Archive for category Web
Bloglines to Google Reader
Posted by Benny Chew in RSS, Web on October 29th, 2006
I’ve finally decided to switch to Google Reader permanently. I probably have been procrastinating in doing this for a long time since I’ve been using it for quite some time and am rather fond of it. :( Unfortunately, the incessant downtimes and also irregularities in feeds being updated recently was probably the final straw.
Google Reader seems to have fixed the scrolling bug with feeds only having 1 item and also the last item not marked as read which I previously encountered the last time.
Guess it’s pretty hard to compete with Google when the point is on reliability..
Box.net signup page oddities
Posted by Benny Chew in Web on October 29th, 2006
CK was telling me that Box.net no longer have free signups, but that wasn’t the case when I tried. And so we both took screenshots..
Accessed from Melbourne, Australia:
Accessed from KL, Malaysia:
Apparently the signup page differs if you have an IP from Malaysia! I told him to try using ATunnel to verify that, and true enough, he was able to sign up. I guess bandwidth abuse by Malaysians is pretty rife..
WordPress 2.0.5 released
Posted by Benny Chew in Open Source, Site Updates, Web, WordPress on October 29th, 2006
Firefox 2.0 close button tweak
Posted by Benny Chew in Firefox, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Web on October 24th, 2006
One of the more obvious user interface changes in this version of Firefox is the position of the close button for tabs. Practically all other web browsers with tabs have tab closing buttons on each tab as opposed to Firefox’s choice of having it at the extreme right of the tab row up until now. With version 2.0, the default close tab button position is now on each individual tab.
This is probably a good decision in a way, but after such a long time of using Firefox, I’ve been too accustomed to the close button being there and would rather not have that change (I use the scroll button to close tabs nowadays, but selectively closing multiple tabs with the ‘x’ at the end is pretty useful). Fortunately there’s a setting which can be easily changed to accommodate the behaviour you want.
Here are the steps to have the close button back at same position as pre-1.5 days:
- Type ‘about:config’ in the address bar.
- In the filter textbox that appears below, enter ‘browser.tabs.closeButtons’.
- Double click on the browser.tabs.closeButtons preference, and a message box should appear.
- Change the value to ’3′ and click OK.
And you’re back with the close button at the same position as before the latest upgrade! You can easily revert to the default Firefox 2.0 behaviour by changing the value back to 1.
Default:
After change of value:
Here are some other values you could use for that preference:
- 0 – Display a close button on the active tab only
- 1 – Display close buttons on all tabs (Default)
- 2 – Don’t display any close buttons
- 3 – Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)
browser.tabs.closeButtons values and explanations taken from MozillaZine Knowledge Base.
Firefox 2.0 released!
Posted by Benny Chew in Firefox, Open Source, Web on October 24th, 2006
Update: Now officially out with a restyled website as well!
Although not out officially via the main Mozilla Firefox site, it’s currently publicly available on the servers for you to download and get it installed!
If you’re interested in knowing the list of new features that comes with this version, check out this page.
Download here.
The latest version should be made available via the automatic software update function relatively soon.
Windows Live Messenger works again
Posted by Benny Chew in Web, Windows on October 19th, 2006
Since googling didn’t work the last time I tried to find a fix, I went through M$‘s Windows Live Messenger’s newsgroup earlier today and actually found a fix to the problem I had! Here’s the fix which worked for me (Credit to Jonathan Yaniv for the steps below):
- Go to Start, run, then type “regedit”
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies
- Delete the key “contacts.msn.com”
- Then, try launching Windows Live Messenger again.
Apparently the full uninstallation I did the last time did not remove any of the messenger registry keys (I forgot to check on that either).
I guess you could say this is probably one of the very few M$ software which I would gladly choose to use over other alternative software. :P Do try out the excellent Messenger Plus! Live extension if you’re already using WLM (adds heaps of features like tabbed chats, etc). Just remember to refuse the installation of the sponsor program unless you want adware/spyware installed on your machine. ;)
The reason why Google bought YouTube
Posted by Benny Chew in Humour, Web on October 11th, 2006
Here’s a picture which sums up all the lengthy articles on this matter. Courtesy of Google Trends.
via digg
Woke up this morning and…
Posted by Benny Chew in RSS, Web on October 8th, 2006
Google Reader’s (and Bloglines’s) looks gets updated!
Posted by Benny Chew in Reviews, RSS, Web on October 3rd, 2006
Most tech sites have covered on Google Reader‘s recent update to its user interface with mostly positive comments. As I have tried Google Reader previously and loathed it, it was probably the right time to check it out again to see if Google has made it better.
Since it has been a long time since I last used it, I exported my feeds from Bloglines to OPML format and subsequently imported it into Google Reader. No drama here as this process was flawless. There was a delay of a few minutes before all the imported feeds showed up with the recent items in the subscriptions list on the left.
Once everything was in place, the updated Google Reader proved to be pretty impressive. Compared to its predecessor, the interface is now a lot more usable (finally has a decent scrollbar and tree view) and in short, seemed like a AJAX-ified Bloglines. The ‘scroll tracking’ feature is rather intuitive as it would mark items as read when you scroll past them which is rather handy if you want to switch to other subscriptions (feeds) or tags (folders) and get back to it later (most other RSS readers would mark all items in a subscription as read the moment you open it). However, this feature doesn’t seem to work properly with subscriptions which only have 1 item which didn’t require any scrolling to read it (manually marking the item as read was required instead).
Besides that minor issue, I don’t have any other negatives to bring up. I would definitely take back the negative comments I made about it. ;) The latest update makes it very compelling to switch and its similarity to Gmail would make it a perfect candidate for those who already use Gmail and want to get started with using an RSS reader.
So while I was getting awed by the updated Google Reader, I noticed subtle user interface changes to the left pane of Bloglines. It was announced by the Bloglines team soon after I noticed it, and in my opinion, were excellent minor tweaks.
AJAX is now used in the left pane which makes it a lot snappier as the whole frame is longer refreshed. Very impressive for such a minor change as it definitely delivers a huge difference in responsiveness. Besides that, they have also reduced the time it automatically refreshes the feeds.
Since my last post on Bloglines, I’m happy to report it has not gone down at all and has been reliably delivering all the updates of my feeds. Kudos to the Bloglines team for the great work they’ve done!
MozSearch plugin
Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Tips & Tweaks, Web on September 30th, 2006
AsenDURE messaged me on MSN yesterday about having a search plugin for any site integrated into Firefox. After having a look at it, I gave it a shot and now this site has a search plugin which you can install into Firefox 2.0 and search directly from the search bar. ;)
Following the steps from here, your currently selected search plugin (by default Google) would glow blue when it automatically detects a search plugin. And the following screenshots on how to add and use it are rather self explanatory.
Adding it:
Using it:
There should be a 16×16 icon image for it, but I don’t have one for it now though. ;)
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