No, this isn’t a religious post; the title just seemed appropriate to the day on which I’m making it. I’m referring to my own resurrection from not posting here recently. I didn’t die, and I wasn’t buried. I was just off exploring various things on the net and have been a bit remiss in posting my thoughts about them. So this will be something of a catch up post, covering a number of things that I found interesting lately.
One site I’ve subscribed to and been reading with interest is Web Worker Daily. If you’ve read my link blog you’ll recognize that site as the source of a number of the things that I’ve shared. Although I’m not technically a web worker, I have found this site to be a valuable resource for information about web tools, and that’s a subject I’m sure you know I find interesting.
One thing I found there was their recommendation that they couldn’t live without a Firefox extension called Tab Mix Plus. I had been using Tabbrowser Preferences, but this new extension contains all the features of that one and then some. So I’ve substituted it for the extension I was using previously. One thing I particularly like about it is that it gives you the option to have rows of tabs rather than a scroll bar when you’ve opened more tabs than the window will accommodate. That is preferable to me. You can learn more about its other useful features by visiting the extension’s website. Here are some screen shots of it.
On the 30th of last month I discovered Google’s Notebook and since then I’ve been experimenting with it. I’ve found it useful for keeping an diary of activities online, making quick notes to myself and for listing things that I want to blog about, things I call blogfodder. I see now that I mentioned Notebook in my post titled Google 24/7 as one of the several Google services that I’m using.
Yesterday I set up the ability to post to the blog by email, using a plugin called Postie which was created by Dirk Elmendorf. I host several blogs on my space with my hosting service, and those other blogs are for people who aren’t dedicated bloggers like some people I know. So their having the ability to send an email to a specific address and have it automatically posted to the blog simplifies the process for them. Postie offers many more features than WordPress’ built-in ability to set up an email address for posting by email. For instance, you can designate that only certain roles (editor, author, etc.) can post using the address. If someone else tries to use it, their post will not appear on the blog but instead will be sent to my address as an “Unauthorized Post Attempt.” I haven’t yet figured out how to set up a cron job to cause the email to be posted without my intervention, but I’ll eventually get that working too.
Recently I installed Greasemonkey, and even more recently, I installed a couple of greasemonkey scripts. One of them, called YouTube Video Original Page, adds a link below any embedded YouTube video which shows the URL to the original video on YouTube. Since I prefer having access to that so that I can sent a link to the video using my own email system rather than YouTube’s “share” feature or so that I can embed the clip on my own site, if I choose, I find this little script to be quite handy and not at all intrusive.
Lest you think I love everything I try on the web, I have to say that when I read this post, I thought I might like Blogrovr so I installed it and ran my system with it installed for a week or so. Now I’ll admit that I didn’t subscribe to many blogs using it and in that sense maybe I didn’t give it a fair shot, but it felt intrusive to me, so I’ve removed it.
And my friend Daryl Houston recently sent me a link to a service called tumblr, thinking that I might find that interesting. I certainly appreciated his thoughtfulness, but after reviewing that service, I decided not to sign up for it either. So I don’t sign up for everything I discover after all. Yeah, I know. I’m slipping as I get older.
And finally, I’ll mention that I have installed a program called Pando, which according to their website “is a free personal P2P software that makes sending, receiving and publishing large files a breeze.” Both parties have to have Pando installed to share files with each other, but the need to send such files grows more each day, so this seems like a reasonable solution to a problem I’ve experienced more than once. Here’s the geek explanation for how it works.
So as you can see, though some of you may have thought I was dead and buried, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I have arisen.