The life of a minor minor prophet, not the rock


Wednesday, June 04, 2003

My friend Rob Adams is thinking about Chipwich's and why he blogs:

Back when I first set up this here weblog, Micah asked me what my reasons were for doing so. At the time, my answer was "I want to have a place to record my ideas" This was accurate if rather vague; I wasn't even sure then if I'd continue to maintain roBlog dot org or if I'd get bored after a couple weeks and take it down. Since then, I've obtained more experience with weblogs as a medium (I'm even planning to write my own news aggregator), and I think I've managed to refine that initial thought a bit. Read more...


6:47:37 PM    
Community uproar at fotolog

Marc's Voice → Corante: Social Software

Community uproar at fotolog.. Over at Scott Heiferman's marvelous Fotolog, there's a classic community uproar going on.

Fotolog has hit a success crisis, becoming quite popular, and, because it focuses on pictures rather than words, it has attracted an enormous international community (particularly Brazilians, for some reason.) In response, the Fotolog staff has adopted the standard solution - limit the number of posts that can be made using the free service to control bandwidth and storage costs, and institute a paid Gold membership for people who want more serious usage.

And then chaos ensued. In Scott's log, he posted a user's picture of herself with her hand stuck out, on which had been written "Fuck fotolog" and then tried to address the reasons behind the change. This opened the floodgates, with a whole range of meta-discussion arising -- Two-tier systems damage the community; Most Brazilians can't pay for things on the internet with a credit card; You americans are murders, unfair and capitalists; Who do you think pays for this, the internet fairy? and so on.

.....

One of the things that precipitates these kind of constitutional crises is manifest evidence that the users don't control the system. They know that, of course, intellectually, but when a community forms, they feel as if they do own it, and as long as the actual owners do nothing to disturb that illusion, things can hum along, but whenever anything happens unilaterally... (emphasis added)

eBay deals with similar issues every day.  Read Adam Cohen's book, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay for history of the 'dolphin's caught in the net' incident as well as the communities reaction when eBay unilaterally decided to stopped selling guns and used underwear.


6:15:01 PM    
Firebird Feedback

Lots of responses to my questions about the Firebird browser (this link probably helped).  I haven't tried all the suggestions yet, but I wanted to share what I learned:

Spell checker

Joeri Sebrechts wrote in to tell me about the mozilla spellchecker add-on.  He notes, "This doesn't work with firebird yet, but since firebird is going to become mozilla I assume it's only a matter of time."

Remembering open tabs

I asked, "Is there a way to have Firebird remember and re-load the set of tabs I had open when I closed the app?  At the moment if I restart the browser I lose all my tabs."


Mike Palumbo wrote in with these directions:
First, open the tabs you want to always load on startup.  Click on Bookmarks, then "Add to Bookmarks".  Pick a name and location for the bookmarks, then click the "Bookmark all tabs in a folder" checkbox.  That part is crucial.
Once you've done that, you'll notice in your bookmarks that you now have a folder containing links to all the tabs you have open.
Now, just go to Tools, then Options.  Click on the "General" selection.  Under the "Home Page" area, click on "Use Bookmark...".  Finally, select the folder you just created when you bookmarked your tabs.  Tada!  You're all set.  When you load Firebird, you should get all of those locations opened in tabs.
 
Mike also mentioned this hack to add Rich Text Editing to Firebird for Movable Type users.  I use Radio Userland so I'm not sure if it'll work... need to check it out.
 
Seamus wrote in with what may be an easier solution to the Tab Problem:
You need TBE (Tabbrowser Extensions) to do this. Go to Tools > Options > Extensions > select Tabbrowser Extensions > Settings > Tabbrowser Extensions > Tab Browsing > Advance Startup > check Open last visited page on start up.

 
My friend and Software Engineer Chris Nitchie is giving Firebird a try too.  He writes:
- I'm a tab addict.  I love 'em.
- No pop-ups.  Cool.  But sometimes it knows when I *want* a popup (I think it'll show a popup for an onClick event, but not for onLoad or onUnload).  Cooooooool.
- Every bit as fast as IE.  Renders almost everything perfectly.
- I have yet to find a plugin I want that I can't use.  Off the top of my head, Flash, Quicktime, Java, RealONE.
- Keyboard shortcuts mimic IE, so I don't have to learn new ones.
- New keyboard shortcuts are intuitive.  "Let's see... shift-click opens the link in a new window... I bet ctrl-shift-click opens the link in a new tab."  Bling.
- All the buttons on my fancy mouse do what they're supposed to.
- You can specify that you'll only load images from the website you're viewing.  Take that, banner advertisers.

Gripes:
- No ActiveX support.  I can see why they did it, but it prevents things like rich text widgets.  Also means the Q42 guys have a lot of work to do to make Xopus work with it (they use MSXML4 as the underlying DOM).
- Nothing else is coming immediately to mind.
 
Andy Edmonds, who tried to convert me to Mozilla several months ago wrote:
Glad to hear you're enjoying FireBird.  I'll have a "better back button" for you soon.
 
Alas, the rich text editing is one of the things we lost in the Mz -> FB transition. 

Mozile.mozdev.org is working on reimplementing editing using just dom methods, no Composer.  Eventually, you'll be able to add composer to FB but not yet I think.  (http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/danielglazman/composer/composer++.html)
 
On the tab memory, http://recall.mozdev.org is getting close. It worked way back when and Pete's revamping it.  The xpi failed on me, so not yet, but soon.
 
You can also save browsing sessions to xml with my project mozwho, also not ready for prime time. 
 
Not sure on the spell checker.  Sorry to be a downer!  -A
Don't worry Andy, I'm having a grand old time.  More tips and suggestions for other uninitiated readers as I discover them :).
 
update:
 
fixed the link to the upcoming Mozile xhtml editor.
 
Also Matt Mower, also apparently influenced by Andy, writes on his blog:

I decided to take a better look at Mozilla and installed the new Firebird release.  For reasons I find hard to explain I found Firebird a much nicer browser than vanilla Moz and could even see myself using it as my every day browser if two problems could be solved:

  1. When I click a link in another application I want Firebird to open it in a new tab automatically
  2. I want to be able to edit Radio postings using WYSIWYG mode

 

I have a feeling the answer to 1 may lie in the twisted passage ways of the Preference panel of Firebird extension Tabbrowser.

I currently have both of the same problems, plus Firebird crashes pretty regularly when I try to open a URL by clicking on a link in Eudora or from Dave's quick search bar.  Matt, I'll drop you a line if when I figure this out.


4:55:31 PM    

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