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The Daily Whim

The Daily Whim

A Photo Gallery With An Attitude

Wed. Jul 28, 2004

Odds and Ends and a Pet Peeve

You might remember me mentioning the “portal” I made, partially to get my feet wet with Wordpress. After discovering a Textpattern plug-in I’d somehow missed that allows you to pull in RSS feeds from various sources, I decided to take the same “portal” style sheet, and make a Feeds Page using Textpattern (I simply created a new “section”). It’s a little slow to load, and will likely change as I tune the number and types of feeds on it. But so far, I find it a good place to start my day with a cup of coffee, to see what the world has done overnight.

An entirely random and anecdotal but interesting stats fact; yesterday, visits by the Googlebot to index my content represented 13% of the total “sessions” (read, “visitors”) for the day. At the same time, search returns from Google represented 14% of my “sessions/visitors” yesterday.

So, it appears the Googlebot ate 13% of my bandwidth (well, not literally), and then returned it in traffic … plus one percent. The other way of looking at it; 27% of my “sessions” yesterday were in some way from Google.com. What would they do without me? Entirely aside from $100+ IPO shareprice, in some way, we are all largely becoming fodder for the Google Hose. Sprayin’ in, and sprayin’ out, complete with contextual ads.

Firefox, using the theme Smoke, plus the extensions GMail Notifier, Web Developer Toolbar, mozImage, Slogger, and Copy URL +, is by far the finest browsing environment I’ve ever had. Looks nice, works great. Oh, and there are some news sites I’d find unreadable without the zap bookmarklet.

And let me leave you with a pet peeve. If you run a weblog, please don’t think you’re doing me a favor by linking to the print version of a story. Assume I am capable of finding that version myself, or otherwise disabling the ads you may be trying to help me avoid. Because when your print-link shows up in my web-browser, I am left trying to read lines of text that are 14 inches long. That’s not very user friendly, and just causes me to make the Homer noise.

And I do that enough as it is.

Posted 3:28AM, Wed, Jul 28 2004 in · · 1 Comments below


Peanut Gallery

1  phaTTboi wrote:

Firefox is great, but a lot of fairly high traffic sites still see it as a “non-W3C compliant user agent”. Like, believe it or not, Wired News. ieview Extension can mitigate that, but keep complaining when you see nag pages being served.

FireFox Extensions are great, and thanks to all the 3rd party folks putting some great ideas and fun back in Web browsing. My personal favorites, as I think many people who work on multiple machines every day will find extremely cool, are

Add Bookmark Here, which lets you put the bookmark directly into your organization structure, where you want it – by Daniel Lindvist

Sort Bookmarks, which keeps things alphabetized automatically (may not be everyone’s perfect paradigm, but it is zero effort, and logical. I can find stuff!) -by Torisugari

Bookmark Synchronizer, which automatically exports your bookmarks to an FTP server at the close of the browser, and automatically downloads them again, even on another of your configured machines, when the browser is opened. Voila, my bookmarks follow me around, with all change current everywhere, if I just remember to open and close browsers when leaving machines! How Plan 9. -by Torisugari

WinXP users can extend this major jump in functionality still further by creating a couple of browser oriented user profiles for themselves, and enabling WinXP fast user switching, and voila! they can have nearly instant access to personal, work safe, and specialty subjects bookmark sets that remained synched on all machines they use. (Not for limited memory systems)

The Web Developer toolbar is great not only for Web developers, but even for casual surfers with a bit of knowledge, who can now quickly answer for themselves “How’d they do that?” when they run across cool site designs.

Jed Brown has updated GMailCompose again recently, to 0.5.3 and I’m going to try it again, along with the GMailNotifier you recommend.

Comment by phaTTboi · 07/29/04 10:28 PM
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