Playing With Sharp Objects

Firefox 1.5 came out a few days ago. All the extensions I use had compatible versions ready to go: Adblock, ForecastFox, Google Toolbar, del.icio.us, Roboform, Download Statusbar, Yahoo Mail notifier, and Google Mail notifier. My beef with having a lot of extensions is that your browser often becomes cluttered with a lot of task bars, and I like my screen real estate. However, I noticed that a lot of extensions are now taking advantage of the toolbar customization, allowing you to take their toolbar components apart. In the screens below you can see portions of my browser that indicate the places where I’ve tucked toolbar components to keep the original browser layout.

Del.icio.us and Google PageRank next to each other by the navigation buttons. Notice that I use small icons and no text for economy of space.

That’s a Google “Search on Page” area next to the page load animation circle, above the Google search box. Note the highlighter button, letting you search through a page for individual query matches.

At the bottom right corner of the status bar are my mail notifiers. Lots of mail from the Rails mailing list in Google Mail, I see. The download statusbar doesn’t show if nothing has been downloaded.

ForecastFox is right next to Adblock. Adblock is THE one extension I can’t live without. Taking out giant banner ads is a big thing for me, but text ads are no big deal. As you can see, ForecastFox says we’re about to get socked with 5-8 inches of snow here in NJ.

Myk Melez has added a revolutionary idea to email client Thunderbird: tabs. Those of us familiar with Mozilla and Firefox tabbed browsing know that managing windows through tabs makes things really efficient. That’s what the taskbar in Windows is all about, but anyone doing any real work on a system knows that the taskbar fills up fast. That’s why on WinXP we have collapsing trays and similar windows grouped together, but things still get lost.

Taking a hint from Firefox 1.5, this is making use of the Mini-T extension features that were available separately for Firefox 1.0, which includes tab rearranging.

However, this feature is not likely to be seen an the upcoming Thunderbird 1.5 release. There have been quite a few Moz/FF patchings due to cross-tab vulnerabilities in the past. Since we are potentially involving SPAM/phishing/viruses in these panes, it should be banged on really hard before it is ready for primetime. Revolutionary, but definitely not trivial. Thanks Myk.

By the way if you aren’t on Firefox 1.5 yet, give it whirl right now. I was able to update my extensions and move right to it from 1.0. I have a link on the sidebar on the right that takes you right to where you can download Firefix 1.5.

UPDATE: Project has stalled!

37Signals reports that the Washington Post has launched a service that lets you keep track of your Congressperson’s voting record through your RSS reader. I live in NJ so I’ve added Representative Mike Ferguson (R), Senator Jon Corzine (D), and Senator Frank Lautenberg. It certainly makes it easier to see what these fellows are up to.

This is the new server, better than the old server. I’ve moved off the old PHP-Nuke system because of the constant security issues associated with it. Now I’m on Typo. Read on for details…

UPDATE: If the razure theme broke after upgrading to Rails 1.1 or using the trunk version of typo after the 9xx versions,

change

<%= render_component(:controller => ‘sidebars/sidebar’,
:action => ‘display_plugins’ %>

to

<%= render_sidebars %>

Every week I read the @RISK Consensus Security Vulnerability Alert newsletter for issues with any software that I use. PHP-Nuke and its branch projects constantly shows up on the list. With most software I use, finding something on that list usually means a patch would be posted within the next day or two. With PHP-Nuke, unfortunately, this is not the case - patches are left up to other sites like NukeFixes.com which has not seen a patch released since July 28, 2005. This is in combination with the fact that PHP-Nuke is not a free product - the current maintained release is $10 each time a new one is released. Any older releases are free, but unmaintained. The author of PHP-Nuke is notorious for not accepting patches into the main tree of the project, so this makes using the system more of an admin project than a publishing project.

No longer wanting to deal with any of this, I began the hunt for a new CMS. I’ve looked a Drupal, which was a close match because of its flexibility and its compatibility with the Gallery2 setup I wanted to use. It was around that time that I saw articles posted on Slashdot about Ruby on Rails. Seeing the demo for the Rails system, I was amazed at how easy it might be to do development on such a structured platform. It turns out that a CMS
has already been written for this. Enter Typo, a very modular system based on Rails. At first I was very intimidated by the strange nature of Ruby’s controller-model-view method, but it works so tightly with mySQL and Apache that it was worth a look. The result is the web site you see before you, complete with my own custom theme (Razure) featured on Typo Garden, and my own Amazon Sidebar module.

Among other things, it works well with a number of RSS based services, and lets me use tagging, rather than plain categorization, for articles. With Typo’s page caching, performance is fantastic compared to my old Nuke setup. Updates to the server are done through Ruby’s gems system, and through the subversion repository for typo - lots of nice automation there. I feel that this new system will let me concentrate more on the content and less on the admin side of the site. More to come…