Category: Web/Tech

WordPress 2.2

This morning I installed WordPress 2.2, which has been available for about a week. I decided to try WordPress Widgets, which meant I needed to use a Widgets enabled theme. For now, I am trying a theme called Twister 1.0. WordPress Widgets, which enables the easy rearrangment of sidebar items, are very slick. Update: Decided to use Mandigo instead. Let me know if you see any problems.

Snap Links Firefox Add-ons

Snap Links, a Firefox Add-on, does something I’ve been wanting for some time.  It allows me to draw a box around an area on the screen, and then will open each link within the box in a separate tab.  I assigned the middle button of my mouse to draw the box, since I found it awkward working with the right button, which was the default.

Better Gmail Firefox Extension

About three weeks ago, I decided to see if I could use Gmail as my full time mail client.  I had been using Google Reader as my feed reader for some time, and decided to give Gmail another try.  (I had been using Gmail to archive stuff, but only used it to read my mail when I was traveling.) So far, there are just a few things that I have found that I don’t like as well as the way kmail worked, and the experiment is a success so far.

One tool that I recently started using to improve my Gmail experience is the Better Gmail Firefox extension from Gina Trapani of Lifehacker.  She incorporated a number of <a href=”http://www.greasespot.net/”>Greasemonkey</a> scripts into one, easy to install Firefox extension.  I like the keyboard macros, which extends the set of keyboard controls that are built into Gmail.

Edgy Eft

After running Fedora Core 6 for several months, I installed EdgyEft, the latest Ubuntu release, released on October 26, 2006. I had run previous versions of Ubuntu, but gave FC6 a try because that is what Jack runs on his machines. However, I could never quite get rpm working correctly on my machine and when your package manager doesn’t work consistently, it makes the machine seem very fragile.

Edgy Eft installs Firefox 2, and I was glad to see that my favorite Firefox extensions installed without difficulty. Other than that, I haven’t noticed any big changes: it is just nice to be using apt-get again.

del.icio.us Bookmarks Firefox Add-ons

An upgrade has been released for the del.icio.us add-on I use which syncs my browser to my del.icio.us account. This add-on now allows you both bookmark to your local browser as well as to del.icio.us. It requires a full refresh, and the servers were getting hammered, so it took a while for it too work properly, but now I like it a lot.