Category: web

Freecycling in Dallas

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

I first learned about Freecycling from yesterday’s Slashdot story on organizing gear. And, later that day, Salon had an article on Freecycling. In short, Freecycle lists are regional mailing lists for giving away stuff in the hopes of finding someone else who may be able to use it:

Via Freecycle, Wallis has also received his share of gifts from people he'd never met before: a little tabletop fountain, a 35-millimeter camera, a toaster-oven and a mini-fridge.

[…]

If a true packrat hordes, a “freecycler” can’t stand to see something that might be useful to someone else go to waste, languishing unused in a musty garage, attic, bottom dresser-drawer or — worse yet — a landfill. That type of person has always existed, but today, thanks to the efficient distribution capabilities of the Internet, Wallis has joined forces with an entire tribe of thrifty givers. At Freecycle everything is free, and you can get rid of practically anything, from a pile of dirt to a beading loom. […]

I checked out the Freecycle site and, sure enough, there’s a DFW Freecycle list. I don’t have much to give away at the moment, but this could be handy for the next time I clean out my closet (better that someone might be able to use my stuff than it end up in a landfill).

Spellchecker for Firebird Browser

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

The Mozilla Suite and Mozilla Thunderbird have had a built-in spellchecker for a little while now. And someone came up with the idea of using the spellchecker for with form fields (input boxes and textareas). But, for the most part, the feature request languished.

However, a guy named Torisugari has come up with a workable setup (for both Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Suite). As mentioned in the Firebird forums, he’s created an XPI browser extension that makes use of the existing spellchecker libraries adds a spellcheck option to context menus for input fields and textareas.

The links to download are included in Torisugari’s forum posts and, if this feature interests you, I’d recommend reading the whole thread (or at least skipping to the end) since the later posts point to more recent versions of the extension.

And, as a bonus for Torisugari, he may end up with some money from this — there's a SourceSupport bounty for adding this feature (SourceSupport is a site where users can pledge towards feature requests and new software). It currently stands at $42.84 and I’m tempted to chip in myself.

Multiple IE Versions on One Box!!

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs has discovered a method of running multiple versions of IE on one box! He made the discovery when he noticed that a developer’ edition of IE was able to run concurrently with his installed version.

Working backwards, he discovered which files the developer’s edition used and applied that knowledge towards older IE versions — he downloaded their respective CAB files and extracted bits as needed. A few tweaks later, and he had stand-alone versions (screenshot). (The tweaks, involving IEXPLORE.exe.local, are further explained in the article.)

Of course, Joe outlines the steps he used to create the stand-alone versions and you could follow along with those. Or — even easier — QuicksMode.org has links to the ready-to-run stand-alone versions of IE download.

I’ve tested this on my XP machine here at work, and it works great! When running multiple versions of IE, it can be easy to confuse which version is which; so, QuicksMode wrote a small script to dynamically prepend the IE version number to the page’s title (so that it’s easily visible in the taskbar).

Joe also includes a link for PayPal donations at the bottom of his page to cover bandwidth costs and the like. And, considering how much time this discovery will save me, I was happy to contribute.

PS As you may have noticed, I’m not one to use exclamation points gratuitously. It could have been two years or more since I last typed two consecutive exclamation points. But, I was so excited about this discovery that I included two in the title of this blog entry ;).

Mozilla Firebird — Now with DOM Inspector!

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

The DOM Inspector was checked in to the Mozilla Firebird trunk today and it should appear in tomorrow’s nightly builds. For those not aware, the DOM Inspector is the ultra-useful browser extension for — among other things — analyzing CSS within a webpage. For instance, you can select an element on a page and the DOM Inspector can tell you how the document’s CSS rules cascaded to produce that element’s styling.

I’m really stoked about this check-in since the missing DOM Inspector was one of the few things holding me back from Mozilla Firebird. Now if I can just get URLs from Thunderbird to open in a new Firebird tab, I’ll be all set :). And, some say that there’s a solution to the open-new-tabs issue as well.

I don't doubt that switching to Firebird/Thunderbird is a Good Idea(tm), but I'm still unsure when the development team will officially make the switch. Reading over the roadmap, they say that “[it’s] clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone” — but they don't elaborate on when they expect that switch might be :-/.

Update 11-13: I’ve discovered that Firebird still doesn’t have inline autocomplete in the location bar (URL bar). Bummer.

New CSS Support in IE6

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

One of my recent projects has the luxury of only requiring support for IE6 (and Mozilla, natch). This is a rare occurrence, since most clients require support for least a version or two back (and justifiably so). However, in this case, a web application in another portion of the website (contracted to another vendor) already required IE6, so that support cascaded to the rest of the site.

Coding for such recent browsers is a bit surreal, in a way — all of a sudden, I can write standards compliant code and there’s a good chance it could work work without fiddling ;). Along those lines, I decided to check on new CSS support that may have been introduced into IE6. Generally, I wouldn’t give much thought to the workings of such a recent browser, but such knowledge could be useful to me this time.

So, after briefly searching Google, I found this MSDN Library article on CSS Enhancements in IE6. I was already aware of several of the features, such as IE6’s support for the CSS box model (in short, the CSS spec states that padding is added to an element’s width, and IE versions before 6 ignored this).

I was also pleased to see that IE6 includes some useful bits such as support for min-height (you can specify the minimum height on an element). Interestingly enough, the article didn’t mention min-width, which I would think they could have implemented at the same time (or, should have been). Perhaps most amusing to me, though, is that IE6 only now supports padding on images. How is it that image-padding slipped under their radar for so long?