Tag Archive for 'firefox'Page 2 of 2

Time to Change the RSS Reader: Google Reader

Published
by
Josh Kim
on March 18, 2007
in Project Ideas and Web Applications
. Comments

I’ve decided to ditch Vienna for my RSS feeds. It’s been getting on my nerves with a lot of little bugs (double downloading, “recent post” count problems), and I decided it’s time I should make the web app jump for this type of application.

I’ve written before on how a problem encourages me to move and try something new. Here’s what’s relevant from that post.

Feeds

  • I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
  • I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
  • I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…

Looks like I’m going to be going against my own words. I still don’t like online apps for certain things, but for feeds, google reader is quickly becoming something that… just works.

Short-cut keys for Google Reader

Only a subset of the advertised short-cut keys work for me, since I turned on “start searching when I type” feature in Firefox (BonEcho for the mac users). But these seem to work:

  • s: Star an item
  • n: Navigate to next item without opening it
  • p: Navigate to previous item without opening it
  • j: Open next item
  • k: Open previous item
    • Oh sweet vi keys…
  • o: Open / Close item (In list view, doesn’t do anything in expanded view)
  • r: Refresh
  • t: Tag it

I think there might be more, but this is more than enough, I think.

What would be really nice is if I had the ability to scroll down an article using a shortcut key also. For example, if the post I’m reading is longer in height than the window it’s in, I want to be able to scroll down on just that story. I’d much rather have j and k be the “scroll key” and have l and ; be the “next/previous post”… thereby solidifying Google’s love for vi. I’m probably asking too much.

CSS Day

Published
by
Josh Kim
on January 25, 2007
in Web Development
. Comments

http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/ie7-dehacker.html

This has to be the… best… thing I’ve read all day, possibly, all month. It helped me so much in solidifying all the unhappiness and anger at the state of the CSS world… up through the recent release of IE 7.

Today, I sat down with some code I had written for a site I’m doing, and ripped it apart. I came across this really strange bug that happens with using ul and li as navigation. For some reason (well… I kinda saw it coming…), the margin attribute is poorly defined. I have yet to look up the proper behavior from the W3C doc, but I’ll do so tomorrow.

Regardless, since there is a difference between the way Firefox and IE handles this situation, I was actually going to pull out the star-html hack… but lo and behold, this hack does not work anymore for IE 7.

http://24ways.org/2005/avoiding-css-hacks-for-internet-explorer

What is a CSS hack? Such a great read… Time to use method #3… if only I had read the positioniseverything article before this one… see, now I know for a fact hack #1 doesn’t work. And since #2 is a hack… boo.

http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/

Good refresher for anyone that wants to learn more about positioning. I love the images… I love how I don’t have to click on ANYTHING, but just to go from page to page. I hated how for some tutorials how I’d have to go and manually load up the page in a separate page and have to close it back down just to realize I want to open it up again.

Thumbs up, Mr. Mike Hall. I look forward to going through some of your other stuff at brainjar. (Except, I just realized it’s all in ASP. Tee hee…)

This has been more or less a brain dump. I bet I’ll be dreaming in CSS tonight.

And… I need a new category for articles like this. And also, I need to come up with a new method of posting these entries, because I have a feeling more than half the readership at this point doesn’t care about CSS.

This weekend, I hope, I’ll be able to tinker with the site and make sure that the right people get the right content. Xanga/Facebook people need to get the personalized feeds, while social sites or technology-related blogs need to get the nerdy feeds. Yum.