Viewing 2 posts tagged with 'firefox' (Oldest First :: Newest First) Show related: del.icio.us links, tags

Saturday, May 13 2006, 4:09 PM

Firefox is awesome. Firefox combined with cool extensions is even better. I've been using the Adblock Plus extension for a while, and I certainly dig it. It allows you to filter out advertisements (or other content, if you wish) using regular expressions, or just simple filters. Generally ads don't bother me that much. I've just learned to look around them.

The ones that really bother me are the ones that interrupt the content I'm reading. There are two schemes that drive me bonkers. The first is Google Adwords. People seem to have zero reservation about placing the adword boxes right in the middle of their content, with the exact same styling as the content they're surrounded by. How annoying. The second just appeared recently, and uses a piece of JavaScript to edit the document client-side so that certain keywords appear as links, but are really just advertisements that pop up on your screen as soon as you mouse over them. Since my sight is somewhat impaired, I do the "highlight a line so I know where I'm reading" trick quite a bit, and clicking on one of those keywords is a really quick way to piss me off.

Adblock Plus has given me an avenue to get rid of these annoyances. The following two rules seem to block all of the crap I mentioned above. I wouldn't call them perfect yet, since I've only tested them on a few sites.

The first blocks the Google Ads, and the second blocks the faux-link pop-up ads. Enjoy.

adblockplus annoyances firefox google tips

Tuesday, April 04 2006, 4:25 AM

I'm sure all the cool kids have known about this site for a long time, but I just gave del.icio.us a try this weekend, and I must say it's pretty neat. It's termed as a social bookmarking service. So far, I've just used the bookmarking part, and none of the social part. There are a few things that make it pretty handy. First, it allows you to store bookmarks in a central location. This makes it easy to keep track of handy dandy links across multiple computers, which is really handy for someone like me. Second, each bookmark is tagged with one or more categories for organization. Third, there are a few extensions for Firefox that integrate the tagging and viewing of bookmarks right into the browser, so you don't have to go to the site to view what you've saved.

Another really neat feature is the ability to export RSS feeds for all of your bookmarks or just bookmarks in individual categories. I see this as being a cool thing because I could tag articles I find interesting with a particular category, and have them show up in a section of my page for others to see. The tagging process allows one to enter a description, and those descriptions should show up in the RSS output as well. It could just be more fluff on my website (of which there is already plenty), but it could be cool at the same time.

delicious firefox rss

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