Despite how useful it is, I have some concern with GreaseMonkey and your browsers security.
The basic problem I see is that user scripts are plug-ins to to a plug-in. User scripts could do things that would be bad for security such as:
Grab user entered information such as user names, passwords, or emails.
Be part of a DDOS attack by contacting some server repeatedly
Insert unwanted content such as ads or tracking into every page visited
GreaseMonkey does not use the white list of sites allowed to install plugins and allows user scripts to be installed from just about anywhere.
I'm worried that somebody could set up a repository of user scripts that appear to do useful things but have spyware embedded in them. Users would install GreaseMonkey user scripts from the site thinking they were getting useful functionality but not realizing they were getting additional "goodies".
I don't install user scripts without knowing how they work and looking over the source myself. Preferably, I write my own. I don't see most users being able to do that sort of analysis. Hence the danger.
The nightly disabled ALL of my extensions. I just can't use firefox without extensions. I'm now on 1.0.4. Hopefully they will have the extension issues resovled by the time 1.1 is released for real.
How about sites that already provide a useful service and want to get as much exposure as possible? I can't count the number of useful sites that I've visited that are not ranked as well as google as I would like (so I can find them more easily) because they do non-Google-friendly things like:
Session IDs in urls
Doorway pages
Content that expires or changes urls
Javascript navigation
Sometimes search engine optimization isn't about making a hack site rank well. Sometimes it is about getting the traffic that a really nifty site deserves.
In fact, I wish all the legit sites did everything they should morally do in terms of SEO. Then the spam sites wouldn't have such an easy time pushing them out of the way.
From a business perspective, money spent on making non-spammy search engine optimizations can be much more effective than money spent on marketing or public relations.
On slashdot, you only get to see old content unless you are a subscriber. Only subscribers see stuff less than 15 minutes old. No reason why something like that couldn't work for the NYT. Be interesting so see at what cutoff they could hook the most subscribers. It would have to be somewhere between 15 minutes and 2 weeks.
AOL blacklists by ip address of the server sending the mail whenever some number of aol users who subscribe to the mailing list hit the "report as spam" button on their email client.
For legit mailing lists you wouldn't think this would happen, but an unbelievable number of aol users treat the "report spam" button as if it were the "trash" button.
To get unblocked by AOL you have to set up an account at which you will receive a request to unsubscribe from each user that uses the "report as spam" button. You then have to parse AOL's format and remove the user from your mailing list. AOL won't even let you contact the user with another "are you sure" type of email.
From what I have read about trust rank, the basic premise is that they pick 200 or so "trusted sites". The trust rank for any page is then basically the number of link hops to the page from a trusted site.
The problem I have with this is that there are many problems with identifying trusted sites and maintaining the trustworthiness of such sites after they have been chosen.
From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites. The open directory projects seems to me to be a candidate for a trusted site. It has editorial controls and links to a heck of a lot of sites.
The first question to ask is: "After the trusted sites is chosen, how much would it cost to buy one?". I suppose dmoz itself would be hard to buy outright, but how much would it take to buy one of the editors, or to buy an editorial position? Probably not much. Dmoz alread has a lot of editorial fraud and it would make the problem worse. I'm not sure that its fair to expect trusted sites not to degrade to some extent.
The second question to ask is: "How hard is it to buy links from trusted sites?". The answer has to be that it is pretty easy. Forget about corrupting the people as I discussed in the last point. Any trusted site that links to lots of pages is going to have a huge link management problem. Every day hundreds of domains that it links to may expire. You can snap those up and buy trust.
All this doesn't even include folks who make sites look trustworthy with the sole intention of turning them to the dark side later. All of this happens currently with pagerank, but it will be much worse once the trust power is put into the hands of a few.
Many of us are also the first tech support contact for many of our family and friends. It is super frustrating to get problem reports for things like:
My computer too slow! (because of all the spyware)
Can't I get rid of all these popups???
I keep getting this blue screen
I don't have any of these problems on linux/firefox. Its hard for me to figure out what is wrong with software that I don't use and don't care about. Usually my solution is to upgrade them to the stuff I'm using.
If you have a site that uses adwords you have the choice of having text ads, image ads, or a mix. I gather that Google is still planning to give sites the choice about what they display.
I just hope they serve the images from a different domain than the javascript used to generate the text ads. Otherwise it won't be easy for most people to block the images without blocking the text.
The biggest problem with allowing text to be as wide as the browser is that it makes multiple lines of text very hard to read. There is a reason that newspapers and magazines use a column layout. When text is only 3 inches wide, it makes it easy for your eyes to jump from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. When text is 20 inches wide (the width of my web browser) it is just about impossible for me to read it properly. On many really simple sites I tend to resize my web browser down to about 3 inches to make it easier to read.
Having said that, it would be really nice for there to be a column layout in html. I could see it so that you specify the column width and it will make each column the width you specify and the height of the browser. Then the page scrolls out sideways as the extra columns appear to the right. Until then, I prefer blank space to unreadable.
I usually select uncheck the "save background color" when I save as png from gimp. I didn't know any program would actually try to use it. I resaved this particular image with the background color of the page and IE does it correctly.
I guess that means that all the pages I use that image on have to have the same background color. True in this case, but still rather limiting.
I believe that mozilla did implement the proposed standard but put it in their own namespace for now because it isn't a standard yet and they didn't want to be accused of "embrace and extend" the way that Microsoft does.
I've fallen in love with the border-radius CSS property in Mozilla that puts round corners on tables and divs without using images. I use that effect on my Attesoro Java translation editor pages. While it isn't part of the w3c recommendations, it would be a great one for IE to pick up.
Sounds like they are fixing the.pngs for sure. I hope the two css tweaks that I want make it in.
I wrote an article about customizing the firefox web browser. Not only can you block google text ads that are downloaded via javascript using adblock, you can also rewrite pages with google adwords on the fly using Greasemonkey.
Slashdot just makes me do worse on comprehension tests. On slashdot when a post gets rambling or boring I just skip to the next one. For examlpe I got about half way though yours and yet I'm still writing a response.
In these tests they seem to stick the details in the middle of a bunch of other crap that I don't care about. There is just no good way to scan for the details. There are reasons that bullet lists with three items are so compelling as a presentation style.
The problem with standard time in the summer is that the sun rises before anybody is up (like 4 AM) and some daylight in the morning is just wasted. Daylight savings time moves dawn back to 5 AM and gives you an extra hour of daylight in the evening.
You probably see where I'm going with this: who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?????
Daylight savings time should move the day another five hours or so. Imagine if the sun were just coming up as I started thinking about getting out of bed by 10. At 11 or so it would have fully roused me and I could get up and enjoy the full day. At 2 or 3 in the morning the sun would be setting just as I was starting to grow weary of my hacking and start thinking about going to bed. I -- along with most other similarly minded geeks -- would be ever so much more productive.
Of course some of you might complain about the extra screen glare, claim that you don't get any natural light in your basement anyway, or state that you just plain dislike that burning yellow eye in the sky.
That does look pretty neat. Too bad it is flash. Googles javascript stuff seems to work a lot better in my browser. The biggest perks of google's way of doing it is that when I resize my browser window the map resizes, and I can bookmark my coordinates.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite how useful it is, I have some concern with GreaseMonkey and your browsers security.
The basic problem I see is that user scripts are plug-ins to to a plug-in. User scripts could do things that would be bad for security such as:
GreaseMonkey does not use the white list of sites allowed to install plugins and allows user scripts to be installed from just about anywhere.
I'm worried that somebody could set up a repository of user scripts that appear to do useful things but have spyware embedded in them. Users would install GreaseMonkey user scripts from the site thinking they were getting useful functionality but not realizing they were getting additional "goodies".
I don't install user scripts without knowing how they work and looking over the source myself. Preferably, I write my own. I don't see most users being able to do that sort of analysis. Hence the danger.
--Currency Calculator to Calculate Rates of Exchange for Foreign Currencies
The nightly disabled ALL of my extensions. I just can't use firefox without extensions. I'm now on 1.0.4. Hopefully they will have the extension issues resovled by the time 1.1 is released for real.
Sometimes search engine optimization isn't about making a hack site rank well. Sometimes it is about getting the traffic that a really nifty site deserves.
In fact, I wish all the legit sites did everything they should morally do in terms of SEO. Then the spam sites wouldn't have such an easy time pushing them out of the way.
From a business perspective, money spent on making non-spammy search engine optimizations can be much more effective than money spent on marketing or public relations.
--
Scientific calculator with hex, octal, decimal, and binary
On slashdot, you only get to see old content unless you are a subscriber. Only subscribers see stuff less than 15 minutes old. No reason why something like that couldn't work for the NYT. Be interesting so see at what cutoff they could hook the most subscribers. It would have to be somewhere between 15 minutes and 2 weeks.
Foreign Exchange Calculator
AOL blacklists by ip address of the server sending the mail whenever some number of aol users who subscribe to the mailing list hit the "report as spam" button on their email client.
For legit mailing lists you wouldn't think this would happen, but an unbelievable number of aol users treat the "report spam" button as if it were the "trash" button.
To get unblocked by AOL you have to set up an account at which you will receive a request to unsubscribe from each user that uses the "report as spam" button. You then have to parse AOL's format and remove the user from your mailing list. AOL won't even let you contact the user with another "are you sure" type of email.
--Convert Exchange Rates
Is this you: http://dmoz.org/profiles/psiolent.html
I wonder if you can find my editor profile? ;-)
The problem I have with this is that there are many problems with identifying trusted sites and maintaining the trustworthiness of such sites after they have been chosen.
From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites. The open directory projects seems to me to be a candidate for a trusted site. It has editorial controls and links to a heck of a lot of sites.
The first question to ask is: "After the trusted sites is chosen, how much would it cost to buy one?". I suppose dmoz itself would be hard to buy outright, but how much would it take to buy one of the editors, or to buy an editorial position? Probably not much. Dmoz alread has a lot of editorial fraud and it would make the problem worse. I'm not sure that its fair to expect trusted sites not to degrade to some extent.
The second question to ask is: "How hard is it to buy links from trusted sites?". The answer has to be that it is pretty easy. Forget about corrupting the people as I discussed in the last point. Any trusted site that links to lots of pages is going to have a huge link management problem. Every day hundreds of domains that it links to may expire. You can snap those up and buy trust.
All this doesn't even include folks who make sites look trustworthy with the sole intention of turning them to the dark side later. All of this happens currently with pagerank, but it will be much worse once the trust power is put into the hands of a few.
--
Exchange Rate Currency Calculator
Many of us are also the first tech support contact for many of our family and friends. It is super frustrating to get problem reports for things like:
I don't have any of these problems on linux/firefox. Its hard for me to figure out what is wrong with software that I don't use and don't care about. Usually my solution is to upgrade them to the stuff I'm using.
--
Currency Exchange Calculator
If you have a site that uses adwords you have the choice of having text ads, image ads, or a mix. I gather that Google is still planning to give sites the choice about what they display.
I just hope they serve the images from a different domain than the javascript used to generate the text ads. Otherwise it won't be easy for most people to block the images without blocking the text.
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Colored syntax highlighting libraries for Java
Some registration free links:
Unfortunately, I don't see anything about this on Google's press release page yet.
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Conversions of Currency Rates of Exchange
I saved this image with the background color of my page and IE is doing the right thing for that page now. Thanks for the tip!
(Thanks for noticing my bad spelling, btw)
Having said that, it would be really nice for there to be a column layout in html. I could see it so that you specify the column width and it will make each column the width you specify and the height of the browser. Then the page scrolls out sideways as the extra columns appear to the right. Until then, I prefer blank space to unreadable.
I usually select uncheck the "save background color" when I save as png from gimp. I didn't know any program would actually try to use it. I resaved this particular image with the background color of the page and IE does it correctly.
I guess that means that all the pages I use that image on have to have the same background color. True in this case, but still rather limiting.
Thanks, that is fabulous. IE now has a max-width on those entry fields on my contact form that I was complaining about.
Know of any tricks for max-width?
Min-width is pretty easy to work around like you say. It can also be done with a 60x1 transparent gif to make something at least 60 pixels wide.
I haven't found a way to make internet explorer render something no more than 60 pixels wide.
I believe that mozilla did implement the proposed standard but put it in their own namespace for now because it isn't a standard yet and they didn't want to be accused of "embrace and extend" the way that Microsoft does.
My pet peeves with IE that make my life harder when I write web pages:
Sounds like they are fixing the .pngs for sure. I hope the two css tweaks that I want make it in.
Is all the plugins, extensions, chrome, files, and settings that have to be configured after you have the Firefox browser up and running. It would be really nifty to be able to bundle all the things that I do when I install firefox into one mega "extension bundle" or some such that I could install with one click.
I wrote an article about customizing the firefox web browser. Not only can you block google text ads that are downloaded via javascript using adblock, you can also rewrite pages with google adwords on the fly using Greasemonkey.
Slashdot just makes me do worse on comprehension tests. On slashdot when a post gets rambling or boring I just skip to the next one. For examlpe I got about half way though yours and yet I'm still writing a response.
In these tests they seem to stick the details in the middle of a bunch of other crap that I don't care about. There is just no good way to scan for the details. There are reasons that bullet lists with three items are so compelling as a presentation style.
--
Currancy Calc
The problem with standard time in the summer is that the sun rises before anybody is up (like 4 AM) and some daylight in the morning is just wasted. Daylight savings time moves dawn back to 5 AM and gives you an extra hour of daylight in the evening.
You probably see where I'm going with this: who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?????
Daylight savings time should move the day another five hours or so. Imagine if the sun were just coming up as I started thinking about getting out of bed by 10. At 11 or so it would have fully roused me and I could get up and enjoy the full day. At 2 or 3 in the morning the sun would be setting just as I was starting to grow weary of my hacking and start thinking about going to bed. I -- along with most other similarly minded geeks -- would be ever so much more productive.
Of course some of you might complain about the extra screen glare, claim that you don't get any natural light in your basement anyway, or state that you just plain dislike that burning yellow eye in the sky.
--
Rate Exchange Calculator and Currency Convertor
I think that two words would fall under 'fair use' for copyright. You are allowed to take short bits and quote them.
Violation of trademark would make much more sense in this case.
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Rate Exchange Calculator and Currency Convertor
Those watermarks are annoying. Especially since there don't seem to be any on their map images.
Google, remove the watermarks!!!!
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Contact Form allows web site visitors to send you email but will thwart spammers
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Programmer's Cheat Sheet