 seconds. This is especially noticeable if you happen to have a lot of tabs open at once.
The quick fix for this problem, at least for my own sake, is to increase the time between each of the saves performed by session restore. By opening about:config in your Firefox address bar, then typing browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box, you’ll see a value of 10000, which is in milliseconds. (Meaning your session is saved every 10 seconds.) I changed this to 300000, or every 5 minutes, as I don’t have the urgent need for tab restoration. If you feel like being more on the safe side, try increasing it to something a bit lower, say 120000, or every 2 minutes.
via How to Fix Annoying YouTube Jumpiness in Firefox – Firefox – Lifehacker.
Date Added: August 27th, 2009 | Leave a comment!
Whilst people are harping on regularly about real-time news streams in the form of twitter and so on, there’s still an awful lot of value to be had from RSS feeds which are incredibly widespread on the web. I’ve been using Google Reader to stay on top of my favourite news sources for a long while, and though it’s not without its failings, I still find it to be the best RSS reader available.
Yesterday the Google Reader team added a few features which make it even more useful.
Send To
There’s a new section in your Reader settings which allows you to set up sites to which you’d like to share an item with. This makes it easier to choose a particular network to send an item to instead of just using the generic share button.
Feeds from people you follow
A small but nice touch. By following people you see their shared items in your feeds. Now you can also check out what feeds they have posted to their profile, meaning that you can catch a friend’s blog feed which you might have missed.
“Mark all as read” tweaked
This is the best update by a long shot. You now have the ability to mark as read any subscription, folder, or all items with certain time conditions. As I’ve recently returned from a week on an island I was confronted with 3000+ new items in my feeds. Now with one click I can mark anything over two weeks old as read, which knocks that number down under 2000 new items.
What next?
Calling out to the Google Reader team – please allow us to set up filters, or some way of training our feeds so that we can start pruning out the noise that doesn’t interest us. I have little to no interest in Apple news, of which there is much discussion on many feeds. I care not about Steve Jobs’ health. I’m not interested in Daily Tech’s reporting of latest news from NASA, but I like their other reports. TechCrunch’s excessive reporting of every single movement of the Twitter team bores me.
Make it possible for me to filter this stuff out so I can save time in my morning catch up.
Date Added: August 13th, 2009 | 8 Comments
Google have just added a labs feature to Google Calendar. Hopefully it will prove as handy as some of the nice little features that have been introduced to Gmail.
When you sign in to Calendar today, you’ll see a new page in Settings called Labs where, just like in Gmail, we’ll list new highly experimental features for you to try.
Today there are six new Labs features in the list and more on the way. Try out Next Meeting, which shows you how much time you have to procrastinate. Free or Busy allows you to see which of your friends or coworkers are currently in meetings. And World Clock lets you keep track of different timezones when you schedule meetings. And as with Gmail Labs, there’s a feedback link for you to discuss these features and to suggest new ones.
via The Google Apps Blog (original posts): Introducing Google Calendar Labs.
Date Added: July 14th, 2009 | Leave a comment!
On Tuesday evening Google decided to announce that it was working on a new operating system called Chrome OS. Since then it’s pretty much the only thing my feeds have been talking about (despite the fact that no one really knows anything about it – it’s all just hearsay).
I’m incredibly bored by all this talk, and by the announcement in general. It doesn’t really feel like that big a deal to me, and I’m not sure why. When Google announced Wave, that was something that really stuck in my head. In my every day work and use of the web I’m constantly seeing situations crop up where a light goes off in my head imagining just how much easier that situation would be when Wave becomes a reality.
I definitely think Wave has the potential to have a much deeper and long lasting impact. Linux based OS’s are a dime a dozen, in fact, they’re not even that, they’re 0 cent a dozen, but Wave is a new protocol which, if widely adopted, could really change the way we approach online communication.
Anyway, just some thoughts that were going round my head. As a random need for an antidote, I figure I should share something else entirely. If you have, or have had, a cat in your life, sit back and enjoy Simon’s Cat:
Date Added: July 10th, 2009 | 2 Comments
