A web agency weblog

I’m always learning new things in the ultra-useful vi, just finished creating some abbreviations with iab (see :h abbreviation) following Tip #610.

One of the comments in the page includes some useful examples, I quote:

You simply iab your most common typographical misteaks with the correct spelung and Robert’s yer father’s brother.
eg
iab teh the
iab seperate separate
iab shit Microsoft

Gosh, haven’t thought about that last one.

A few days ago I mentioned how to capture long web pages with a neat Firefox extension, Screengrab. As I have Java always installed in my box I forgot to mention the extension needs Java, actually I didn’t even notice it.

Now that I upgraded from Fedora Core 4 to 5 and also moved to Firefox 2 RC1 the neat extension stopped work.

I fixed the problem unzipping Andy’s .xpi of the 0.8 version and changing these lines in install.rdf:

<em:version>0.8b</em>
<em:maxVersion>2.1</em>

You can grab the modified version, which I called 0.8b, here.

There are occasional crashes in some web pages but that also happened in the original 0.8 and I’m sure Andy will have it fixed by version 1.0.

This should work with other extensions as well, I’ll try with another of my favorites: the one for del.icio.us.

Update: Yep, it worked with del.icio.us too, here my version 1.1b.

I like Rojo, a very efficient web based feed reader. The Rojo guys have added many nice improvements to their user interface after the company was bought by SixApart, of Movable Type fame, a few weeks ago.

And of course I love the upcoming Firefox 2, already in release candidate 1 stage.

So it was disappointing not to find Rojo in the list of feed readers that Firefox supports. There comes the question: what’s a mozillorojoish guy’s got to do?

How To Add Rojo in Firefox With Just Three Lines

These steps are based on what Ben Goodger wrote some months ago in his Inside Firefox blog. Thanks Ben!

I assume you already have a Rojo account, you’ve logged in and you have Firefox 2 running.

• Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. You will see a list of preferences.
• Type browser.contentHandlers in the filter box and press Enter. Now you see a smaller list.
• Each preference is of the form: browser.contentHandlers.types.#.something where # is a number, which goes from 0 to 5 in my Firefox, and something is title, type or uri.
• You clever quick guy already got the pattern here and know what to do, good for you! For the rest of us let’s elaborate: you have to create an additional set of preferences, three additional lines. We will base our new lines in the 0 numbered lines and will use number 6.
• Right-click on the first line, browser.contentHandlers.types.0.title and select Copy Name.
• Right-click, select New, String, paste the name you copied and change the number from 0 to 6, or another corresponding number if you have more than five sets of lines.
• Enter the name of the feed reader you are adding, in our case: Rojo. You won’t see your new line automatically in the list, just press Enter in the filter box on top if you need to.
• Create a new instance of the second line, browser.contentHandlers.types.0.type, following the same procedure and also changing 0 to 6. You can also right-click and copy the value here, application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed, for that won’t change.
• Create the third line based on browser.contentHandlers.types.0.uri and use the following value for Rojo: http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription/?resource=%s. I got it from the bookmarklet, you can find a similar url for any other feed reader. Use %s as a placeholder for the feed url.
• Restart Firefox and you are set!

Too Many Clicks?

Ok, just open your prefs.js file (in my Fedora box I found it at /home/my-user-name/.mozilla/firefox/uk3kd43k.default/prefs.js) and add these lines:


user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.title", “Rojo");
user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.type", “application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed");
user_pref("browser.contentHandlers.types.6.uri", “http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription/?resource=%s");


Set your default feed reader the first time you subscribe to any feed or using the feeds tab in Firefox’s preferences menu.

Now you can click on any feed link, including the icon appearing in the address bar, and you are already set. One click subscription to any feed.

Ready?, why not testing it here?

Text Link Ads (aff), my favorite broker for selling and buying text links, just launched Feedvertising, a service for including text advertisements in your feeds.

It’s working just with Wordpress based sites for now but Patrick Gavin and company have already promised many other platforms being supported soon. There are many guys asking for Drupal already, I’m one of those.

I guess Feedvertising will work better for those offering full articles instead of teasers in their feeds, one more reason for offering full content to your subscribers.

I’ll let you know how it works for me when I have them working for a while in my sites.

My first web site that appears at CSS Mania. In less than twenty minutes has already received 500 hits from the gallery.

I was wondering about a way to track the comments I post in many blogs and sites. There are interesting conversations going on and most current feed readers aren’t enough to keep updated with what others are saying.

Bart was kind enough to point me to cocomment (that’s the name, I’m not stammering), a nice service that makes life easier for commenters and bloggers alike.

Commenters just have to install a Firefox extension and a small bar will appear at the bottom of the text area where they write their comments. cocomment works with Internet Explorer using a bookmarklet but I didn’t test it, who needs that browser anyway?

Once you post a comment, it’s tracked by cocomment. There’s a little icon at the status bar of your browser that alerts you whenever somebody adds a new comment to the discussions you are following. It’s small and non distractive but even so you have to keep yourself under control. Highly commented posts could consume your whole day if you try to read them too often.

Clicking the cocomment icon takes you to the cocomment site and there you’ll find a simple but usable table with the latest comments from the posts you’re tracking.

Everything is quite simple to use.

And bloggers don’t need to worry, most blogging systems are supported by cocomment. If yours is not, integration consists of playing with a few lines of Javascript and the code of your content management system or blog platform.

I spent a few minutes with my Drupal templates before finding out that Olav had already written a cocomment module. Great work, thanks dude. A couple of clicks later and both mumobo and Telework People were cocomment-enabled.

cocomment’s Firefox extension also installed a bookmarklet where you can enable tracking of a discussion even if you are not commenting. A good idea for blog-voyeurs.

So, pay a visit to cocomment, it can save some minutes a day and help you find lots of interesting discussions where you can waste your whole day once again. Nothing is perfect, uh?

Reading some posts at the improved Rojo, I promise to write about it this week, I was thinking: “boy, how nice being able to read my favorite pieces of content from just one simple interface.”

Then the what if appeared. What if we could have the ability to comment in every blog or website without visiting it? Imagine a universal method for comments. Something like RSS is becoming for easily reading your favorite sites.

I resisted the temptation to google this before posting, maybe there’s somebody already working in some kind of reverse-syndication system and I’m just another silly guy with a dumb idea. It doesn’t matter, there are millions of us already.

Ideally feed reader and comment writer should work under the same user interface. Going one step forward we could ask for having our content management systems or blog tools integrated with these features. Imagine writing your content, reading feeds and posting comments from one single location.

In fact, we already have the writing and commenting part, we call it a trackback.

There is, of course, the big problem of spammers using a commenting tool like this, but I think captcha-like or validation features would help.

We already have the technologies for such a platform, would it work? What ya think?

There are many occasions when you need to take a snapshot of a web page, maybe one of yours to include in your portfolio or other’s when commenting on design, usability or maybe writing a book or tutorial.

Windows users are used to pressing the print screen key and then pasting into their favorite graphics application. There are also some commercial applications available for this apparently easy task.

I’ve been using using KSnapshot under Fedora Linux for a few years and was enough for most of my needs.

But there are times when you need a snapshot of a complete web page, including parts below the fold, parts that aren’t in your browser’s viewport. What’s a clever guy got to do?

Vertically scrolling, taking two or more snapshots and putting them together in your graphics application is the obvious solution but takes a little more time and soon becomes tiresome, specially when many snapshots are needed.

Some commercial applications include the feature but come on! there are smart and free solutions for almost everything.

I was thinking about that when I found ScreenGrab!, a neat Firefox extension. ScreenGrab is the solution for the long web pages snapshot problem and, as every Firefox extension, can be installed with just a click and a restart. Then you just have to visit a web page and right click to capture it.

ScreenGrab offers three options for capturing a web page: document, viewport and window.

Choose document is you want the complete web page saved as an image, including parts below the fold. Viewport captures just what’s visible and window includes your browser in the picture. The images are saved in PNG format.

Here’s a capture I just made from my music, movies and books reviews site. The image was later scaled with Gimp. Nice, uh?

Ready to launch, a new Drupal based site, mumobo is here. It’s a place for writing about the books I read, the movies I watch and the music I listen.

It’s a project I’m quite fond of, includes my most complete PHPTemplate to date and my first fixed 1024 x 768 layout.

Completely developed with open source tools: Freemind for IA, Inkscape and Gimp for design, vi for editing and, of course, Drupal for content management.

It’s all Drupal 4.7. I started working with HEAD first (pre 4.8) but then decided to go with the stable 4.7, many modules and some details were not working yet a couple of months ago.

I wanted to create an easy to use and different, kinda retro, design this time, but my focus is on content, writing with a very personal voice and sharing my comments about the stuff that fills most of my days.

Writing the articles took almost as many hours as design and programming, but I think it was worth the effort. Now I plan to add fresh content on a weekly basis.

What do you think?

Take a look at mumobo and publish some comments, would you?

My list of 5 blogs in this Blogday:

• The Truth about Islam published just a few posts but they are still an interesting reading.
• The No God Blog includes well written articles for clever atheists, and theists too.
• Clientcopia. Can’t live without them, can’t live with them. Wait. I could try living without them! At least without the ones this site mentions.
• The Long Tail. If you were living in a Hussein-style cave for some months then you should read Anderson’s blog to get back on track.
• Change This. Well thought manifestos. Worth taking the time to read many of them.