With the upcoming release of Google Caffeine and the importance it will place on page load time when it ranks results, now is as good a time as any to learn about optimizing your site. This recent blog post by kangax is a great primer for getting rid of common, unnecessary bloat.
Archive for the ‘web’ Category
For Halloween this year I decided to go full nerd and create a jQuery pumpkin. I’m sure no one else understood what it was, but it was unique!
This script was born out of a simple problem: I wanted to find out which movies have been released to theaters or DVD lately, and add them to my Netflix queue. Unfortunately, Netflix doesn’t provide an easy way to browse "major" movie releases by release date. However, IMDB always has a nice interface for this. Further, I’ve found myself at IMDB before, looking at a movie that I would like to add to my Netflix queue, but I had to go to Netflix, search, find the movie, then add it.
Solution? A new GreaseMonkey script!: Netflix Links on IMDB
I created this simple GreaseMonkey script, which adds a little red "+" next to movie titles on imdb.com. Clicking the image pops up a new window that searches on the movie name, usually finding the movie you want as the first match.
Easy! Hope it helps!
This is just a fun little site to highlight some of the obnoxious habits of Facebook users.
I’m sure we have done or currently do some of these things. Don’t be ashamed. Just stop. 
This is an old issue, but I never looked into it in enough detail to solve it until now.
When using slideUp() and slideDown() in jQuery (and any other animations that animate height) there is often a “flash of content” when the animation starts or stops in IE.
Here are the details you might want to know:
- IE 6/7 mishandles a style like “overflow:hidden;height:0px;” (which should show nothing) and instead show the entire contents of the object. But ONLY in quirks mode. This is a bug.
- When doing a hide animation, jQuery animates to 0, and when doing show, it starts at 0
- So when the value of 0 is set inside the animation, the entire content is flashed visibly on the screen, this causing annoyance and potential epileptic seizures.
A ticket was filed with jQuery 2 years ago about this issue: http://dev.jquery.com/ticket/1726
Unfortunately, they changed it to “wontfix” and instead declared that FX animations are not supported in IE6/7 in quirksmode. I consider this to be pretty lazy on the part of the developers, and I’ve seen this attitude several times with regards to problems that are not so obviously solved or outlying cases. It’s disappointing.
I started a thread in the jQuery Dev group about this, so we’ll see if anything comes of it.
Meanwhile, inserting this fix into the page solves the problem:
jQuery.fx.prototype.originalCustom = jQuery.fx.prototype.custom;
jQuery.fx.prototype.custom = function(from,to,unit) {
if (this.prop==’height’) {
to = to || 1;
from = from || 1;
}
this.originalCustom(from,to,unit);
}
It’s simple – when the to or from value in the animation is 0, and we’re animating ‘height’, then just go to/from 1 instead. Problem solved.
Hope that helps out at some point in the future when your content is flashing and you can’t figure out why…
The Mozilla add-ons site has been re-designed, and we finally get the ability to group add-ons together into Collections, which can be installed all at once. Share all your add-ons with others, or make your own Collection to easily install your tools to new instances of the browser.
Now if they would only add automatic sync with my add-ons and settings.
By the way, if you aren’t using FEBE, you should. I have it back up all my Firefox settings nightly to box.net, so if my computer ever crashes I can quickly and easily get everything back. These days, a ton of my stuff is actually stored in the browser, so losing it is quite a hassle.
Two new kind of search engines debuted recently, in the increasingly-crowded space of companies trying to search, organize, and present relevant information from the mess of bits on the interwebs.
WolframAlpha is a "computational knowledge engine" rather than a general search engine. It doesn’t just aggregate url’s and match keywords. Instead, it seeks to find relevant answers to real questions using its internal collection of equations, facts, comparisons, and figures. If you put in "weather NYC" it doesn’t just find pages that have those words and show them to you, hoping those pages contain what you are looking for. It understands that you are looking for weather information about New York, and offers you a view of the actual data rather than pages that contain it.
Where Google might be equivalent to asking a librarian "which books contain information about weather, specifically about New York?", WolframAlpha is more like asking a weatherman from New York what the weather is like there. Big difference.
Topsy.com is a search engine trying to capitalize on the popularity of Twitter. Instead of scouring the web for all web pages it can find and indexing the words on each page, it "listens" to all tweets on Twitter and pulls out the keywords and url’s posted with them. It associates the words with the url and aggregates the results.
Searching Topsy for "weather nyc" gives you back nothing useful. But that’s because it’s not meant for that. Instead, Topsy is a view into pop culture and the stream of public consciousness. Searching Topsy for "obama" won’t give you a summary of the President’s actions or all the important news of the day. It will give you a view into what url’s people think are interesting and related to Obama right now. It will also show you who is mentioning the search terms, how many there are, etc. This is a great way to monitor a brand, a current event or issue, or a technology. These things will be tweeted about often, and the way Topsy aggregates the information and presents it can be very interesting.
I finally updated my jQuery Cheat Sheet to match jQuery 1.3.2. I hope people find it useful!
I’ve officially started tweeting (username – @matt_kruse) if for no other reason than to stay current with web trends and pop culture. I also created a short presentation that I will use to introduce some others to the joy that is Twitter.
So, is Twitter useful? I don’t know yet. Search seems interesting. But I’m not sure I have much interest in following users and seeing what they are eating for breakfast. From a purely technical perspective, I’m currently using TweetDeck to follow #js OR javascript, jquery, and igoogle. It’s interesting, and I’ve replied to a few people to answer questions and get a feel for how this all works. I’ll have to wait and see if and how I continue to use Twitter as time goes on…
Like many Firefox users, I have a number of add-ons installed that customize the browser and make my work/browsing easier. Since these are very useful to me, I thought I would share my list in case anyone is interested in trying them out.
I’ve used an add-on called "Extension List Dumper" that makes it simple to dump a list of all installed add-ons. Enjoy.
- Adblock Plus 1.0.1
http://adblockplus.org/
Firefox 2.0 – 3.6a1pre
Ads were yesterday! - Better Gmail 2 0.7.3.2
http://ginatrapani.org/workshop/firefox/bettergmail2/
Firefox 0.8 – 3.1b3
Enhances Gmail with a compilation of useful features written by Greasemonkey user script developers. All scripts copyright their original authors. Click on the script homepage in the Help tab for more information. - ColorZilla 2.0.2
http://www.colorzilla.com/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.1b3
Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies - Custom Download Manager 1.6c
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/6945
Firefox 3.0 – 3.1a1
This addon allows you to personalize the Download Manager - CustomizeGoogle 0.76
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
Firefox 1.0 – 3.6a1pre
Enhance Google search results and remove ads and spam. - Extension List Dumper 1.14.1
http://sogame.awardspace.com/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.1b2
Dumps a list of the installed extensions. - Favicon Picker 3 0.5
Firefox 3.0 – 3.6a1pre
Replace bookmark icons from the bookmark properties dialog. - FEBE 6.1
http://customsoftwareconsult.com/extensions
Firefox 3.0b1 – 3.1b3
Backup your Firefox data - Firebug 1.3.3
http://www.getfirebug.com/
Firefox 3.0 – 3.0.*
Web Development Evolved. - FireShot 0.69
http://screenshot-program.com/fireshot/
Firefox 2.0 – 3.6a1pre
Adds the ability to take a screenshot of the page entirely, edit it and save in (JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP), print, copy to clipboard, send to external editor or e-mail it. Additional annotation tools (text, freeform drawing, highlights) provide quick and easy way of documenting of captures. - Fission 1.0.3
http://mozilla.zeniko.ch/fission.html
Firefox 3.0 – 3.5b4pre
Progress bar in the address bar (Safari style). - Flashblock 1.5.9
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.6a1pre
Replaces Flash objects with a button you can click to view them. - Google Gears 0.5.4.2
http://gears.google.com/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.0.*
These are the gears that power the tubes! - Greasefire 1.0.3
http://skrul.com/blog/projects/greasefire
Firefox 3.0 – 3.1b3pre
Automatically find Greasemonkey scripts on Userscripts.org - Greasemonkey 0.8.20090123.1
http://www.greasespot.net/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.1b3
A User Script Manager for Firefox - IE Tab 1.5.20090207
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/1419
Firefox 3.0 – 3.6a1pre
Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Mozilla/Firefox. - Open in Browser 1.4
http://www.spasche.net/mozilla/
Firefox 3.0 – 3.0.*
Offers the possibility to display documents in browser window. - OpenDownload 1.0.0
http://mozmonkey.com/
Firefox 1.0 – 3.0.*
Allows you to open any file from the internet into the OS assigned program. - Pixlr 1.2
http://www.pixlr.com/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.6a1pre
Edit screen capures and images in Pixlr Image Editor or Pixlr Photo Express. No need for an offline image editor. - Stylish 0.5.9
http://userstyles.org/stylish/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.5b4pre
Customize the look of websites and of the user interface. - Tabs Open Relative 0.3.3
http://jomel.me.uk/software/firefox/tabsopenrelative/
Firefox 1.5 – 3.1a1pre
Tabs open to the right of the current one. - Textarea Cache 0.5.4
http://hemiolapei.free.fr/extensions/index.php/textarea-cache
Firefox 3.0 – 3.5b4pre
Allows to save automatically the content in a text input field. - TryAgain 3.2.0
http://mathijs.jurresip.nl/tryagain-extension/
Firefox 3.0 – 3.0.*
Will keep trying to load a webpage when the server is not found. - URL Fixer 1.5
http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/url-fixer/
Firefox 2.0 – 3.5b4pre
Fixes common misspellings in URLs entered in the address bar.