Monday, 30. October 2006, 00:36:57
opera
There is a lot of info available on the Opera browser - in a lot of different places. Like the forums and blogs at my.opera, at the official opera.com site, at operawiki.info, in the opera.* newsgroups, etc. So when I read about the 'Google Co-op Custom Search Engine', this seemed like a great way to aggregate these sources and let Google do its magic.
Here is the result:
Opera Browser Info. Tell me what you think; is this useful? Any important source of info on Opera obviously missing?
Saturday, 28. October 2006, 22:04:43
opera, firefox
Just back from a few days off in a well-preserved
old part of Belgium, so hundreds of newsfeed postings awaited me this evening, providing some entertainment. One was a bit strange:
Asa explained that they refer to 'Firefox 2' when promoting the new release, and in the comments people expressed surprise at this 'move'. I'm not surprised at all though. We are doing exactly the same with Opera. We promote 'Opera 9', not 'Opera 9.0' (and certainly not 'Opera 9.0.2'). The big number jumps are the time to showcase and advertise new functionality.
Talking about '2.0' or '9.0' is bad because
- it is geeky, and
- you'll have to do the artwork again, and
- you can't focus the message enough.
BTW: we might
get a 9.1 release soon, which of course muddles the message somewhat
Tuesday, 17. October 2006, 16:26:42
opera, customize, userstyle, screenshot
Electoral Vote is an great site that aggregates all the known polls in the US Presidential and Senate elections (made by a well known American geek, who happens to live in The Netherlands). The result: a nice red-and-blue map of the States. Unfortunately, the alignment, fonts and heavy HRs make it look rather unappealing. As I intend to follow the site for quite a while again (also did this during the Bush/Kerry battle), it was worthwhile to invest some time in making a userstylesheet to improve the looks.
Before:
After:
I've modified a copy of the site stylesheet. The changes are not very extensive, but that's OK because the site layout isn't very fancy anyway :-) Couldn't change the background color, because it is ugly if this doesn't match the background color in the automatically generated images. But I prefer to read text in
Cambria. I've also made the fat horizontal rules invisible, and added some thin borders instead.
Here's the stylesheet:
electoral-vote.cssOh, and this is the current polling result:
Sunday, 15. October 2006, 23:09:56
opera, userscript, customization
These are the userscripts I currently have running in my 'normal' browser installation:
-
Autosizer activates when you use Opera to view an image file, and adds five different viewing modes for images: original, shrink to fit, maximize, fit to width, fit to height. Prime candidate to turn into a built-in feature, if you ask me.
-
Google Suggest will add the autocomplete feature from Google Suggest to regular Google search pages. Sometimes helpful, sometimes interferes with entering text.
-
Google Thumbnails adds web site thumbnail images to google search results. A bit of harmless fluff (unless you're on dialup), but the thumbs are not always relevant because they depict only the server homepage. This is offered as a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, but it works out-of-the box in Opera as well.
-
Linkify text files improves display of text files by making URLs in text documents clickable. Also adds line numbers when you want. To make lines wrap, press Ctrl+F11 (Fit-to-width).
-
MyOpera Community Forum Enhancements is a suite of toys that improve various tasks at the MyOpera forums, such as showing attachments inline and adding page numbers.
-
Operapedia shows you a relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results. Adds links in the article which will trigger new Google searches. This script needs updates frequently, when either Google or Wikipedia make a little change to their site.
-
PageRank userscript gives proper formatting for Andrew's PageRank popup button.
-
XML tree displays the XML tree for XML documents without style, making it a useful tool for analysing XML files. Also something we could use built-in IMHO.
Inactive scripts, used to be active in my Opera installation:
-
Operafy Asa's blog mangles Asa's blog in a funny way, but makes it harder to read.
-
No Click to Activate works around the new 'Click to activate' plugin handling. It caused problems reading PDFs for me.
-
Link Alert displays icons beside links to specific file types or actions. Nifty. But I rarely need the info, while the icons always show.
-
Enhance blockquotes adds clickable links when a blockquote uses the cite attribute, and the blockquote doesn't already contain a clickable link to the cited work. Alas, I don't see many properly marked-up blockquotes on the web. The script recently seemed to mess up an important website, and I saw no reason to keep it.
Thursday, 12. October 2006, 09:39:45
screenshot, opera
QA staff had a teambuilding activity today. Our bugs could rest, no hunting this afternoon. A handful of QA staff are not located in Oslo and work mostly from home. We've been invited to participate in this activity by making a little quiz. Three of us each made three questions, and we would give the various teams clues for the next part of their challenge only after answering the questions correctly.
A somewhat predictable problem came up: we were too enthousiastic in making difficult questions, and the organisers were too optimistic in their planning. IOW, we had to relax out rules a bit because otherwise they wouldn't get to the 'eat pizza together' part of the activity before midnight
.
Here are the questions I gave them:
- Which three boroughs merged a few years ago to become my current resident borough, and when?
- What music do I listen to while working? Specifically, today?
- What browser is Opera mimicking here?
Congratulations to Joen's team for being the only team to answer all three questions correctly!
WIDGETIZE