It's magic! Experiencing the power of Foxmarks...

I came in to work this morning and fired up the old 'Fox as usual, with the thought at the back of my mind that I needed to add that Gmail bookmarklet I blogged about yesterday.

But I was genuinely surprised to see it was already there! Magic? No. Foxmarks of course!

Learning to lose the mouse!

I always used to marvel at people who were able to use a computer almost solely from the keyboard. But it never seemed worth learning all the keyboard shortcuts to be able to become a keyboard wizard!

Over the years I have picked up the odd shortcut here and there - mainly for things like Photoshop where you tend to be constantly chopping and changing between tools. But one area where I've been quite slow to pick up keyboard habits is, oddly enough, web browsing, despite the amount of time I spend doing it!

Only with increasingly using a laptop (and finding that the right 'mouse' button is wearing out!) have I started to take browser keyboard shortcuts - and general keyboard navigation - more seriously.

Lifehacker have a useful article (rather old now actually but still just as useful) introducing the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts.

As something of a Firefox extension addict, the Keyconfig extension is certainly highly recommended by me - simply to resolve the inevitable conflicts over shortcuts that arise from installing multiple extensions.

Keyword bookmarking is another very handy feature. In relation to my last post, it's really handy to be able to simply press Ctrl+L and type 'gm' (as I have set it up) to get an instant Gmail Compose window pop up. About 10 times quicker than any other way of doing it!

I think it's one of those things where you have to make a bit of an initial effort (old habits die hard, of course) but in very little time that effort is repaid many times over in time saving. The same lesson has been recently learned in getting used to using Launchy - at first I was continually wanting to use the mouse and click on programs in the Quick Launch bar. Now 'Alt+Space' is second nature! Similarly, using 'Alt+Tab' to switch applications rather than constantly having to move down to the taskbar, etc. etc.

Add a 'Compose new Gmail' Bookmarklet to Firefox

This is a modified version of the 'GmailThis' bookmarklet which automatically adds the title and url of the current page into the email. I don't often need to send URLs to people, but being able to instantly open up a compose window in a popup is very useful.

• Right click on your bookmarks toolbar and select 'New Bookmark...'
  
  
• In the 'Name' field put 'Gmail' or something.
  
  
• In the 'Location' field put:
  
  javascript:(function(){m='http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=&su=&body=';w=window.open(m,'addwindow','status=no,toolbar=no,width=575,height=545,resizable=yes');setTimeout(function(){w.focus();},%20250);})();
  
  
• Save it.

Goodbye Posterous - it was nice knowing you but I've just discovered Twitterfeed!

New technology is a fickle and ever changing thing...

Posterous seemed like a great idea until about half an hour ago. Blogging via email is nice (but Blogger does it already so no brownie points there). But having it auto-post to Twitter each time I posted a new blog entry was what won me over.

But then I came across a problem. I wanted to set up a new Twitter account, specifically related to my railway-related interests. And I wanted to set up a new blog on Posterous to mirror my existing 'Line to Nowhere' blog on Blogger. And I wanted to have Posterous autopost to my new Twitter account and my railway blog on Blogger each time I posted to the new Posterous blog. (In other words, two different online 'identities', each with seperate blogs, Twitter accounts etc., all managed through Posterous.)

Trouble is you can't do that with Posterous at the moment, unless you create two seperate Posterous accounts and then make sure that you always post to each one from a different email address. Which is a hassle and it kind of cancels out the simplicity of it all. (But then, maybe not everyone has such diverse interests as me?!)

Then I discovered Twitterfeed. You create an account (using OpenID) and then set up as many different RSS-to-Twitter feeds as you want. You just give it the URL of an RSS feed and the Twitter account you want it to auto-post to (you have to supply your Twitter username and password but a quick Google suggests that its a fairly reputable service), and how frequently you want it to update, and off it goes and does its stuff!

Since I have no need to post via email to Flickr or YouTube or Vimeo or any of the other blogging services supported by Posterous, and because Posterous doesn't allow me to easily differentiate my online identites, Blogger + Twitterfeed is actually the ideal solution for me right now.

So I now have the following setup:

mattots.blogspot.com + twitter.com/mattots
line2nowhere.blogspot.com + twitter.com/line2nowhere

I can post to either blog via email (I just post to a different address for each), and Twitterfeed automatically updates the relevant Twitter account every 30 minutes. Simple.

(Oh yes, and if I just want to post direct to either Twitter account, Twitterfox lets you log into and switch between multiple Twitter accounts, so that's no problem.)

Sorted.

For now at least!

Blogger-users, meet Posterous!

For those of you who follow this blog on Blogger, you may have noticed the "Posted via email from Matt's Random Stuff" link at the end of recent posts and wondered what it's all about. Well, clicking the link would have answered the question for you, but if you've not got that far yet then simply go and check out Posterous or see a carbon copy of this blog post at mattots.posterous.com and all will be revealed.

My current setup allows me to send an email to post@posterous.com from any of my email addresses and the contents of the email are instantly posted to my blog on Blogger and Posterous with the email subject as the post title. At the same time, the subject line and a link to the blog post on Posterous is posted to my Twitter account.

At the moment this is all I need to do, but Posterous lets you do much more than that - check it out.

It's still in the early stages of development really so I imagine there are going to be a lot of new features being rolled out as time goes on.

Posted via email from Matt's Random Stuff

TinyTwitter would be great if it actually worked on my phone. But it doesn't!

Accepting the fact that I won't be getting an iPhone any time soon means having to scout around for decent apps that will work on my Sony Ericsson W950i. That's a bit of an contradiction in terms really, as there aren't really any truly decent apps for UIQ3 (unless someone can prove to me otherwise). Still, I was looking for a Twitter client that would work with my phone and after trying several, most of which either blatantly didn't work or were just plain rubbish, I found TinyTwitter, which seemed to be okay. And it works, except for one small thing - I can't send tweets! It just gives an error. Quite annoying really. I presume its some sort of big or incompatibility with my phone.

Posted via email from Matt's Random Stuff

Christmas shopping - Ugh!

Why oh why do I always leave my Christmas shopping till the last few days before Christmas? I really ought to have learned my lesson by now! Next year I intend to get it all done before December even comes around. Some hope, I know!

Posted via email from Matt's Random Stuff

I want an iPhone - no, I REALLY want an iPhone

I'm sorry, but I just can't hold it in any longer. Until now I have managed to contain my craving, but it has finally got the better of me.

However you look at it, even with the fairly minimal hands-on experience I have had of these beautifully crafted pieces of technology, there's just nothing else to compare to them.

Unfortunately there's no way I can afford one and I'm tied in to another 15 months on my current crappy phone's contract. Sigh.

Posted via email from Matt's Random Stuff

Could Posterous replace Blogger?

So could it? For me, I mean. My first impression was that Posterous would post to my Blogger blog and post a link to it in Twitter, when actually, while yes it does post to Blogger, the link it posts to Twitter points to the blog post on Posterous itself, not on Blogger.

It's not a big deal, but the question this begs of course is, why use Blogger at all if my blog is just being duplicated in two places?

Posted via email from Matt's Random Stuff

Twitter - a second chance

OK, maybe I was a bit hasty with my earlier blog post slamming Twitter as a total waste of time. As my boss said, it was a bit of a "grumpy old man" post really, wasn't it!

I think maybe I was approaching things from the wrong angle. I guess there are lots of things in life you can look at and call a waste of time, but then if you look at it differently it makes more sense.

From one point of view, Twitter is indeed solving a problem that didn't exist - no-one was going around saying "I really need to be able to post messages of less than 160 characters to all my online friends". But then, the same thing could be said for the vast majority of things we have come to accept and rely on in modern society. Who needed the telephone when you had the postal service and word of mouth? Who needed email when you had the telephone? Who needed mobile phones when we had landlines? Yes, sure, from our perspective we look back and say "Of course these things were needed - how did we manage without them?" But it's all about perspective.

OK, so philosophising (is that a word?) aside, why the change of heart?

Well, I was at a client meeting this morning and a colleague was "preaching" about the benefits of Twitter for building customer relationships. And the client was getting quite excited about the idea. And it suddenly started to click. Even if it doesn't have any direct, quantifiable benefit, the benefits are gradual indirect, incremental. And isn't that true of all relationships? They don't happen overnight, and you can't neceesarily quantify them. But they're still just as real. Twitter might not in and of itself have any greta power to change anything, but as one tool in a wider arsenal of resources, maybe it can make a difference after all - whether that is simply keeping in touch with friends, or building relationships with customers.

I've posted this from my email using Posterous, and it might just be another reason why I start using Twitter again. But that's for another post!!

A close call

I just went to switch on my desktop PC earlier this evening and was confronted with a nasty surprise - all my programs were crashing about 30 seconds - 1 minute after launching. I restarted several times but the same thing kept happening.

My first thought was 'virus' and a quick Google search (on the laptop) seemed to confirm my suspicions.

However, when I called my brother - the tech guru! - for advice, he thought it might be the memory and suggested I simply remove the memory modules and replace them again and see if that fixed it.

Which, I'm relieved to say, did fix it! Phew! I really didn't want to have to face a Christmas sorting out an infected hard drive!

But it does prove that sometimes the good old "give it a kick / drop it" technique for fixing things works for even the most advanced of modern technology!!

Hallelujah

I was very pleased that Alexandra won X-Factor on Saturday night. She was clearly the best singer in the competition. It's arguable whether she's a better singer than Leona Lewis, the 2006 winner, but she's probably a lot more versatile as evidenced by the wide range of styles she tackled throughout the competition.

The winner's single, a cover-version of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', seemed a slightly odd choice at first, but Alexandra's rendition is absolutely incredible.

Seems like the Christmas number one is already guaranteed!

Recursion

Recursion is one of those things self-taught programmers (or designers who dabble a bit in programming, like me) tend to overlook. That was certainly the case for me. Apart from the occasional situation where I needed to loop an indefinite number of times (and ended up cheating and using an iterative loop with an artificial end-point instead) I wasn't really aware of what it was.

But having realised it was something that I needed to get my head around, I rooted around on the web for a decent - and simple - tutorial.

(Those of you with a programming or mathematical background are probably laughing at the thought that it wouldn't be immediately obvious to anyone, but it took me a while to grasp the concept. However, once you do get it, its actually really straightforward. The key, for someone like me who generally writes very linear, one-dimensional code, is that you have to use a function to create a recursive loop - unless you want things to get extremely complicated!)

The test was to rewrite a piece of code I wrote a while back to display a nested list of web pages in a CMS. Previously I'd cheated by setting a limit on the number of nesting levels, but I wanted to allow an unlimited number.

In fact, the recursive version of the code is about 10 times simpler than the original iterative version and took me all of about 3 minutes to write - including thinking time!!

Send SMS from Gmail Chat - if you're in the US that is!

When I saw the red message at the top of Gmail today telling me I could now send SMS messages from Gmail chat, I thought "That sounds good!" And why not? No more SMS charges texting people unless I'm away from a computer - which really isn't very often at all these days.

But oh, when I clicked the Labs icon and scrolled down, what did I behold... "Only available for US mobile numbers". Darn!

Maybe they'll roll it out to non-US mobiles soon. I hope so.

Converting Vimeo and YouTube embedded HTML to XHTML

Handy if, like me, you can't bear to put a site live without that nice green tick in the Firefox statusbar on every page!

Convert Vimeo embed code to XHTML (instructions)

Convert YouTube embed code to XHTML (generator)

Search unread items in Google Reader??

Does anyone know whether its possible to search unread items in Google Reader? There's an option in the dropdown to search read items but not unread items. is:unread doesn't work. So is there some other way of doing this?

Twitter - the biggest waste of time ever?

Well ok, so posting the odd 'tweet' is perhaps not the biggest time-waster in the history of the universe (although I suppose it depends on how many tweets you send!), but in the last few months since I took the plunge and created a Twitter account, I have come to the conclusion that the whole thing is simply a waste of time.

Yes, I know people rant on about it being a great tool for businesses to 'get the word out' and 'build relationships with customers' or just for friends to 'hang out in cyberspace', but I just don't really see it that way.

For one thing, the vast majority of Twitter users are techy people - the kind of people who'll install the latest gadgets and adapt the latest web services because it's 'cool'. The overwhelming majority of normal web users don't use it and aren't interested.

But secondly and more importantly, it doesn't actually acheive anything that can't be acheived just as well - or better - with existing tools: email, blogs, Facebook, etc. Those things are just as 'real-time', just as accessible, as a tweet and, crucially, because they're not forced into the confines of a ridiculously small number of characters, can generally convey the message far better. Just because it's good to be brief and to the point doesn't mean that you can say everything that needs saying in 140 characters or less!

There's an online Google maps 'mashup' called Twittervision which displays live tweets from Twitter on a world map. Sure, it's cool in one sense, but just spending a few moments watching the sorts of things people are tweeting about is all the evidence you need to see that it's mainly just fluff.

If you want to promote a product or service, write a blog post. If you want to ask a question, send an email. If you want to chat with a mate, use IM... Come on, it's not rocket science!

Next thing you know they'll be coming up with a TV channel where the programmes can only be 15 seconds long... oh, they've already done it!!!

Maybe I sound like a grumpy old man, but it's not that I don't like new technology... if it serves a valid purpose and solves a problem. I just think that things like Twitter solve a problem that never existed!

I'm sure there'll be plenty of people ready to disagree with me, but that's ok, I'm not out to win any arguments here - just say what I'm thinking.

Introduction to Firebug

Estelle Weyl has a great introduction to the Firebug extension for Firefox on her website.

I have to admit, to my shame, that I've had Firebug installed for perhaps a couple of years and yet never actually taken the time to understand how it works or what exactly it does! I just knew it was one of those things I "ought" to have as a web developer!! But reading this has opened my eyes to just what a powerful tool Firebug really is. I try to avoid javascript if I can help it but even just for HTML and CSS it has some very useful features.

Uninstall AVG Safe Search

Instructions for how to uninstall the AVG SafeSearch extension in Firefox.

Foxmarks, Google Bookmarks, Delicious....???

I think its about time I decided on a single solution for managing my bookmarks. At the moment I have different sets of Firefox bookmarks saved on three different computers (desktop, laptop and work), and a Delicious account (which I use with the Delicious Firefox extension).

I started using Delicious a while ago but I've never quite got into the swing of it, and since I don't want to share my bookmarks it seems a bit unecessary. Foxmarks seems a simpler solution if all I want to do is synchronise my Firefox bookmarks across computers.

But if I'm going to start syncing bookmarks, what about my history? It would be quite nice to be able to search back through my browsing history on all the machines I use. But does this mean installing the Google Toolbar? I really don't want another toolbar.

I think I'm going to give Foxmarks a try and see how I get on.

Magic/Replace

Magic/Replace is a free web-based tool for making changes to all of the rows of a data table at once. You can paste in a spreadsheet, CSV or TSV file, make your changes in a single row and it intelligently applies the same changes to all rows. So for example, you can make all email addresses lowercase, or combine forename and surname into a single column, or change middle names to initials, or reformat dates....

There's a good video demo on the site.

This has already been added to my 'Resources' bookmarks folder.