Beginner’s Guide To The Internet

29Sep/090

BGI: Browser Tips – Cleaning Up Firefox

Do you find that you have the same browser windows open all the time? (All of your Google stuff? Hint! Hint!) Well I certainly do. I have my GMail, Google Reader, and Calendar open all the time, I never close them. Anyway, I found this great hint on how to integrate them more cleanly into the browser.

Original link: Set Up Space-Saving, Permanent Gmail and Reader Tabs in Firefox

First you need to download the following firefox plugins:

Install all 4 of those, and restart Firefox.

Now restart and open the tabs pages that you want to integrate, I would suggest:

Now right click on the tab and select Permatabs > Permanent tab. Do that with each tab.

PermaTab

Next right click on the tab and select FaviconizeTab. Again do this with every tab. This gives you a very small icon in the top left hand corner where you can always go to get your important tabs.

FaviconizeTab

Now to optimize a little more (unread counts).

Start with GMail.

Open Tools > Add Ons
Then select the preferences for Better Gmail 2.
You will want to select: Show Unread Message Count on Favicon (Bogs)

GMail Unread Count Setting

Now we will do the same with Google Reader

Open Tools > Add Ons
Then select the preferences for Better GReader 0.8.
You will want to select: Show Unread Message Count in Favicon

GReader Unread Count Settings

If everything has gone according to plan your Firefox should now have permanent tabs, that take up no room. Something like this:

Clutter Free Firefox

Filed under: Beginner's Guide To The Internet, Software No Comments

16Sep/091

BGI: Really Simple Syndication

Everyone has websites that they know and love. They go back to them time and time again. Well as spend more and more time with your fingers tied to a keyboard (or for the true internet beginners... with their hand on a mouse!) the number of sites that you need to check on your rotation will increase to an unreasonably large number. So how do you keep track? The answer is Really Simple Syndication or RSS. I know that most people have seem the RSS symbol, but I know that far too many people don't use it.

It's tough for me to fathom that the internet newbies aren't using RSS, while the internet hipsters are already giving RSS a post-mortem. I don't believe that RSS is dead, and certainly not in favour of Twitter (which is a strange and wonderful beast, but that will be explained in a future post). So here is what RSS is and why you must embrace it...

RSS is a full site summary of all content summarized in one document (XML format) so that it is machine read-able so that it may be consumed by many different platforms, usually called feed readers or feed aggregators. In my mind there is only one feed reader worth using that is the very excellent Google Reader (reader.google.com). What this gives you is a common place to view the new content from all the sites that you regularly follow. It will give you an unread count of new items from all the sites, that is updated roughly hourly.

It lets you keep track of sites that would normally take hours to follow and do it constantly. To put it in perspective I have 357 feeds in my reader now, and I am able to keep mostly up-to-date in the items I wish to read (which certainly isn't everything). There is no way I would be able to do this without a reader, as going to 357 sites daily taking 30 seconds per site (not reading anything) would take 3 full hours. Having this inbox of articles to read is simply awesome.

RSS Article Inbox

Adding sites to your feed reader of choice is very easy, just click the RSS icon in the address bar like this one seen in Firefox.

RSS Icon address bar

It will prompt you with what you would like to add the feed to, pick google reader and you are away to the races. It honestly will change the way that you view the internet. The idea of 'surfing' will be a thing of the past and you will have Google Reader (or *sigh* some other reader) open all day to see what is new. It is a real time saver, and lets you keep up with everything that you want to know.

So take a moment and add the feed for this blog to your reader: TylerOnEverything.com RSS Feed.

Beyond the time saving abilities of this sort of setup it has the added benefit of giving you your own microcosm for google to search. Think of it your own private google!

So embrace RSS and stop surfing blindly.

Filed under: Beginner's Guide To The Internet 1 Comment

22Jul/090

BGI: AJAX and why JavaScript is so damn important!

So many times I have seen and heard people speak of AJAX like it were a programming language. I have heard people who know nothing about computer programming, and I have heard programmers say it. It seemed like for a few years everyone was talking about AJAX, and I guess to some point people still are. Perhaps now people are just taking it for granted.

Well AJAX is not a language, in fact it's not even really a technology, it is more like a technique. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. What it does is give the ability for web applications to behave more like desktop apps rather than the page reloading after each click.

The first application that extensively used AJAX was GMail, it revolutioned the way that web apps looked and functioned. So how does AJAX work? First a few things that you will need to know about Javascript.

Javascript is run in the browser, meaning that it is not run on the server, so when javascript executes it will change the appearance of the webpage without a request to the server. For the most part it was used to change images when you hovered over them, and change text when a button was clicked. Nothing particularly powerful, it really seemed more like a toy. It gives the programmer the ability to change different properties of the HTML on the fly. So if you have something along the lines of <h1 id="myHeadline">The Headline</h1> you can access the element by its ID and change the style or even the inner content.

So for instance document.getElementById("myHeadline").innerHTML = "New Heading" would change the "The Headline" to "New Heading". The ability to alter there elements without contacting the server was useful but it didn't have much power.

What has happened now is the ability of the browser to make a background request back to the web server to fetch some data. This is all done with javascript. The javascript will then update the page without reloading it. This gives the look and feel of the desktop app.

Because of this type of behavior javascript has become a very important part of common webpages. You now see that browsers base their speed ratings very much along the lines of their javascript engine. These new fangled sites speed to operate. How long it takes to open an email in gmail, load more comments on digg are dependent on how fast the javascript engine is in your browser.

Filed under: Beginner's Guide To The Internet, Everything No Comments

29May/094

BGI: Picking A Browser

The largest market share of browser's hitting this website is Internet Explorer! 38% of all visits to this website are with Internet Explorer, Firefox is next with 35%, then Safari at 12%. I hate the fact that Internet Explorer is still winning! I crave the day when I check these stats and see something, ANYTHING other than IE. Having said that I should point out that I am actually doing pretty well. In the wild and not using this website as a reference, IE holds about a 66% market share. This number needs to change, especially in regards to IE 6.

Internet Explorer 6 was released on August 27, 2001. That is roughly 8 years ago. It was not a particularly great browser when it was released but due to Microsoft Bundling it with Windows it eventually won out against Netscape. In its peak in 2002-03 it had market share in the high 80s. Now it dwindles for good reason in the less than 20% range. Yet in the corporate world, it is still used extensively. In fact I still have IE6 (along with 3 other browsers) installed on my computer at work.

At this point I cannot fathom how people still use IE6. It is a hideous browser, to compare it to an Automobile that was released in the same year. It is a Pontiac Aztec:

Pontiac Aztec

Now an alternative would be Firefox 3.0. It is a good deal faster, with much richer features. It is a safer browser and better yet it is free! Would you rather drive a 2001 Pontiac Aztec or would you rather drive this (keeping in mind that it is free!):

BMW M3

Well 66% of all people are still driving the Aztec. Now since I have slammed IE enough I should go into greater detail as to why it sucks, and give some alternatives.

Firefox 3.0

This looks to be the current favourite to unseat Internet Explorer as the browser champion. In its current state, it is hard to question Firefox's supremacy in the browser race. Firefox is based off the old open source code base of the now defunct Netscape project.

Firefox has a lot going for it. It is a very fast browser, especially in comparison to IE. It should be getting even faster after the upcoming release of FireFox 3.5, which should come with the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine enabled. Yet if you are looking for pure speed, Firefox is not the king. Where FireFox wins hands down, is its extensibility.

Firefox has a vast theme and plugin catalog (created by everyday users) to be able to make the browser do whatever you want it to do. The Firefox themes allow you to change the appearance of the browser to suit your personal tastes.

Beyond the appearance, the plugins capability of Firefox, allows you to add functionality to suit your needs. Email notifier? Yep Gmail notifier handles that. Ad Block Plus blocks ads. GMarks integrates with you Google Bookmarks. The list is never ending, there is a Better Gmail plugin, that ads features to Gmail. Plugins for improving google reader, links to del-i-cious, digg, you name it. You can make firefox do pretty much anything you want, and that is its strength.

Most importantlyFirefox is standards based. This means that it renders web pages to look the way a published set of standards dictate they should look. Differences from the published standards are treated as bugs by the Firefox developers.

Also important to note is that Firefox is available on all computing platforms.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is in it's infancy. It was only released in beta form in September of 2008. It has a singular goal in optimizing browser performance to bring web-apps to the desktop. Google has a great deal invested in web applications (Google Docs, GMail, etc...) and to make them truly compete with desktop applications they felt they needed a faster browser; which is exactly what Google Chrome is.

Chrome has far and away the fastest Javascript engine on the market (name V8). The javascript processing time of a browser is crucial to the performance of the newer web applications. Beyond that there are many other advancements. The name chrome comes from the fact that that is exactly what it is lacking, the chrome. It tries to give as much content as possible content of websites as opposed to the browser itself. As well each tab in the browser operates in a seperate process. This means that if a bit of bad javascript crashes the browser, in Chrome it will only crash the single tab, rather than all existing tabs.

Chrome's biggest short comings are the strengths of Firefox. It lacks customizability, although a plugin in frastructure is coming. As well for the time being it is only available on Windoze although OS X and linux versions are in the pipeline.

Regardless of the current small market share of Chrome, I think that it actually has the best shot of unseeding IE. Google is pushing this browser very hard, they have taken it out of the beta state remarkably quickly for a Google product. They are marketing it a huge amount; they are even rumoured to be taking out television ads. Beyond the advertising they are said to be negotiating with computer manufacturers to OEM Chrome, which would be a major coup against IE.

Chrome is my browser of choice on Windoze.

Safari

Safari is Apple's answer to the browser. It started out as being OS X only, but has now been extended to the windows platform. Like Firefox and Chrome it is standards based, as well it is a very fast browser, yet it does not compete with Chrome. Yet it is faster than Firefox on OS X, and very comparable on Windoze.

Where Safari lacks, is it does not seem to be a polished application on the Windoze platform, and it lacks the extensibility of Firefox. Safari is very close to being my browser of choice on OS X, but with the upcoming version of Firefox, I think I will continue with it.

Internet Explorer

Saving the worst piece of shit for last. This browser is everything that is wrong with the internet, and it is leading the downfall of Microsoft. The only thing that is has going for it is the update infrastructure being tied in with Windows Update so that it can be pushed to the client in a corporate setting. Other than that! It's a nightmare.

Is it standards based? Nope. Internet Explorer says FUCK YOU to standards. You create a website according to the web standards and it will work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, ... pretty much every browser EXCEPT IE. You need to put in all kinds of conditional work to make the website look good in Internet Explorer.

Is it fast? Nope, one of the slowest browsers on the market.

Is it extensible? There is a growing amount of plugins, but it is extremely limited in comparison to Firefox.

Available on all platforms? Nope it is windoze only. A few years back there was an attempt to create a Mac version, but that one was even more fucked up then the windows version.

So with all the shittyness spewing out of IE why does it have the most market share? The easy answer: People are too stupid/lazy to download a far superior browser. I have high hopes that when Chrome starts being bundled on OEM machines (hopefully Dell and HP) then we may see IE die the death it so richly deserves.

In short, when picking a browser pick ANYTHING except Internet Explorer!

Filed under: Beginner's Guide To The Internet, Software, Technology 4 Comments

20May/090

Beginner’s Guide To The Internet: PT 1.5 (The Prequel)

My post in regards to Google Bookmarks has inspired me to start a whole new sub-section on the site! I am creating a new series called: A Beginner's Guide To The Internet. I am going to try to outline some of the things that people should know in regards to the current state of the internet, as well as little tips and tricks that I have found. To start off, I will get into what the Web 2.0 culture really is.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 has become a real buzz word. There still seems to be some real confusion as to what it is. Some people equate it to using newer technologies that make web-pages seem more desktop application like. That is not at all how I interpret it. Web 2.0 is the personalization of the web.

An example. This blog page is not Web 2.0. When you visit the page, it looks the same for you as it would for the next person (with a few exceptions). This is the old standard of the web, and really it is not bad, but it did not fully embrace the full capabilities. Web 2.0 is specifically content that is tailored to you. When you visit Facebook or Hotmail, you see content that is your content. The next person will see an entirely new set of content. This contextual setup is the real definition of web 2.0, and it is spelling the end of the desktop application age.

With web 2.0 we work on data that is stored and secured on the internet, that is never downloaded. I am huge proponent of this new cloud computing revolution. When I check my email, I access the Google Mail servers and get my messages, I frequently do it from a web browser, but my smart phone can download email so that I have an offline copy as well. Downloading the message does not remove it from the cloud. It simply makes a synchronized copy, the main repository of the data is still the Google database. This is the change in the web culture; the data simply being out there... Out there in the cloud!

Cloud computing is all the rage, and we are not fully there yet. We still maintain a large amount of data on our personal computers, but a good deal of it, is stored out in the cloud where it can be universally accessed. I would hazard that the majority internet users have a free web based email account. Popular systems included Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. These services do not require you to have any data downloaded onto your computer. You can access them through a webpage, on your phone, from a desktop client, but the data is always housed on the web. Changing the data through any client application, also must modify the data on the web. And because of this, it will also mean that if you check the data from another device it will always be synchronized. This is a perfect example of Web 2.0 and the cloud.

Going forward you can expect to see more applications move to this model. Already we are starting to see online storage solutions; Amazon's S3 being a big one. It allows you to access your data from any computer. As connection speeds begin to increase we will see that an ever larger part of our data will be stored in these online services. We aren't there yet, but we will be soon.

Coming Soon:

Picking the right browser (and by that I mean stabbing yourself in the face if you use Internet Explorer).

Filed under: Beginner's Guide To The Internet, Everything No Comments

15May/091

Google Bookmarks

I am going to be writing a little bit about things that I have found that make my life easier. This is one google product that I have been using and loving , yet it doesn't seem to get any publicity; it's Google Bookmarks.

I had been looking for a while for a way to handle my bookmarks. There are options out there. Apple's MobileMe will sync your bookmarks to the cloud, but it didn't seem to have a solution with Windows (and thus my work machines), there are tons of linking services; Digg, Delicious, etc... But those were all social bookmarking. I wanted something that was in the cloud, that was private, easily organizable. I thought to myself: Why the hell does Google not do bookmarks?!?!? Which led me to wonder if they did.

I did a quick search for 'Google Bookmarks' and sure enough there it is! It lacks the spit and polish of most of their products, but it is quickly working its way up my favorite products list. You see I was sick and tired of emailing myself links that I found at work, or at other's computers. It would be something like, see an interesting link off a blog, follow a few more pages, bam! This is a great tutorial! Now I need to get that tutorial to somewhere I will remember it, and that I could easily find it again. That was done through tags in Google Reader or through emailing it to myself, both of whice were crappy solutions.

Now I just use Google's booksmarks service. The key is placing a link (this one: Bookmark This Page - you can just drag it to your bar), in your bookmark bar in your browser. When you click it, it will open a dialog box with the information of the current page in it. You can add coma seperated tags, and add a description. Clicking OK adds it to your bookmarks, which is accessible at: http://www.google.com/bookmarks/. This gives you a similar searching and browsing structure as GMail.

I absolutely love that I have all my bookmarks with me at all times. It is also very very easy to add a new link to the system. It really is a simple yet elegant solution to my problem. Are there are any other solutions that you like? This may not be typical Google clean, but it certainly the best solution that I have found.

Filed under: Beginner's Guide To The Internet, Software, Technology 1 Comment

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