Clazh » FireFox

How To Access Experts Exchange and Bypass Without Registering

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:25:54 +0000

Have you ever been annoyed when you search on Google and click on a link that you find relevant only to find that you need to register to have access to the content. You might be wondering how the content in these sites are indexed when they are not actually viewable this is because these sites allow only the search bots to access the restricted content. I wonder why Google does not penalise site like Experts Exchange for showing different content to users and the Google search bot.

There are two ways you can access content on Experts Exchange without the need to register and and pay for membership to view the content. The first two methods are the the easiest way.

Just Scroll Down.

You might be wondering how scrolling down can help. Experts Exchange were smart enough to figure out that internet surfers have very short attention spans and rarely scroll down beyond a given point. They in fact convince the users they need to register to view the content by showing a large number of dummy comments with text that says

All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only. Sign-up to view the solution to this question.

So the user assumes that the content is only viewable if he/she registers when in fact all the comments and solutions are viewable if you scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Use Google Cache.

This is a no brainer. When you search on Google if you see a link to Experts Exchange instead of clicking on the link directly click on the link below where it says Cache.

User Agent Switcher FireFox Extension.

If you constantly land up on experts exchange or you are tired of scrolling down so much. Use the User Agent Switcher FireFox Extension to spoof your User Agent and make Experts Exchange believe that you are a Google Search Bot. Download a list of User Agents from here and import it using the user agent switcher extension.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Featured, Tutorial Tags: FireFox, Free, Unblock

Flock 1.0 Released

Arpit Jacob — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:14:28 +0000

Flock 1.0 has been officially released. For those of you who don’t know what Flock is, it is basically a Firefox based web browser. However, it has some amazing features that Firefox don’t have. Much of what makes Flock so special is it’s social networking tools. Some of the features of Flock are:

Instantly publish blog posts
Connect with your friends across multiple networks
Easily share your photos, videos and favourite links
Create your own world so you are also informed
Inbuilt RSS feed reader
Instantly find media form Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook
Grab your favourite photos, text and links
Instantly upload photos Flickr, Photobucket, Piczo and Facebook

To download Flock, click HERE

Post published by Michael, find more about me HERE

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Open Source, Software Tags: FireFox, Photos, Social-Networks, Software

FireFox 3.0 And Opera Have Inbuilt Support For Video, SVG Is Pretty Cool

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 02:17:48 +0000

Update: Looks like Opera also has inbuilt support for video in the upcoming release. Read the Comments below

While you might have heard of Flash, SilverLight etc which are proprietary application frameworks to create RIA(Rich Internet Application) and have been developed by Adobe and Microsoft respectively. But did you know that Firefox has inbuilt support for various frameworks such as SVG, Theora and OGG, which can be used to create and build RIAs.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) an Open Standard by W3C is an XML specification and file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated.
Ogg is an open standard for a free container format for digital multimedia, unrestricted by software patents and designed for efficient streaming and manipulation.
Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies’ VP3 codec, and christened by On2 as the successor in VP3’s lineage, Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4 video (e.g., H.264, Xvid and DivX), RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and similar lower-bitrate video compression schemes.

FireFox 3 Added Inbuilt Support for Video Playback

FireFox 3.0 has officially added inbuilt support for the open video format Theora. You can download FireFox 3.0 from here to see the examples in action. For example you can easily use Html tag like the example given below to show a video without the need for installing any Third Party tool to view the video.

Also Check Out this cool implementation of the inbuilt video support and SVG it tries to simulate the Microsoft Surface interface.

FireFox 3 And RIA

What do think happens if you are able to combine all these Three Open Source Standard? I see the possibility of creating RIA based purely on Open Standards.

While SVG has been there for a really long time and FireFox has inbuilt support for it not many use it for animation. I did a bit of hunting around and found some cool SVG Applications. These are built using only SVG hence you can view them only in FireFox.

Blobular – Check out this amazing demo using SVG. If you play around with it you can see how powerful SVG is.
Photos – If you have seen Microsoft Surface then this demo will Wow you.
CanvasScape – How about a 3D game
An MS Paint Application

source: Mozillalinks

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Open Source, Software, Technology Tags: FireFox, Silverlight, Web-Development

ScribeFire 1.4.1 Released

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 02:28:06 +0000

Update: Correct the Typo is 1.4.1 not 14.1 thanks to kanak

A new version of ScribeFire, one of the most popular blogging Extension for FireFox has been released after a long time. Most of the changes are cosmetic. Here’s the list of changes. You can download it from the Official Mozilla repository for extensions. (You might want to wait a few more hours before you download it, since the Extension has not been fully loaded and takes time to get updated on the repository)

Navbar is now collapsed by default
Rotated nav bar toggle to show direction of flyout
Shrunk sidebar toggle to match navbar toggle
Restyled publish button to be more consistent
Moved navbar and sidebar toggles into the top row the editor to save space
Categories have been relabeled as tags
Added confirmation to post deletion
Blog list now uses radio buttons
Added link to each blog in blog list
Removed “View this blog” link from bottom of editor
Put blogs, tags in groupboxes
Moved “add/edit blog” button into groupbox
Moved “add tag” button into groupbox
Fixed bug where all spaces were being encoded as
Added Strong, Em buttons to editor
Fixed blockquote button
Added Dutch translation

Source: ScribeFire

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Software, Wordpress Tags: Download, FireFox

The Best Free Blogging Tools for Power Bloggers

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:21:41 +0000

Lately I’ve been trying to focus on churning out some quality posts instead of re-blogging or echoing news. With the limited 3-4 hours a day that I spend blogging and reading my RSS feeds, I have I been trying to use various free tools and tricks to enhance my productivity. Some of the these tools have become indispensable to me and I cannot imagine blogging without them. Do let me know if I have missed out any tools that you think should be there in this list.

The Best Offline Blog Editor

Windows Live Writer

This is the best blog editor out there. I have used more than 7 different blog editors and I can tell you this is the only one I really liked. One reason why I like it so much is that you can manage your drafts and synchronize them very easily. You can also copy paste html while stripping it off all junk code, use tags, link glossary lots of inbuilt support for WordPress.

FireFox Blogging Tools and Extensions.

Well the first thing you need to do is download FireFox, if you are a opera, or IE 7 user (Don’t tell me your still using IE 6) your missing out on a lot of tools and extensions that enhance your productivity.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire needs no introduction it was previously called Performancing for Firefox. This is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

Screen Grab

Screengrab! is an extension for FireFox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page.

FireFox Universal Uploader

As the name says, this FireFox extension allows you to upload/download files from any website using a friendly interface. Upload files/photos/videos to Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, Box.net(1GB of free space), Facebook, Webshots and OmniDrive in this version. Next versions would support other websites like Google Videos etc. You can add multiple files to the queue at a time. Extension will take care of uploading them for you.

AutoFill Forms

Tired of Filling the the same details while commenting on different blogs? Autofill Forms enables you to fill out web forms with one click or a keyboard shortcut. A set of customizable rules is used to determine the input for each form element. You are able to edit, remove, enable/disable the provided rules and to add your own ones. You can configure the order in which the rules are to be applied and define site specific rules.

FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla FireFox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Free Screen Capture and Photo Editing Tool

Gadwin PrintScreen

A Free simple yet powerful screen grabbing utility. (there are two version Free and Paid)

Image Resizer Widows XP Power Toy

This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click. You can even resize multiple files in one go.

Google Picasa Photo Manager

Resize crop, alter, refine make a collage etc all can be down with this simple but powerful picture manager from Google.

Best RSS Readers

Google Reader
The best Web based Rss reader, some people prefer netvibes or pageflakes.

RSS Bandit
The best Free Offline Desktop Reader. I like the Inbuilt support for Wordpress comments without the need for going to the post to read comment, unfortunately it works only for Wordpress blogs.

Miscellaneous tools

YotoPhoto

Yotophoto is indexs well over a quarter million Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL, and various other ‘copyleft’ images.

Stuff a Blog Bmash

A useful tool just type in your keywords get related Picture, Tags, links, News and amazon products.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Featured, Software, Wordpress Tags: FireFox, Tools

How To Restore And Recover Your Firefox Bookmarks

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 22 May 2007 08:43:06 +0000

Today morning when I logged into my computer and started Firefox for some reason it crashed. This has happened to me a number of times since I open too many tabs. The unfortunate thing is that after the crash sometime your settings and bookmarks are lost. Fortunately unlike Firefox 1.5 you can recover your setting and Bookmarks in Firefox 2.0. Below I have listed the steps to recover your bookmarks in case they get lost or corrupted after a crash.

1. Browse and Navigate to the Hard disk where your Windows is Installed.

2. Then go to the following location C:\Documents and Settings\Jacob\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
Where Jacob is the user name with which you log into windows.

3. Inside the Profiles folders you should see a single directory or multiple directories if you are using multiple Firefox Profiles.
Select your Default Firefox Directory.
Example stzbt87m.default

4. Inside this Directory you will see a folder called “bookmarkbackups” go into this folder.
You will see a bunch of html Files name bookmarks and a date. These are the bookmarks that have been backup for the last five days by Firefox.

5. Select a file that is a day or two older than todays date.
For example today’s date is 2007-05-22 then select bookmarks-2007-05-21.html i.e a file which is a day older.Copy this file and rename it to bookmarks.html

6. Put this file in the main Default profile Directory and replace the old file.

i.e C:\Documents and Settings\Jacob\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\stzbt87m.default\

7. Start Firefox (Assuming that it was closed)

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Open Source, Technology, Tutorial Tags: FireFox, How To, Tutorial

Top Firefox Extensions and Plugins you should Know.

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:30:33 +0000

One of reasons for the popularity of Firefox is its extensibility. If you are a Firefox user you know that there are a huge number of extensions available to suit every possible need. But some Extensions are extremely Popular and useful and every user needs to know about them.

Most Popular Extensions

1. ADblock and ADblock Filterset.G Updater

Every Firefox user should know about these two plugins. ADblock is a very useful Extension which can block every kind of ads shown on web pages on the internet. Adblock combined with the ADblock Filterset.G Updater which is another extension that Provides a set of predefined Filters for ADblock Extension and Updates the filters automatically. Not only do these extensions block ads but they help to reduce the time load of web pages and improve the usability and browsing experience of users.

2. FlashGot And DownloadThemAll

These are two separate Extensions which act as advanced Download Managers. Even though Firefox has an inbuilt Download manager it is not sufficient if you use it for downloading large files or if you would like to pause/resume the downloading at some other time. You can install either of these two extensions. They give you better control over your downloads and make downloading faster.

3. IE Tab

Unfortunately not all website function correctly on the Firefox Browser. Some Websites may render incorrectly and break up or hang if they are not viewed in Internet Explorer. Using this extension the web page is loaded inside Firefox using the Internet Explorer Engine with just a click without the need for opening Internet Explorer in a separate window. You can switch between the rendering engines by clicking the IE Tab Icon.

4. NoScript

If you would like to browser more securely or would like to protect your Privacy by blocking Scripts that track your behavior while surfing example web analytics and statistics Scripts that websites install on there site to track the statistics of people visiting the site. Then you should make use of the NoScript Extension. You can add sites that you frequently visit to the Allowed category.

Best Blogging Extensions

5. ScribeFire Previously called Performancing

This is one of the best Blogging Extensions for Firefox with support for a large number of blogging services like Wordpress, Movable Type, B2evolution etc and XML-RPC supported API’s. It loads inside Firefox as Bottom bar and can brought up with just a click of a button. You can also configure it to Ping various Services to notify that your blog has been updated. Also there is the option to leave TrackBacks and to add Technorati tags.

6. Scrapbook

Scrapbook is a very useful tool if you want to store researched information from the web. You can Grab parts or content from a WebPage and store it like a bookmark for later reference, it will include a link to the original website so you can check back later.

7. ScreenGrab

Often you might want to capture web pages and show screenshots of the web page. This tool helps you achieve that with minimum hassle.

Top Customisation Extensions

8. GreaseMonkey and Stylish

These are two popular Extension that you can use to customize Firefox or web pages that you visit often. Both these Extensions have a huge number of scripts available online.

Top Development Extensions

9. Web developer ToolBar

One the most useful and important Web development Toolbar for Firefox. It has countless number of features that are extremly useful is your developing web pages or websites. you can use it to edit, view and inspect CSS, HTML values and form data. You can even manipulate values.

10. FireBug

Another Extremely useful tool if you want to quicken your web developement process and if you use AJAX and Javascript a lot. You can use it to edit, inspect CSS, HTML, Javascript, Debug Javascript and monitor Network activity such as page load time of various elements etc.

11. FireFTP

This is Free Cross Platform FTP program that Loads inside Firefox, so that you do not require an External Software to Upload files to your web server.

12. HTML validator

Helps to check the Validity of your Webpages. The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP. Both algorithms were originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. And now extended and improved by a lot of persons. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Internet, Open Source, Software Tags: Extensions, FireFox, Plugins, Web-Development

Flock The Web 2.0 Social Browser To Be Forever In Beta?

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:00:45 +0000

I decided to take a look at the Browser called Flock again after a year.

Flock is a browser based on the Firefox / Mozilla Code base that was launched with a lot of Hype and internet Buzz around this time last year. I was particularly intrigued since I loved the look and feel and it felt like a refreshed Firefox running on Steroids it was labeled as a Web 2.0 The Social browser. Though even after the release of Firefox 2.0 they have not yet update the code base.

It is being developed by some Ex-Firefox Promoters.
Based on the Mozilla code base hence it is Multi platform and Open Source.
Great Eye-Candy Interface.
Inbuilt tools and support for Web 2.0 Services and blogging Platforms

Interestingly when Flock was released the Founder decrem said (He left Flock a while back).

Flock is not interested in forking the Mozilla code-base”.”Further, we don’t want to break anyone’s Firefox experience, or have our browser break, due to updates either way that have not been fully tested propagated. In the short term, that means that fewer people will play with our stuff, but over the long term we believe it’s the right way to go for us.

To the question “Why not an extensions?” He goes on to say

We want to be able to offer our users a complete end-to-end user experience, including a single browser download, an update service, technical support. the works.

So how does a open source product such as Flock profit. For one they have tied up with Yahoo with their search engine as the default for Flock also the Flock Start up page features a custom search Page using Yahoo. Similarly Photobucket has tied up Flock to release a special version of Flock where Photobucket users can upload and browser through their photos and pictures.

The initial releases for flock suffered from major memory leaks and bugs. Though the current versions are pretty stable. Flock has a lot of potential but it looks like the enthusiasm with which it was launched has slowed down or run dry, since its release I have hardly seen any new, major features. Most of their releases till this point have been only bug fixes. The features from Flock that I found most appealing were the Blog Editor which was similar to ScribeFire(previously called performancing extension) and the nifty Flickr top bar, though now I prefer ScribeFire to flock’s Blog Editor since it doesn’t load in a external window.

The Rss feed reader in flock needs a lot of work since I found it extremely slow and a huge memory hogger. The Rss feed Reader is fine for People with a few feed in the range of 20-50 but anything more than that can ruin your browsing experience I have more that 300 plus feeds .

I checked up the traffic to Flock’s website using Alexa and results are not very positive. The traffic seems to be steadily declining over the past few months, when it should be increasing considering that its a open source product.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Software, Technology Tags: Blogging, FireFox, Internet, Open Source, Photos, Web 2.0

FireFox Hidden Easter Egg – The Book Of Mozilla

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 09:30:40 +0000

Here is a intresting Easter Egg in FIrefox 2.0
Type about:mozilla in your address bar. you’ll see the following screen with the words.

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

It sure sounds funny and a bit ominous as well. So what does it all mean. It is a well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of web browsers. This not the only verse you can view the rest of the verses that have appeared throught the development and releases of the mozilla based browsers at http://www.mozilla.org/book/.

Explanation of the Verse from the Book of Mozilla

The 7:15 chapter and verse notation refers to July 15, 2003, the day when America Online shut down its Netscape browser division and the Mozilla Foundation was launched.

In the HTML source of www.mozilla.org/book, this verse is accompanied by the following annotation:

The “beast” falling refers to Netscape being closed down by its now parent company AOL. Are you searching for this 1337. The “great bird” that rises from the ash is probably the Mozilla Foundation, which was established to continue Mozilla development. The bird rises from the ash like a Phoenix — a reference to the original name of the Mozilla Firefox browser (known as Firebird at the time this verse was written). The bird casts down “fire” and “thunder” on the “unbelievers”, which is a direct reference to the Mozilla Firebird (now Firefox) and Mozilla Thunderbird products, which became the main focus of Mozilla development a few months before the events of July 15. The fact that the beast has been “reborn” indicates that the spirit of Netscape will live on through the Foundation (which is made up mostly of ex-Netscape employees) and its strength has been “renewed” as the foundation is less reliant on AOL (who many feel neglected Netscape). Again, the “Mammon” is probably Microsoft, Mozilla’s main commercial competitor.

You can find a better explanation on each verse on the Wikipedia site.

source Wikipedia and Labnol

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Internet, Open Source, Technology Tags: FireFox, Mozilla