Notepad entry (will be updated every once in a while).

Some Add-Ons for Firefox that I use:

• Abduction – Helpful tool to create screen- or webshots.
• BetterPrivacy – Since the methods of datamining get better, one needs better defense.
• ColorZilla – A colorpicker, ’nuff said.
• DNS Prefetch – While Firefox 3.5 will do DNS prefetching to speed up the browsing, you need this little extension with earlier/current versions.
• DownThemAll! – Firefox has no decent download manager? With this, it has.
• Firebug – Very, veeeery helpful when debugging websites.
• Flashblock – Flash is a great way to create interesting content for websites and also a great way to kill memory. Not to speak of annoying banners with SFX. Simply block them by default and activate them when you want them with a simple click.
• Greasemonkey – While I personally only use it on deviantArt, it can be helpful on almost any site. For the popular ones (like most Google services) there are already a lot of tools available that make the browsing more enjoyable/simple.
• Lazarus: Form Recovery – How often did you fill out a long form, only to see the contents vanish to the nine hells, because you took to long, your browser crashed or another error occured. Lazarus remembers them for you, even textareas, which alone outraces the built-in function.
• Read It Later – Before this Add-On I usually had dozens of tabs open with pages I want to read some time, but not right away when I stumble upon them. Usually they stay open forever, since I never find the time and making a bookmark is to much work to do (especially to remove them later). With this Add-On you get  a nice tool that provides a simple way to store and remove them in a seperate bookmark folder and you also get a tool to keep track of them. You could even store them online to use with several computers.
• Redirect Remover – Some sites create links that lead to an internal app first and then to the site you want to go. Some do this for stats, others for datamining,  some to direct you to ads every once in a while or they just do it to please their evil overlord. This tool directs you to the real URL directly.
• Session Manager – Firefox remembers your last session. Session Manager can remember several sessions and lets you load them even partly.
• Torbutton – Well, this is on my to-do list. Doesn’t work out of the box, so I need to dig in more.
• Tree Style Tab – Another way to organize your tabs, especially useful for wide screens.
• Ubiquity – As already said, a great tool. The only two things that it lacks are the integration of external apps (like Thunderbird and Lightning/Sunbird) and that most standard functions lead to non-German services (which I don’t care about in language, but location… I usually order at some-store.de instead of some-store.com for example). But it’s quite easy to extend, if you know a bit programming.
• Web Developer – You can’t really do webdevelopment without this toolbar.

• The Nethnet – I place this a bit seperately. This is a MMOG, using the www as playground. While the idea sounds like loads of fun, I’m not really sure if it is a good idea. Since all is tracked on a central server, it kinda sounds like a big datamining operation. Just my two cents…

Just a few for the moment. I hope some will be replaced by equal or better built-in functions in the future.

Oh and before I get mails that state that Opera can do most of that with build-in features: I do not care!

• bmlet.com – Great page for ready-to-use Bookmarklets
• Jessi’s Bookmarklets Site – More ready-to-use Bookmarklets
• Bookmarklets.com – Guess what…
• Any JavaScript website you know will help you develop your own.

Not all Bookmarklets will work for you, cause it depends on your JavaScript engine, browser and if the coin of fate fell so, that Tymora smiles upon you. But if you find some helpful little Bookmarklets, they will enhance your web-experience. Here are some that I use frequently:

• Search Wikipedia (EN) – Does what it sounds like. Either a marked part of the website or if nothing is marked, a popup will appear. Can easily be changed to query whatever language on Wikipedia you prefer.
• Search Leo Dictionary – Same as above. Hey, my English ain’t really that good, I really need it.
• Sort table – unfortunally not all webdesigners think it is a good idea to add a sort function to cluttered tables. Well, this helps.
• Highlight RegEx – Since there is no highlight search feature in Firefox and the fact about every search function in every application sucks (more about that in an upcoming post) and me being a RegEx freak, this is a wonderful function.
• Edit webpage – As mentioned in an earlier post. Not a regular Bookmarklet of mine, but helpful when creating documentations or just to have fun.

There are a lot more helpful functions (taking the first two from this list will give you a hint how to use it with any other web(site) search function), those are just a few examples. Go browse and find some that work well for your. Or maybe even create your own and post them to the pages mentioned above.

And while we are at it, there’s another way to enhance your webbrowser (as long as it is called Firefox or can use whose Add-Ons). Check out the following two Add-Ons. No further describtion from me, just check the links.

• Ubiquity – Great tool in development by Mozilla Labs. Even has a natural language parser.
• Greasemonkey – Mostly for layout stuff, but some very useful scripts (especially for communities like deviantArt).

That’s it for now. Go and enhance your browser!

Now, what do you do, if you are only interested in a few specific items that appear in a particular feed? Well, you could ignore the unimportant posts, mark them read unread or delete them. That’s what one usually does. But there has to be another way. Some sites, like this one, offer a variety of different feeds for every category and tag. It’s easy to pick the topics one is interested in. And for the others? Well, there’s Yahoo Pipes.

With pipes you can do a lot of things. For example you can filter a feed for different search terms. You could also combine several feeds into one. Or build both functions into a whole pipeline, that filters the feeds of many sites and combines the results into a single feed. And after you’re done with that you can just put that through a translator to get the informations in your language.

And those are just examples with feeds. You can also use it to actively filter sites like internet auctions for special items or price ranges. Or manage your whole social networking life via a single pipe. And thanks to a growing API trend on the web you’ll be able to do a lot more over time.

So anyone who is actively using the web should check Pipes out. It’s really helpful.

The thought occured to me while working on the concept of lonks. For the community edition I want to save URLs into a seperate table and just refer to them through IDs, so that they are not directly connected to the bookmark entries. That also reflects the idea of a somewhat normalized database and makes anonymizing referers more easy.

But the (random) IDs have to be in the right size from the start to last for eternity (or at least close to that). Otherwise some URLs could be identified to be created after a certain timestamp. On the other side they should be short enough to waste no unnecessary dataspace and don’t make the the referer URLs too long.

Just using numbers looks lame. But I can’t use all characters as well or there’ll be an ID that makes sense as a word. Maybe even a swear word. You don’t want http://lonks/nr1idiot to direct to your site, do you? Going hex is a bit restricted as well, but is the best common system.

In addition I thought of a system that splits the alphabet into chunks, which will makes it virtually impossible to create a word. I still have to figure out if that system is any good and how many IDs I can squeeze out of it with a decent amount of digits. If that won’t work out, I guess I’l stick to 4-16 digit hex (64 bit).

Okay, lets do the math with 4-16 digits (always including numbers) just for fun.

• hex
  18,446,744,073,709,486,080
• 3 no-vowel chunks
  194,644,767,472,667,473,927
• No vowels
  727,423,121,747,185,262,904,960
• All characters
  7,958,661,109,946,400,882,712,320

Maybe a case-sensitive character system will help to reduce the digits and/or increase the possible number of IDs. But maybe hex is enough… considering there won’t be the need to save every url of the internet anyway.

Am I thinking too much? Or am I just megalomaniac? Still the question remains… how many URLs are there?

Update: Just did the number crunching on a case-sensitive version of the 3 no-vowel chunks: 36,349,704,372,835,319,666,931 Somewhat a nice intermediate number. Looks mysterious and leet as well, so I might go for that. So many possibilities, that most of the time there won’t be the need to generate another random id, in case it is already in use. The speed of the queries and searches will be an interesting factor in the end, but I guess that problem will be solved when it arises.