Get to your favorite sites quickly – even if you don’t remember the URLs. Type your term into the location bar (aka the Awesome Bar) and the autocomplete function will include possible matches from your browsing history, bookmarked sites and open tabs.

The Awesome Bar learns as you use it—over time, it adapts to your preferences and offers better-fitting matches.

I’ll give some examples in future blog posts.

Now that I’ve picked up blogging again I’ve once again become annoyed with how this TinyMCE editor captures the <Tab> key thereby overriding Firefox’s tab navigation. What makes it even weirder is that it doesn’t even indent anything when using <Tab>.

I’ll let this post serve a dual purpose by also acting as a reminder for myself to rip this stuff out of the relevant event handler once I get around to it.

Here’s what it looks like:

The ID for the popout is share_popout in case you want to hide it using user styles. Here’s what you can use for Stylish:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
 
@-moz-document domain("blog.okcupid.com") {
    #share_popout {
        display: none;
    }
}

The first talk I’ve watched so far is Seth Godin’s “This Is Broken” talk at the Gel conference back in 2006. In it Seth talks about stuff that’s broken, why it’s broken and why sometimes it’s a good thing but usually a bad and how all around us is this huge hidden potential to make things unbroken and benefit from it.

I don’t want to give away too much about the talk so I’ll just say that it’s definitely worth watching ;-)

Footnotes

1. Perhaps you’re wondering, “Why did you start with this talk”? Or maybe I just really want to share why :-) Well, the reason it caught my eye on the front page of TED.com is because a good acquaintance of mine heads a company that organizes conferences and they had Seth over for one of their conferences. It’s funny how the mind works.

I’d be very happy if at least the core functionality from the party and matchmaking system from Modern Warfare 2 would be preserved in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Seeing as how Call of Duty: Black Ops has a confirmed release date for 9 November 2010 (less than 6 months away) there may not be a lot of time left to integrate this feature if it has not already been taken into account but one can certainly hope :-)

Thanks!

Yes, this is actually possible and quite easy because all one has to do is register an event handler for the onCopy event. The sites I’ve stumbled upon so far are using it to add some text like “Read more at …”.

This is extremely annoying because it breaks my workflow in several situations, not limited to:

• When I want to search the web using the copied text: I will first copy the text (Ctrl + C) and then paste it into the search box using (Ctrl + K and Ctrl + P) (possibly adding more search terms).
• When I want to copy the text for use in a blog post (like this one).

If you don’t understand why this is annoying, you just don’t get it.

So for now I’ve enabled NoScript again, but as NoScript whitelists domains it means some websites might still slip through the cracks. If I get annoyed enough I might look into the possibility of removing attached event handlers using JavaScript injection (e.g. through GreaseMonkey).

CNN's video website

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Problem #1: When a video is done playing, all player functionality is disabled and after a few seconds the player automatically skips to the next video.

Solution: Don’t do this! Instead, keep all player functionality enabled (time slider, replay, share etc.) and allow the user to permanently configure the automatic skip behavior.

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Problem #2: The links to videos are not actual links but the very common <a href=”#” onclick=”…”>link</a> type.

The biggest issue with doing this is that it breaks a lot of functionality not directly related to the website itself. One example is that your visitors will be unable to easily copy links using the browser’s “Copy Link Location” functionality (to use on their blog for example), but one should also not forgot about all those other extensions and applications (think search engines) that depend on the ability to scrape links.

Solution: Add the real permalink as an href and override the default handler using JavaScript (see Problem #3). An added advantage of doing this is that navigating will still work even when JavaScript is disabled.

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Problem #3: JavaScript is used to change the playing video but the URL is not adjusted (you can get a direct link to the video, but you have to do this from within the Flash player and because of Problem #1 you have to do so before the video ends).

Solution: To adjust the link, but not reload the page, use an anchor to separate the parameters, i.e. http://us.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/10/30/kark.flooded.car.kark. These URLs can also act as your permalinks, you just have to handle everything after the # as a parameter. CNN actually only supports this behavior as you can tell by following the link above, so the only change that needs to be made is that the href’s need to be set correctly. The only problem with using this technique is that using real anchors becomes a bit problematic.

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Problem #4: There are no links to relevant resources.

You only get a title and a short summary of the video, e.g. “Doomed boy seen on camera”, “A store worker testifies about seeing the Kehoe brothers before they were savagely attacked.”. But this doesn’t tell you anything!

Solution: Actually include links to a news article, or multiple news articles.

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I made use of CNN’s feedback functionality to leave my comments on their video website, let’s hope they actually do something with it.

To make it more comfortable to create tasks I’ve started using the GNOME Do plugin for Remember the Milk (an online to do list and task management).

A really cool feature from Remember the Milk is the format in which you can enter the due dates, you can do anything from exact dates to using statements like “End of the month” or “60 days from now”. They’ve documented all the possibilities in their documentation.