moeffju.net

Snap Preview Everywhere!

11 Jan, 07

Are Snap.com actually paying people a lot of money, or why would wordpress.com think it’s a good idea to enable Snap Preview Anywhere on all wordpress.com blogs?

I drink many beers

11 Jan, 07

Everyone drink many beers.

Habari

10 Jan, 07

Habari is a new blogging platform being developed by a number of well known people, some of which are fed up with open source, others just looking for new challenges.

The thing about Habari is that is starts from scratch, and today. That means it doesn’t have to worry about a lot of existing legacy code and thus, downward compatibility. It is also being designed from the grounds up, using the latest available technology. Heck, it’s full OOP! It abstracts database access! You can plug in different theme engines (and, of course, there are plugins). In short, it could easily be the greatest thing since pressed words.

I wrote my first patches against Habari trunk today, one fixing a locale bug and making basic i18n work, the other mostly style changes. How could I resist joining the development frenzy!

Find me in the habari-dev group and on the Habari IRC channel, #habari on irc.freenode.net.

Disable Snap Previews

09 Jan, 07

Recently, Snap Previews Anywhere (by Snap.com) have been proliferating wildly. Some people only experimented with them for a short time, then disabled them again; others are still using them.

I personally find them annoying as hell. They:

• break the user flow, since they just pop up right in the middle and they can’t be anticipated (unlike e.g. intellitxt, where the huge green border is a good hint);
• get in the way, if you accidentally hovered over a link and the bubble pops up over text you were reading;
• block clicks, sometimes even on the very link they triggered on (this doesn’t happen consistenly, but often enough to be annoying);
• don’t add value, or am I just not seeing how previews of the site behind a link somehow improve my browsing experience? (Of course, this is highly subjective.)

Luckily, you can disable Snap Previews Anywhere rather easily - if you know where to look. You can either click the question mark button and search through the FAQ, or just follow this link to disable Snap Previews Anywhere, anywhere. You must accept and keep cookies for that page to work.

Now, I don’t want to be only complaining. A very simple way of making Snap Previews behave would be to a) add a little marker to snappified links, maybe a smaller version of the bubble graphic; and b) only trigger when the user hovers over the marker, maybe even add a small delay. This way, it doesn’t disturb people who just coincidentally hover over a link, it’s visible, and still easily accessible.

[lang_en]Firefox Extension wanted[/lang_en][lang_de]Firefox-Extension gesucht[/lang_de]

06 Jan, 07

[lang_en] [/lang_en] [lang_de] [/lang_de] I’m looking for a Firefox extension that marks the boundaries of the previous viewport after scrolling, e.g. in most cases, a horizontal bar that, when you scroll down, signals where the bottom of the previously visible screen was.

Does something like that exist, or does anyone have an idea how that could be achieved using only JavaScript? I would be willing to create an extension or userscript but … nevermind, I just thought of something. Stay tuned.

Update: It is done. Enter Reader Bar 0.2, available in userscript and bookmarklet flavours.

Nicht verstanden, setzen, Sechs

06 Jan, 07

Die FDP macht jetzt auch “Internetvideos”. Unter tv-liberal.de kann man einem sekundenlangen Intro lauschen, verregnete Fensterscheiben betrachten, und dann Guido Westerwelle dabei zusehen, wie er steif einen Text abliest. Um das ganze dann etwas aufzulockern, werden wahllose Kamera”fahrten”, Perspektivwechsel, und als Höhepunkt ein Splitscreen-Effekt eingebaut.

Habe Post, suche Anwalt

02 Jan, 07

In eigener Sache: Ich suche einen Anwalt, der sich im momentanen Dschungel des deutschen Online-Rechts auskennt. Es geht dabei um userscripts.org, es wäre also schön, wenn Konzepte wie clientseitige Scripts bekannt wären ;), ansonsten evtl. um §826 BGB, das Urheber- und Markenrecht.

Ideen bitte in den Kommentaren oder per Kontaktformular.

Long titles for Firefox

15 Dec, 06

Mozillan browsers (SeaMonkey, Firefox, Flock, …) cut off tooltips after 80 chars, including tooltips from HTML TITLE attributes: bug 45375, bug 218223.

After the bug has been open for six and a half years (opened 2000-07-13), it has finally been resolved - on the Seamonkey trunk, which means the change will not make it into the popular browser before version 3.0.

Long Titles (amo, home page) is an extension for Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape that fixes this annoying behaviour. It prevents tooltips from being cut off, and also enables line breaks within TITLE attributes.

Another little step on making Firefox more useful…

TWAINgle

15 Dec, 06

Twaingle is a tool that allows you to search for images on flickr or yahoo and insert them directly into an application.

Where ‘application’ means ‘anything TWAIN-aware’. TWAINgle installs itself into the system (Windows XP only at the moment) as a TWAIN driver. Thus, all applications that have an option to “scan” images via TWAIN become web-enabled instantly. And how!

Do follow, please

14 Dec, 06

[lang_de] Dieses Blog ist seit jetzt wieder frei von rel="nofollow". Das nofollow-Attribut hat in meinen Augen nichts gebracht - der Linkspam hat nicht abgenommen, die Suchergebnisse wurden nicht merklich besser. Statt dessen wird auch den legitimen Links (in Posts oder Kommentaren) der Google-Juice(tm?) genommen.

Also, back to the (web)roots: Do follow! [/lang_de] [lang_en] This blog is once again free from rel="nofollow". The nofollow attribute hasn’t done any good as far as I can see - the link spam has, if anything, grown, search engine’s results haven’t become noticeably better. Instead, even legitimate links (in posts or comments) are stripped of their Google juice.

Thus, back to the (web) roots: Do follow! [/lang_en]