by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 24, 2005 | Usefull Things
After fiddling a bit with Flock I really liked the bookmarks integration but hated the rest of it so I figured I’ll try find some plugins for Firefox that does something similar, it has to be said these is a major gap here for plugins in that area, sigh.
So while doing that I came across Customize Google, it’s a fantastic little plugin that fixes up Google search results, some of its features:
- Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you’re typing) on all searches
- Add links to competitors that lets you search on other search engines for the same term
- Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
- Removes image copying restrictions in Google Print
- Secure Gmail, switch to https
- Remove ads, including gmail
- Anonymize your Google userid
- Filter spammy websites from search results
- Add links to WayBack Machine (webpage history)
- Remove click tracking
These are all fantastic features though I think the spammy link filter deserves special attention. I previously wrote a frontend to Google using the Google API to filter out those annoying user review sites, this does the same just right there in the actual google interface. Supports regex and all that, fantastic.
Check it out. There is an animated gif demo on their front page, that should get you hooked immediately.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 10, 2005 | Usefull Things
It is time for a site redesign and I’ve been investigating DHTML menus. Till now I’ve used Visual Menu, it is nice but has this windows wizard type tool for building the menu otherwise you need to use a pretty complex but flexible config file format. Currently I’m on a mac so its just annoying, so I figured it’s time for something new.
A bit of browsing found TwinHelix a site with a couple of DHTML based menu’s and other gizmos, some really nice there, its donation ware but you can use it for free if you provide a link back to the author.
I’ll launch my new design once the new Movable Type is out with its tags and other new stuff since incorporating those will require a bit of template hacking, will get it all done in one go.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 9, 2005 | Usefull Things
I don’t often write RC scripts these days, most things are in ports and works out of the box, but now and then I need to write something and don’t feel like pouring over the tons of man pages for something I do once or twice a year.
Today a few sites mentioned an excellent article titled ‘Practical guide to BSD rc.d scripting‘ which seems exactly like the thing I need, shows detail examples with explanations of each knob in the typical file, great read.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 26, 2005 | Usefull Things
I’ve been looking for book catalog system for a while now, I’ve tried a few but all desktop based ones. The problem with these are that they’re not platform independent, hard to share with other people, just more things to backup etc etc.
I have been considering writing my own for a while now, today again I figured I should start on this, then I read about Library Thing on Blogspotting.
Library Thing is fairly typical for todays online tools, you add the books by ISBN or title, author etc, it searches Amazon in many countries or the Library of Congress in order to find all the information about the book, including images. You can tag your photos, it shows tag clouds, author clouds etc and will help you find other people who share your taste in books.
Crucially it has a export function that lets you save your data locally, import into Excel or whatever. Great site, I put my 170 books into it in about a hour.
You can see my catalog of books, hopefully soon there will be a API that lets you build on-top of it. So far I am within the free account limit, but I cannot see why I wont upgrade to a paid account soon.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 14, 2005 | Usefull Things
It seems my wishes has come true and Google has finally launched a Blogsearch service.
It does not have all the bells and whistles of other blog search tools, you cannot restrict searches to OPML feeds etc, but I’ve never used those features in the competition. I just do a simple text search and want results.
The search supports all the usual google search modifiers like link: but also has some blog specific stuff: inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl:, more at the FAQ.
UPDATE: Scoble is doing some comparisons between google and others, check his blog for new entries but so far see these: 1, 2, 3.
