If you are one of those people who beleive that Atom/RSS aggregation should be a part of the browser, than try Sage. It is an extension for Firefox, which supports all the usual bells and whistles. Additionally, it supports scaling images to fit in to the window, the way Firefox does it. This post has a screenshot.
Tag: browsers
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.
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.
Distributed authentication
Today I realized that I am still not registered at Spread Firefox. That is a shock and shame. I immideately went there and got myself an account and a sweet looking button on the bottom of the right panel. I am now an official promoter of Mozilla Firefox. Although I had probably converted a billion times more people by just talking to them than by placing a button on this site, but anyway…
While creating an account, I read about distributed authentication. The “billion sites – billion accounts” problem is old with the web and there were several alternatives to solve it. Microsoft Passport was the most famous, but I think its as dead as Elvis these days. I’ve never heard of Drupel way of solving the problem, so I thought maybe I just post a link so you guys get the idea about it too.
In short: Drupel is an open source CMS, which among other things, supports communications between installed instances for username/password verification. So, basically, one person can get a single account at any Drupel-based website and than use this account to login to any other Druperl-based website. Sweet!
Luckily or unluckily (which is a total other question) not all sites are Drupel-based. That doesn’t mean that everyone else is out of the game. Since the system is open sourced, other sites can be made to suppor the protocol. The protocol is, by the way, XML-RPC, HTTP POST, or SOAP based as mentioned on one of the sites above.
Overall, I find it to be an excellent idea. Hopefully it will gain some weight in the near future, so that I could use a single account on most of the websites out there.
Promoting Mozilla Firefox
This site has a whole lot of original promotional graphics for Mozilla Firefox. You can find anything there – wallpapers, avatars, comics, banners, animated GIFs, buttons, etc. Pay attention to those little digits on the bottom of the listing pages – these are page switchers. Yes, many categories have several pages filled with images. These all are absolutely and totally amazing!