dria.org

As pointed out in about 1000 other places, the folks over at Performancing have released a fantastic new Firefox extension that turns your browser into a fully-integrated blogging tool that works with a variety of different blogging software. I’m using it right now to post to my custom WordPress install, for example.

You can grab the extension here, and check out the Solution Watch review.

Update: The HTML formatting could use a bit of love, but I’m sure that will come in time :) The HTML formatting is fine if you don’t rely exclusively on the WYSIWYG editor. Neat!

So, the good folks over at Performancing have put together the beginnings of a pretty slick little blogging extension for Firefox.  If you’re curious, you can grab it here.

Note: read the start of the page (above the “Install” button).  That’s where it tells you how to use the extension (hint: F8 and the little clicky button in the lower-right corner of your browser).

The account wizard worked beautifully for my custom WordPress install (you’re soaking in it), which is always a nice thing.

Let’s try some test text: bold, italic, underline, bigger, smaller, link.

So del.icio.us was down for a day, and that was severely cramping my style, so I started casting about for a replacement service. I found Jots.com which has pretty much everything I’m looking for in a third-party bookmark service: RSS feeds, blog autopost tool (nicer than del.icio.us’s), and bookmarklets. There’s no Firefox extension for it yet, but we’ll see what happens there.

Anyhow, from here on in, my “Today’s Links” posts are brought to you by Jots.com. It’s a viable del.icio.us competitor with a much nicer design and interface.

del.icio.us has been down for a couple of hours so far today. It was also down for a couple of hours (5? 6?) a couple of days ago. I’ve been using the service lately because the Firefox Extension, LazySheep bookmarklet, and blog autoposting service have made it useful as a blog-post-link-aggregator. It’s less useful when it’s offline.

Oh well. Hopefully Yahoo! (who apparently just bought del.icio.us for an undisclosed-but-rumoured-to-be-healthy amount of money) will be able to throw enough money at the problem that del.icio.us will become a reliable service again sometime. Right now I’m just moderately irked because I’ve gone to tag a half-dozen sites in the past couple of hours and keep running into the “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible” error message. Grf.

I’m looking for a shared online whiteboard application. Ideally:

• It will be free and open source. Free is necessary. Open source is a clear “nice to have”, but not absolutely necessary.
• It will allow whiteboard sessions to be saved and loaded.
• It will have background options — ie: the background could be quadruled for simple charting, etc.
• It will not require Flash or other plugins.
• It will have a variety of brushes or shape-drawing tools. This one isn’t strictly necessary, but it’d sure be nice to have.
• It will be cross-platform (in an ideal world, it will “just work” in, say, Firefox 1.5).

Don’t suppose anyone could point me at something like this? Thanks!

Check out the Lazy Sheep bookmarklet. It’s really very, very good.

Paul Graham, prolific and excellent essayist, has written an essay about Web 2.0.

Does “Web 2.0″ mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn’t, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don’t need it.

Movie

Boolean and I just finished watching The Elephant Man, starring John Hurt and directed by David Lynch. This is an utterly phenomenal movie, telling (part of) the story of Joseph Merrick. It’s tragic and heartbreaking, while also somewhat uplifting. I won’t bother with any more trite cliches, I’ll just strongly recommend you rent it sometime soon.

Food

Last night, somewhat on a whim, I did a garlic-rosemary sirloin tip roast with potatoes, onions, and asparagus, accompanied by a nice bottle of wine from Portugal (Quinta D Encontro ‘Bairrada Superior’ 2001, $19.95 @ LCBO). Sirloin Tip roasts are roughly half the price of Prime Rib, which is a bonus, and I think Sirloin Tip actually makes for better sandwiches. Tonight’s dinner was leftovers, transformed into total yumminess as Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches with Cordon Bleu Beef Gravy, extremely fresh thick-sliced white bread from the local bakery, and fresh, very lightly steamed, peas. So, a $22 hunk of meat from the local grocery fed 4 people for a nice proper meal, and had enough leftovers for 3 more sandwiches (I’m having the last for lunch tomorrow).

Games

A bunch of us have been playing a strange little web-based space game called Ogame lately. It’s interesting, fun, not very time consuming (unless you’re phik), and a strangely interesting diversion every so often. It’s not for the weak of heart, however, as there’s basically no documentation. Still, if you like space games (or even just resource management/building games with an exploration/piracy twist), you might get a kick out of it.

Books

Tried reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. Didn’t make it very far. It…I dunno. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time, but after an hour’s reading, it still felt very much like he was just rambling aimlessly. Felt much more like a drunken weblog than a novel, I’m sad to say. Abandoned it.

Started reading Oblivion, a recent book of short stories by David Foster Wallace. I’m only about halfway through the first, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. It’s a bit of a jarring leap from Roald Dahl to this, I find, if only because Dahl’s stories are actually short, while Wallace’s first in this volume is 64 pages long or so.

Work

For those of you who don’t know, I work for the Mozilla Foundation, managing the Devmo project. It’s coming along nicely, but we’re always interested in having more people come on board to help out. If you’re interested in Web or XUL development, drop by the Devmo Wiki and take a look around. The place is still a bit rough around the edges as we’re still officially in “alpha” stage (which, here, really means we’re still building stuff), but we’re hoping to shape things up for a beta in the near future. Comments, suggestions, editorial help, and content are always welcome.

I’m in search of software that will allow me to quickly and easily post photos — with thumbnails, thumbnail pages, captions, and ideally a user-comment facility — to the web, only hosted on a private, self-administered server. Think “flickr” or “.mac + iPhoto”, only without having to entrust your photos to someone else.

How about (this would work, too) something like Pixelpost, only with catalogue pages that will display clickable thumbnails for a whole month. Something like that would be sweet. Like candy.

I’m starting to think I might just have to suck it up and build it myself, but if you happen to know of software that does stuff like this, please post a comment here. Note 1: I have a Mac desktop and a Linux server, so whatever it is has to run on that. Thanks! Note 2: If you happen to know of a WordPress plugin that does something roughly like what I’m describing here, please post a url.

It bugs me when dumb bugs in popular web pages stick around for weeks or months. The folks at GU have been informed of this problem with their headlines in Firefox, but nothing seems to be getting done about it. It makes me cranky: