Archive for November, 2005
· November 30, 2005 at 1:45 pm · Odds & Ends
I am truly excited about the newest PlayStation Portable update. I think Russell Beattie’s reaction is the closest to my own as well. Sure, it didn’t include Flash or any other browser improvements I would have liked to have seen.
The RSS Channel is amazing though. It cuts the middle man right out, as long as you are in range or a wireless network. Apple Who?! Now all Sony has to is make me feel like I’m not carrying a brick around in my pants when I use it as an MP3 player.
I wish I had the new Yahoo! Mail beta, but I guess I’m just not cool enough for the folks at Yahoo. I hope they improve the RSS reader before the public launch. Right now it sounds like they are off to a good start, but not anywhere close as far as replacing my RSS catcher of choice, FeedDemon.
Firefox 1.5 looks and feels great. Nuff said there.
· November 30, 2005 at 11:00 am · Odds & Ends
Don’t you hate it when a Web site leaves you only a tiny little box to type in your comments, suggestions or feedback? Sometimes you need a little more room to put your thoughts down, but the Web site creator doesn’t realize this at the moment that you need it. Thankfully, like with most problems Online, there is a Firefox extension that will solve the problem.
Here is what the author has to say about the Resizeable Text Area extension:
A lot of forums and boards provide very small text areas for new postings. If you type a longer posting, you have to scroll up and down, to read, what you have wrote and to proceed. This situation is annoying.
I couldn’t agree with him more. I want my Online experience to be more comfortable. You can drag your text box to the left or to the right. You can drag your text box up or you could drag it down.
This is all about giving you more room to put in your thoughts. Think of this extension as the elastic in your favorite pair of underwear. No mater what size you grow to or shrink to, it fits around all your needs.
It might not solve world hunger or be the most popular extension at the homecoming dance, but it is one of the best I have found in a long time. This is one of those extensions that you don’t realize how many times you will use it, till you have it installed on your version of Firefox. So give it a shot, and make sure you have plenty of typing room for your next text submission to this lovely think we call the Internet.
· November 30, 2005 at 10:00 am · Odds & Ends
I’ve been thinking about releasing a series of podcasts for the Web Hosting Show, each one by one but once all 4 or 5 are done, they will all be related. For example lets say I picked the topics “domain names”. I could have one podcast about how to pick a good name. I could have another podcast about the top five domain name registers. I could do another about the domain name extensions (.com, .org, ect..).
So what do you think? If you are a Web host, would these series make you more willing to share knowledge of the show with your customers? (In the case that I wouldn’t give shopping tips, but more information and definition.)
· November 29, 2005 at 1:41 pm · Odds & Ends
I agree with Nick about the full/partial feed debate! I actually like getting partial feeds because it makes scanning RSS a heck of a lot easier. As I have said before as well, I don’t want full feeds because I don’t read every single news story that comes across FeedDemon. Instead, I scan paragraphs instead of articles, and pick out the ones I want to read.
It is rare these days that I find good and original content out there. Well, one dry spell is over I guess you could say because I found subnixus.com a few weeks ago. It is one of the better blogs out there today. What is discussed? The guy running the Web site talks about making a living off of all his Web sites. Yeah, I do the same thing but it sounds like he’s a little better at it than me.
Well I do think I am on the verge of updating my PSP again. I’m not sure what the long list is when it comes to the new firmware 2.6 version is, as far as features go. One thing did catch my eye so far. I am interested in seeing how RSS plays into the new version. Read about it here and here. If there is anything life changing involved, I’ll be sure to let you know.
[UPDATE] Listen to the Web Hosting Show via the PSP’s new RSS channel!
· November 29, 2005 at 1:38 pm · Odds & Ends
What is a guy to do when his DSL line starts to get a little flakey? Well sure, I could go outside, learn a new language or find a cure to the common cold. The bad news is, I didn’t do any of those. The good news is, I gathered a collection of the Firefox search plugins I’ve written, zipped them up and got them ready for other folks to use.
Download my Firefox search plugins from here:
Lockergnome Firefox Search Plugin
Mitchelaneous Firefox Search Plugin
The Web Hosting Show Firefox Search Plugin
To install, all you need to do is unzip the .zip files and dump the .gif and .src files into Firefox’s search plugin folder. (This folder is usually found at C:\\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\) After that, just restart Firefox and you should be good to go.
I’ll probably leave these as they are for now because I really just quickly wrote them for myself so I could reference material from these Web sites. I just thought I’d make ‘em public just in case anybody else wanted to use them. Any questions? Shoot them over to me at mitch@mitchkeeler.com.
· November 29, 2005 at 11:00 am · Odds & Ends
When you spend much of your Online life in notepad writing your little heart out, you tend to copy and paste a lot. You want to get quotes. You want to get information. You might even want to save a block of text to read later. With the citation extension for Firefox, you can do all of that and more.
Here is what the folks working on the extension have to say about it:
The Citations project is a simple extension that allows the user to select a text in a Web page and put it in a special bookmark file. Citations are stored in a RDF file and can be browsed in a HTML view.
It is easy enough to use. All you need to do is highlight the text you want to save, then select “Save citation”. After that, fill in an author link if you want, then hit save.
Managing your citations is just as easy. All you need to do is right click and select “Mange citations”. After that a window should come up with all your citations in a neat table for you to view. From there you can either navigate back to the Web site where you found the quote or you can delete the quote from the citation manager.
Now the extension itself could save to a prettier back end, but that will probably come in a future release. Other than that, I see no reason at all why the Citations project should not be installed. It adds loads of functionality to everybody’s favorite browser, and it is totally free to use.
Next Page »
