Daily Twaddle

What are these website owners thinking when they decide to make advertisements that look like regular links on their websites? Are they crazy? This must be the ultimate in online-advertisement annoyances.

What Are You Talking About?

It’s called IntelliTXT, “inline text ads”, or “keyword popovers.” Website owners pay third-party companies to locate keywords on their website and display relevant commercial information. Once IntelliTXT finds a corresponding keyword, it creates an annoying link/pop-up and double-underlines the word. See my screenshot below:

How Do You Get Rid Of Them?

Firefox: Install Adblock Plus.
Safari: Install SafariBlock.
Internet Explorer: Install IE7Pro, then follow these directions.
If all else fails: Ask the owner of the website to stop!

My Rant to The Jerks

I don’t give a crap if you have to make a living with online advertisements. Really, I don’t. I will go to another site that won’t annoy me to death.

Here are some interesting statistics about the people who visit this website.

This first graphic is a USA map showing where each of my visitors come from. A big thanks to Carol for keeping it strong in Wisconsin!

This second graphic is a pie chart that shows my user’s browser and operating system. Look! Only half the people use Internet Explorer! Yay! Maybe that number will continue to decrease over the years as other browsers like Firefox get popular.

Note: This generic, non-identifiable data is collected anonymously. Websites gather this information in order to better serve the needs of their users (for example: make sure the design works with Internet Explorer since half of the people who visit my site use it).

Firefox (my browser of choice), keeps forgetting my password and log-in information even though I checked the “remember me” on the website. Each time I went back to the website, I had to type in my login credentials again - annoying!

I couldn’t figure it out! I allow cookies for websites, so what’s the problem?

Well, I accept cookies alright… but only until Firefox closes! Duh! So, if you’re experiencing this problem, go to Preferences > Privacy > and in the cookies section choose to keep until “they expire” from the drop-down menu.

Happy browsing!

Firefox introduced a “Campus Edition” of their browser for scholars and students. This version combines the most popular add-ons for students into one easy download.

Since I already had Firefox, I just downloaded the extensions suggested for students. And… I found one of the most useful computer features I’ve ever used as a student! Zotero! This extension helps me collect, manage, and cite my research sources. It rocks! I save so much time in my research by clicking a button instead of writing an entire bibliography.

This video explains Zotero’s useful features:

I just installed a couple of really neat Firefox extensions. Both of these add-ons can be described as “what will happen when I click” helpers.

1. Google Preview. Shows little preview-pictures of websites in the Google search results. You get to see what the site looks like before you click on it. I changed the per-page-display preference from 10 images to 20 images. Other than that… it works perfectly!

2. Link Alert. Now this one I really like. When you hover over a link with your mouse, the cursor will change to indicate what kind of link it is. For example, if the link is a Word document - the mouse pointer will show a little word document image. Cool huh?

Enjoy!

Oh yes my friends. I’ve been so sad since I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 because it didn’t support the old version of ColorZilla.

Introducing ColorZilla 1.0! Oh happy day.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.

Firefox rocks my world! And so does ColorZilla!

I’ve noticed many people making lists of their favorite Firefox extensions. I made a list a while ago, but since the list is ever-changing, I thought I’d hit you with an update. These are in no particular order.

For those of you not using Firefox… you’re missing out.

1. Web Developer Toolbar. If you have anything to do with website function or layout, download this extension. It’s a time/life saver!
2. Cookie Button. Adds a button in your toolbar (or status bar) to quickly set cookie permissions for the site you’re viewing. So awesome and handy!
3. Iget. Initiate a direct download. It sounds useless since clicking on a download should download the file right? But have you ever clicked on a video or sound file and it just starts playing through your browser? Annoying! This extension solves that problem.
4. NoScript. I’m paranoid. No script on my browser (unless you’ve got something really cool).
5. Search Status. Oooh yes. This tells me a site’s pagerank from Google. It sits in the status bar.
6. PDF Download. What do I want to do with a link to a PDF file? View it, download it, or cancel (because I didn’t know it was a PDF file). Thank you for giving me options!
7. Tab Mix Plus. It’s not Firefox until you install this extension. I love tabbed browsing. With this extension I can have my browser my way. Kind of like Burger King.
8. Clear Private Data. This is useful as a designer. Starting with a fresh browser (clear of history and cache) is easy with this one-click button.
9. FireFTP. File management baby! This may be the most useful extension I use. I can upload/download to my servers with just a few clicks. It’s so nice.

As far as themes go, I like Mostly Crystal the best. I like it because there is an icon for everything (even menu items). It also saves my favicons in my toolbar and bookmarks.