Category: Web/Tech

The Color Palette Generator is a php application that transforms photographs into palettes. You can upload your own photo, or use the ones already on the server.

There is now a wiki for recipes called Wikipes, which was launched on January 1. I had wondered why no one had done this before, and now they have.

dtoy_vs_byokal is a kaleidoscope where your drawings on the screen are animated into a kaleidoscope. (via By the Way.

Leaky Tap presents some lists of Custom Keywords that can be used in Firefox and Mozilla, as well as pointers to various other information about setting them up. Once set up, these shortcuts can be typed into the address bar for quick searches. For example, I have a CustomKeyword called write that takes me to the page I use to post to my weblog, as well as one called gnews that will search Google News for a topic.

I was using markup languages for documents when html was just a gleam in Berner-Lee’s eye. I couldn’t remember when I first saw html or a browser, so I found A Little History of the World Wide Web. Odd to think that it has just been fourteen years since he coined the name World Wide Web.

I remember my first impression of html: “hmm…how limited.” (I was used to a rather fabulous markup language called Bookmaster, which was used by IBM to produce documentation.) This was when Jack first showed me a browser running on our XT machine here at home, not too long after we moved to Colorado. “Boy…this is sure going to suck up a lot of bandwidth.”

I was right on both accounts.

I am posting this via mozex, which is a hard to configure put powerful Firefox extension that allows you to choose an editor for Firefox (and Mozilla) textareas. Browser support for editing textareas is usually quite poor, so it is nice to have the ability to specify a “real” editor. This NewsForge article explains how to set it up.

I am using Quanta as my editor, since it allows me to preview pages easily.

Another not particularly obvious feature of Firefox is the ability to use Ctrl and the plus and minus keys from the numeric keypad to make the text bigger (in the case of Ctrl-+) or smaller (in the case of Ctrl–). This is probably the feature I miss the most when using Internet Explorer, because I don’t usually even notice when I resize the text at a site. This tip only works for text, not images.

You can also use the pulldown menu View->Text Size->Increase or View->Text Size->Decrease, but the Ctrl keys are much faster.

One Firefox feature that I am starting to like a lot is the ability to type a few words in the address line at the top of the browser and having Firefox go to the most appropriate site for that combination of words. For example, typing the words “amazon joe haldeman” turns up “Forever War” by COSine 2005 guest of honor Joe Haldeman. Firefox uses the Google “get lucky” search to perform this function. And yes, typing in my name brings up Five Acres with a View. As another example, “imdb The Lion in Winter” brings up the entry at IMDB for the 1968 movie starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn.

To get to the address line quickly and clear it, use Ctrl-L and then the delete key.

Friday, I installed Firefox on my mother’s PC, after spending some time installing and running a virus checker and spyware checkers. Her subscription to Norton just expired, so I downloaded AVG Anti-Virus for her. There were no reported viruses, but Spybot and Ad-Aware sure found a lot to complain about.

After that, I installed Firefox 1.0, and walked her through some of its features. She has a rather slow machine on a slow dial-up, and Firefox seems faster to both of us. Just the pop-up blocking ought to save her some download time.

I like the line in the review of Firefox that I found in the Washington Post: Internet Explorer, you’re fired. For even more reasons: Why Switch?