Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Greasemonkey extension for Firefox

Extensions for Firefox are great. There are so many of them, that sometimes good ones hide and pass unnoticed. Greasemonkey received a lot of publicity, but still some people don’t know about it. Greasemonkey allows for insstallation and usage of numerous user scripts that fix problems with famous sites and make certain sites more usable. For example, there are scripts to remove all sorts of advertisements from feeds displayed by Bloglines, make Delicious and Slashdot look better, or add some aggrigated information to IMDb pages. The best thing is that there is no need to restart the browser between installations and removals of these user scripts.

Try it! It probably fixes annoyances that you are complaining about on a daily basis.

akregator RSS/Atom feed reader

While Bloglines is a wonderful service with all bells and whistles, it is not a panacea. For example, it can’t help me with internal company feeds (like development wiki RSS feed), which aren’t open to the general public.

In situations like this, a standalone RSS/Atom feed reader is of great help. KDE provided NewsTicker, which could use RSS and Atom feeds, but the display of new items is terrible. The scrolling thing just doesn’t work. In the latest release of KDE (3.4) a proper RSS/Atom reader was integrated – amarok. It is a really nice application, which integrates beautifully with KDE.

The problem is that KDE 3.4 will be a part of Fedora Linux Core 4, which is not released yet. For those of us, who are using Fedora Linux Core 3, a ready made RPM package is available.

Konqueror and BlogLines

My Firefox gave up on me today after I played a bit with its settings once again. I am still hoping that it will return from the NoGo land without the reset of the profile. In the meanwhile, I fired up Konqueror and decided to use it for a while. It has matured a lot since the last time I used it for web browsing and I can even say that it can handle most of the sites that I use correctly.

The most annoying problem so far is with Bloglines. Clicking on items in the left panel does not work at all. The only way to read new stuff is by clicking on the folders which is way too far from convenient. I have over 500 new items in some folders and loading them all at once doesn’t do me any good.

I’ve googled for the solution for a bit, but didn’t find anything. If you know by any chance how to overcome the issue, please let me know. If I will find the solution myself, I will update this node to include it.

P.S.: I am using Konqueror 3.3.1 from the Fedora Linux Core 3 installation.

More WordPress goodies

I came across this excellent resource with a bunch of WordPress plugins. It doesn’t display very well in my Firefox, with titles being written in green over the green background, but if you can get over that, it has a lot to offer. For example, I’ve immediately downloaded and installed two plugins:

  • BAStats. It provides a nice way to see site statistics in a Dashboard tab. Browsers, referrers, hosts, requests, search strings and all the usual bits can be displayed over a selected period of time.
  • Comment Quicktags. This one provides buttons that help in editing comments. Making text bold or italic, linking to URLs, striking through words and blockquoting paragraphs can’t be any easier now.

And there are a few others that I am looking at and thinking if I need them or not and if I should try them on or or not.