Mar
28
For a while now I’ve been on about microformats and how useful they can be. What was lacking up to now is the TOOLS to make them useful! Here is a handy-dandy one. So Paul and Victoire, I guess you’ll be installing it soon? You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4106/
Introducing Operator! The mother of all tools. Operator is a Firefox/Flock extension that will recognize the following microformats on a page and enable you to do something worthwhile with them:
I’ll be going into more detail on each item later.
What it does:
It parses the web page you are on and if it finds any of the above microformats, it will highlight the relevant toolbar button and offer you something you can do with it.
For example:
If you have Technorati tags on your page, it will highlight the Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati buttons. If you click on one of these buttons it will drop down with all the tag words it found. If you are in say the del.icio.us button and you click on one of the tag words, it will search del.icio.us for the selected tag word. Same for Flickr and Technorati.
Another GREAT feature is that if it find an hCalendar event, you can click the Google Calendar button and stick the event straight into your Google Calendar.
Or if it finds a hCard on the site, you can click the Export Contact button and it will save the contact in your Outlook Address book if you use Outlook! Nifty (as Mike would say!).
It is still early days for this extension, but it is sure to grow in popularity and extend as time goes by! So all we need to do is to start implementing damn microformats!
technorati tags:microformats, semanticweb, firefox, flock, operator, extensions
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Flocking, Semantic Web, firefox, flock Stii
Dec
07
Just found this great Firefox theme! Thanks to TAP!
Go make your foxy say xmas-bling and get this theme here!
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Funnies, browsers, firefox Stii
Nov
14
If you are a web developer/designer you will at some point in time run into some browser differences. The site might look fine in Opera and Firefox, but in good old IE something is clearly wrong… There is always something! Yes, it irretates everybody and that aside, its not really why I hate IE.
I hate IE due to the fact that everybody that has a computer with Windows on it, never even had a choice if they want it or not. Their computers is infected with IE as soon as they install Windows. I’m not saying that its wrong to install a browser by default. Hell, if you install Linux, you get a choice of 4 or 5 browsers! And THAT folks, is my point. At least give Windows users a choice!
The problem is (and specially in South Africa where the internet is still fairly new) home users do not know better. They do not know of Firefox or Flock or Opera. They know only of IE and as far as they are concerned, there is only 1 browser. We spend lots and lots of time just telling our clients of other options and even hand it out on cd’s when we’ve developed a site for them.
Apparently, IE7 is quite an improvement on IE6. It supports tabbed browsing, add-ons, better security than IE6 and apparently they’ve fixed some of the quirks that used to be in version 6. Thing is if everybody needs to download it (i.o.w. it didn’t infest the user’s computer when Windows was installed), it will not get that much support. Then again, I’m sure Microsoft will find a way for IE7 to install itself on IE6 users computers. And wait for the release of Windows Vista! Guess what the only browser option will be on there!
Another point is one characteristic of spyware is that it does not give you an uninstall option. Guess what the one thing is that you cannot uninstall on Windows? You can remove the shortcuts from your desktop and start menu, but you can not uninstall it. Actually I’m sure you can by hacking the registry, but thats not for everybody.
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browsers, firefox Stii
Nov
10
What is RSS? What can I do with it? These were my 2 first questions when I head about it! Lets look at it.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”.
Lets first look at an example of RSS in use. Lets say you have a web site and you publish lots of news on a very regular basis. In the “old” days ( I say old, which is actually the days before you heard of RSS!), a visitor to your web site would have to revisit your site every single time he wants to see whats new(s) on your web site. On the technical side, if somebody liked the articles you have on your web site and would like to publish your articles on their site, he first needed to contact you and make arrangements and some special development on his site to get your news on his site, or even worse, he would have to copy-and-paste your articles physically into his site!
Then you heard of RSS and decided to create a RSS Feed of your latest articles. You asked your web developer “Please RSS enable all my news articles!”. So your web developer write some interesting scripts that reads your news articles and formulate it in a standardized XML format, ready for the people in the world wide web to consume your RSS news feeds.
NOW the guy that used to visit you web site on a daily basis just to see if there is any new articles can copy your special RSS link into his favorite RSS reader and he can on a daily basis go check his reader for any new articles on a number of his favorite sites including yours. It will “download” the latest articles into his reader and saves him a lot of time and dissappointment of going to your site first and seeing “Oh dear, nothing new here…” and then decide later on “Oh dear, I’m not wasting another second on this guy’s web site. I’m not visiting it again!”.
The other guy that wants to publish your articles (with a link back to your site of course!) on his web site can now, without even contacting you, read your feed with some scripts on his site and display your latest articles on his site. He can do that easy, because he KNOWS the format that your feeds are in due to the standardized format of the RSS XML files.
Getting started
Get a RSS reader and subscribe to other sites feeds. This will help you see the value of RSS feeds best! There is quite a few readers out there that will help you manage your feed subscriptions. (Personally, I manage my feeds using the Firefox Web Browser. It has got a built in RSS reader and is one of the best web browsers available.) Download it at http://www.getfirefox.com
Now go surf the web for your favorite topics. Wherever you see a RSS icon, simply click on it and it will ask you if you would like to subscribe to this feed. Say yes!
Tommorrow, first thing you do when you are online is go to your bookmarks and check if there is any new sites listed in the feeds you subscribe to. If there is nothing new, you don’t have to waste time going to the site just to find out there is nothing new!
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RSS, browsers, firefox, flock Stii
Sep
22
If you are still using Micro$oft’s Internet Explorer, you need to do the following:
- Go outside.
- Wait for someone to come past…
- Slap yourself senseless (the Fightclub way…)
- Then come back to your puter
- and type in http://www.flock.com/download or http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ to het the best browser ever!
I’m telling you, you will not be sorry… Flock is AWESOME!!!
Oh, and by the way, go check out http://www.ie7.com and get that if you don’t think I’m telling the truth… (AWESOME!! IE got pwned!)
In the near-not-too-very-distant future, I’ll do some basic Flock/Firefox articles to help make the web a better place… 
technorati tags:flock, firefox, browsers
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browsers, firefox, flock Stii
The thing is they are just so damn handy and quick! 
