Category: Web/Tech

WordPress 1.3

Last night I upgraded to the beta version of WordPress 1.3. I broke plugin handling in the process, but decided to press on with 1.3 rather than back it out. Yes, the look has changed a bit: I am trying to make Five Acres work better in terminal with low resolutions by paring away some of the frills.

Firefox

QuickNote is a Mozilla/Firefox extension that sets up a sidebar for taking notes. It will allow you to gather selected text along with the url.

Jack and were comparing which Firefox we load this morning, and he recommended AdBlock. I asked, “Why don’t you just right click on the image and block the images from the server?” He wasn’t aware of that function, so I tried to find an image to demonstrate. I had to go to seven sites before I found some that weren’t already blocked, including my.yahoo.com, cnn.com, and ustoday.com. I don’t block ad servers until they serve flashing advertisements, so I guess they are fairly common.

I really hate flashing advertisements.

TargetAlert

TargetAlert is Firefox plugin that I found when someone mentioned it for its ability to alert that a clicked link will attempt to load an Adobe Acrobat file. What I really value though is that it warns (by a little icon beside the link) that a clicked link will open in a new window, allowing me to Ctrl-Right Click (or Middle Click on Linux) so that it will open in a tab instead.

FlashBlock

Under the assumption that if I find something annoying, someone else has found it annoying, I went looking for a Firefox browser plugin to block the automatic playing of Flash animations, and found FlashBlock. It puts a small button on the page where the animation would have appeared, which you can view the animation if you desire. One note: after you install the plugin, choose FlashBlock from the Tools->Extensions menu, and enable the plugin using Options before restarting the browser. It does not automatically enable itself when installed.

The Browser, Reloaded

I have been rebuilding my desktop after a clean install of Linux using Fedora Core 3 Release Candidate 5, which gives me my twice a year opportunity to revisit what software I use on a regular basis. This time, I am trying to see if I can forego using Privoxy. Privoxy is a proxy for web browsing, which means it puts itself between your browser and the Internet. Proxies can be used for several purposes: Privoxy screens out advertisements (including popup boxes) before the content is passed to the browser. Privoxy works extremely well, and is not all that difficult to set up, but of course setting up any proxy is beyond the comfort level of 98% of Internet users. (Privoxy is not just for Linux users: there are versions for Windows and other operating systems as well.)

However, since Firefox 1.0 is now included as a standard with RC5, I decided to see if I forego using Privoxy since Firefox has a lot of options to block annoying ads and popups. In other words, could I train Firefox quickly enough before the ads drive me crazy. (I am always appalled when I use other people’s browsers, and I am assaulted from all side by things flashing and rotating on the edges of the screen. Do I have less innate tolerance for such things, or is it simply that I have not learned to screen them out?)

So far, I am cautiously hopeful that I won’t have to install Privoxy. A few Right-Clicks to block ads got rid of the most annoying ads. I chose the option to eliminate popups, so those are gone as well. (Firefox allows you to make exceptions for sites that use popups to present content.)

In a weak moment, I downloaded and installed the Macromedia Flash plugin. (This takes an extra step or two in Linux, since the security features make it a little harder to install software.) Now I am wondering why I bothered. Is Flash used for anything but annoying ads?