Monday, October 17, 2005

two mostly pointless (but geekariffic!) timesucks



Despite my best intentions to allow my work only to be distracted by my obsessive reading about the pharmaceutical industry, large swaths of the afternoon got sucked up by two distractions:
1. Trying to import as much album artwork as possible into my iTunes collection using this newly-discovered little utility. All the while when I was doing this, I wondered what the benefit was going to be of having an album's artwork show up on the postage-stamp-sized screen of my Nano as it bounces around inside my pocket while I'm jogging.

2. Figuring out how have my very own favicon (the little icon that appears to the left of the URL in one's browser).* This necessitated the impromptu creation of an Official JFW logo. Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, the logo does not actually work in Internet Explorer but instead will only be visible to whatever Firefox users read this blog other than Eszter and I.**
In case you are wondering, yes there were better ways I could have been spending my time. The menace of accumulating laundry being an obvious example.

So long as I'm venting my geek-spleen, let me add that I have always wished Blogger had tags (by which I mean keywords, or categories for posts; see example tag cloud), and I have been lately tempted to try to subcontract someone to export my entire blog--archives, comments, karaoke photos, everything--out of Blogger and into some other platform just so I can have them. I say "subcontract" because even I have to draw the cyberprocrastination line somewhere.

* This page creates the icon for you and explains how to change your template to include one. But: if you use Blogger, you have to serve the icon from somewhere else.

** Or is it "other than Eszter and me"? Ugh: lately I feel like I've acquired some kind of grammatical brain lesion or something.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

jfw logo also visible in Netscape

john said...

I had to delete jfw from my favorites then add it again to make the logo show up on my toolbar.

I use Firefox, by the way.

Anonymous said...

Count me in for the Cool-People-Who-Use-Firefox-and-Can See-the-Nifty-Logo-Club... I wouldn't be surprised if you've got a decent-sized Mozilla readership, given the way the general browser-user stats have been leaning.

Milk said...

Yes some of us do use Mozilla and all its awesomeness, and your logo works just fine in it.

Corey said...

another firefox user reports.... The logo looks good by the way.

tina said...

The logo looks great! (I think we should change the question to "why would anyone who reads this blog use Internet Explorer?")

BTW, I think lyrics are on the way to iTunes, too, so you can plan another afternoon for that.

jeremy said...

I would love it if everyone reading this blog stopped using Internet Explorer and started using Firefox. It's so much better. So, dear reader, what are you waiting for?

Elizabeth said...

The logo shows up in Safari, too. Does that make it microsoft's problem?

Anonymous said...

Oooh, thanks for all the kind mentions.

FYI, if you are NOT a Firefox user (yet) and are concerned about being able to follow the download details, feel free to check out this guide I wrote about installing the program: http://webuse.info/firefox.
Or send the link to your friends and relatives who may not yet be using it.

Also, stay tuned for some detailed instructions on how to optimize it. I just promised my students that I would teach them all sorts of nifty things about it this Wednesday so I'll have to put together a guide by then anyway. (They were wondering why my browser said "Eszter's Superturtle" instead of Mozilla Firefox, which led us down the path of all sorts of Firefox goodness.) I'll be sure to post an update on my blog (and will be happy to return here and add a comment here as well).

As for tag clouds (thanks for the link:), you can try TagCloud.com. It's not quite the same as having your own tags, but it will create a cloud based on your feeds. Again, not ideal, but it's a start.

Regarding Firefox popularity, its spread is stagnating. (I have to run so I can't look up the link, but there are references on this.) I'm not surprised, but more on that some other time as well.

Finally, it should be "Eszter and me", which I know, because it would be "other than me" and you're just adding another person to the list.

Anonymous said...

Whew! Thanks for bringing this up -- here I was with a site with no favicon. It's all fixed now. And yes, I can see your favicon with Firefox.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and BTW, I can also see your favicon with IE, but in order to do so, I had to grab the old vanilla icon with the mouse and drag it off onto the page a couple of times -- then the new groovy one showed up. Quicker than clearing the cache or whatever.

Ang said...

Forgive my ignorance, everyone, but what makes one browser "better" than another? I'm not trying to be cute. I really don't know.

jeremy said...

Ang: Whatever else one might mention, Firefox allows you to have tabs and IE doesn't. If you set up your tabs, you can have all your favorite sites open as tabs in one window with one click.

Anonymous said...

Ang: you can start here to get an answer to your question. Also, as I note on webuse.info/firefox, it's more secure than IE.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if anyone - at least JFW?:) - is going to see this here at this point, but I said I'd come back and post about it so here it is. I've put up a list of my favorite Firefox extensions: http://webuse.info/firefoxplus.

My long-term goal is to make it a much more user-friendly page (with detailed instructions about how you install these things) including screen shots, but that just takes too long so this is it for now. Enjoy, there are some super useful ones in there and some really fun ones as well.