Top Firefox Addons
Back in the good old days, Opera was my browser of choice. It wasn’t long before someone knocked me on the head, and I woke up to the world of Firefox. The browser war has been heating up over the last 18 months, and Google’s Chrome has the potential to win in my books. Whilst I love the speed and simplicity of it, the one thing that keeps me planted well and truly in the Firefox kingdom is the vast array of addons.
Yes, shh, I can hear you. No need to yell at the internets. I will tell you which addons make up the amazing collection that keeps me firmly rooted. Rather than one giant post though, I’ll focus on a single addon per post over the next few weeks. Keep this page bookmarked as I’ll update it as more posts appear.
My Top Firefox Addons
Every time I install Firefox on a new machine, I go through and add every one of the above addons. Until Chrome can provide alternatives for most of them, I can’t see myself switching. Of course as always, I could be wrong? Is Chrome already the next best thing, or have I missed some addons which would transform my world?
What’s the Buzz?
You’ve heard of Facebook, you’ve heard of Twitter, and now we’re hearing about Buzz. It’s pretty surprising that we haven’t heard anything earlier, given that the new kid on the block is a full-blown Google release without the standard “alpha” or “beta” tag line that we’ve come to expect. This is a well thought out product, which is a clear strategic move against the juggernauts of the social networking scene. I have no doubt about it, Google Buzz is going to be big, but what exactly is it?
What is Google Buzz?
Well I’m glad you asked, otherwise it’d be pointless explaining it!
Built right into Gmail, Google Buzz is a social networking slash near-realtime aggregator. Or for my mother is reading, it’s like a Facebook from Google. Basically, whenever you log into your email account, there’ll be a page that shows you all the recent updates from people you follow. These updates can be in the form of status updates, links, photos or other rich media.
Instead of yet another social network hub that nobody can be bothered using because it’s deserted, Buzz pulls the updates from a number of existing sites. This solves the classic chicken and egg problem, making the service instantly useful. While the concept itself isn’t new (with services like friendfeed on the scene), Buzz has the advantage of building on the existing Gmail user base. According to the Official Gmail Blog, tens of millions of people have tried out the service in the first 48 hours alone!
I’ve heard there are privacy issues?
When you first sign in, you’ll be prompted to choose a list of people to follow based on your most commonly emailed contacts. Only a few days after the release, this prompt replaces the original behaviour of automatically following these contacts. The problem was that the people you follow can be publicly visible, and this was seen as a privacy risk that exposes the people you most commonly email. Google said “Oops!” and have since changed the behaviour, but not before receiving criticism from a number of sources.
Well what can it connect to?
As of today, Buzz is integrated with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Google Reader shared items, and Google Chat status updates. Or if you like pictures:
You can even add the RSS feed of any content you publish, with updates being posted straight to your feed! Of course there’s also the typical “Share what you’re thinking” box that you can post Buzz specific statuses, links, or media.
As you may have noticed, there’s no Facebook support. In fact, only 6 of the 206,741,990 websites in the world are connected! But fear not young reader, our hero Google is coming to the rescue with this quote:
Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API.
Ding ding ding! That’s the “open” bell ringing, which is what we developers love to hear.
What can’t it do?
Buzz is great at aggregating your content in one convenient place, creating a conversation of comments and likes between followers. Just like other aggregators (such as Google Reader), this conversation doesn’t get back to the publishers, effectively breaking the feedback loop. This deprives publishers of useful feedback or motivation (in the case of small time bloggers like me). It’s a core problem with web 2.0.x, and Matt Haughey’s blog is an excellent discussion on the topic.
How do I get started?
This is as easy as a nice slice of cherry pie!
- Log into your Gmail account, and click the Buzz logo on the left (under the inbox link).
- Next choose the people you want to follow.
- Connect to the sites you want to access.
- Start Buzzing! (I think I’ve just coined a new verb!)
For those inclined, there’s plenty to read over at the Buzz homepage, and don’t forget to check out Buzz on your phone. Time will be the ultimate test, but I expect Buzz to common place in conversations of the future. What do you think about all the Buzz?
Mozy On Down To Backup Town
Since I spend a lot of my life working with computers, you’d expect that I know a lot about backing up. I’m always telling people about how important it is to protect their digital belongings, and yet I’ve got virtually no backup system in place! I’m not alone either, with most people I know being just as ignorant as I am. However data loss does happen, and I’m sure David Berlind’s story will be worryingly familiar to a number of people.
This morning, I woke up to hell that’s worse than the blue screen of death: a hung system. You know the type: mouse frozen, unresponsive keyboard… Today, the situation got worse because now, the system won’t boot either. It booted fine yesterday. I get to the Windows splash screen, but after that, something goes terribly wrong and the hard drive, which sounds normal up until a point, starts to make a rhythmic grinding noise as though it’s trying to get at something it just can’t get at.
I’ve had a hard drive or two fail in my time (stupid good for nothing lightning!), so I am aware of the situation. Every year or so I have copied some or my important files around to other computers on my home network. Also I’ve recently bought a portable hard drive that lives on top of my server, and I store another copy of my files on there. All in all, it’s pretty inadequate. I’m left completely unprotected, losing all of my precious files in the event of fire, meteorite, or theft.
So as my blog starts to take shape, I thought it was about time I looked into implementing some sort of real backup system. I don’t need anything fancy, and I’ve come up with this list of requirements:
- Cheap – I don’t like wasting money.
- Simple – If I have to constantly manage the backup then I’m not going to do it.
- Automatic – Same as above. I’m too lazy to think about backing up, let alone click a button to do it.
- Offsite – If the next asteroid near Earth takes out my house, my photos will still be safe.
- Versioned – Sure I can restore a deleted file, but what happens if I delete the contents and save it? (rhetorical)
I’ve been an avid listener of TWIT for a while now, and if you’ve ever heard Leo Laporte open his mouth you’d know about Carbonite. It’s an offsite backup service that automatically uploads your selected files and folders to their servers distributed across multiple data centres. I thought that I should give it a go, so I signed up for the 30 day free trial.
Yeah mmm it was ok. I did everything that I wanted it to I guess. There was just some little things that annoyed me, and for about $6 a month it didn’t seem worth it. One of the things that bugged me was the user interface. Mainly based around shell integration, the look and feel seemed almost hacked together and unfriendly. Also, Carbonite has a “feature” (probably designed to save storage space on the server) that stops videos as well as system style files from being backed up by default. To a developer like me, system and configuration files are really important, and it was too much effort manually selecting them all. Goodbye Carbonite!
I generally liked the idea behind Carbonite, just not the implementation. Using the Google comparison trick I checked out the competition.
Hello Mozy! And welcome to the family! Mozy was exactly what I was looking for, and has none of the things I complained about with Carbonite. These are the things that I like:
- The interface is clean and simple, which makes it easy to select the folders you want backed up.
- Every file type is backed up automatically, with no exceptions.
- It even backs up open and locked files like Outlook PST files!
- Every fixed disk in your computer can be backed up.
- 30 days of version history.
- Backups are scheduled incrementally, and only when the computer is in low use.
- Multiple restore options, including ordering your data on a DVD!
So for approximately the same price (US$4.95 a month), I get unlimited storage space with all of these features! In comparison it seems much cheaper. For those of you who think they don’t really have enough data to warrant the cost, Mozy offers a free version with 2GB storage. If you need a little more space, then every 2 friends you refer gives you another gigabyte of space.
I’m sleeping much better at night knowing my precious 1′s and 0′s are floating around safe in the cloud. It doesn’t complete my system as only my server is backed up, but that’s where most of my data lives. The next step is to use another third-party tool to back up my other machines onto a network share (yes that’s supported!), but all in good time. So next time you hear the click of death, will you be crying, or sighing with relief that you signed up with Mozy?
No, My Site’s Not Down, Is It?
I was sitting on my lunch break today, innocently checking up on the latest news as I munched on pizza sub with a Farmer’s Union iced coffee. As I scrolled through the sites on Google Reader, my very own blog appeared displaying my last post! Ok, so I wasn’t exactly surprised since I had subscribed to it, but a little dramatic effect never hurts.
As I’m sure most wannabe bloggers do, I like to regularly check out how many people have subscribed. No surprise here, as it’s still stuck on 2 (and one of which is me). Next to it though, there was this little message: (Actually I forgot to write down exactly what it said, so I just paraphrased from my memory for you.)
Google Reader is unable to update your feed due to connection issues.
In my head I questioned:
No, my site’s not down, is it? I just checked it this morning and it was fine, so there’s no way it’s down. Google must have gotten it wrong!
I pulled out my trusty bookmarks, went to downforeveryoneorjustme.com and did a quick check. You wouldn’t know it from the title but it’s a simple, no-nonsense site that checks if a given website is down for everyone or just me (or you in your case).
Oh. Now I’d like to say that I was on the Digg front page, or that I’d been virally retweeted overnight, but I’m not that lucky. I’d been reorganising my office, and changed the structure of my network in the process. I forgot to check the state of my server afterwards which is a big mistake as I try to increase my pagerank.
Moral of this story: When you think Google is wrong, you are wrong! (Unless your name happens to be Chuck Norris)
UPDATE: I’m in the process of finding a simple and free website monitoring service so I can be alerted next time something happens. I’ve tried a few but they all seem pretty appalling. Can anyone recommend one that they find useful?
Synchronize Your Life With Google
The word “cloud” is thrown about a lot these days, with services such as Amazon’s EC2 bringing the cloud within the reach of your humble developer. For the uninitiated, Wikipedia describes cloud computing as the following:
Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (“computing”). In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.
Understand?.. No?.. Neither did I. I see the cloud as a magical room up in the sky, filled with an infinite number of computers that can store as much data as you like, and do a zillion calculations a second. The best part is you can access it from almost anywhere because it’s always up above you. It’s considered the future of computing, with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all competing in the race to become the cloud king.
So now that I’ve written an intro around the fluffy photo above, I’ll get onto the real post. What I love most about keeping my data in the cloud, is that it allows me to keep my data backed up in once place, and synchronized with all of my devices including my iPhone. Google have a number of services that help you do this, which I use to sync all of my email, contacts, and calendar entries “over the air” (another fancy term). If you’re nice, I’ll show you how to do it.
Doesn’t iTunes already do this for me?
Well kinda, but you have to plug your phone in for it to update your contacts, and it will only synchronize your calendar with Outlook (or the Mac equivalent)! If you follow these instructions, you’ll be constantly up to date without having to think about it.
1. You must have a Google account
If you haven’t already, head over to mail.google.com and sign up for a new account. Please please please use a sensible username, and save fluffy_bunny_69 or imdahottest for your Hotmail account. Have a play around and get a feel of your new home, then check out calendar.google.com to activate the calendar. You use the same username and password for every Google application, but you have to log in at least once to activate them.
2. Turn off iTunes sync
Next, we want to completely disable iTunes controlling the synchronization of your data. If we leave this enabled, it will mess with the data you store in the cloud.
- Open iTunes
- Connect your iPhone
- Go to the “Info” tab
- Ensure that synching of contacts, calendar and mail are all disabled.
3. Connect to Gmail via IMAP
The IMAP protocol allows you to keep your email messages synchronized between all of your clients and the server. You can use the standard Gmail option in your iPhone settings, but Google recommend that you use the custom account configuration:
What if I tap ‘Gmail’ instead?
Archiving and deleting messages will work differently. Our instructions ensure Gmail works as designed.
In particular this deals with the way Gmail archives emails instead of deleting them directly. Although not completely necessary, it’s probably best to follow their instructions.
4. Setup Google as an Exchange account
The Microsoft Exchange system is the market leader in the enterprise communication market, and for good reason. The wise folks at Google realised this and have emulated an Exchange server, which your iPhone can connect to. Now Google suggests that you enable synchronization of all of your data this way, but I recommend that you do not enable Mail synchronization via Exchange. I find the iPhone has trouble receiving notifications of incoming mail, especially when you have a large number of emails.
With the above caveat, follow these instructions on configuring an Exchange account.
5. Choose which calendars to sync
Whenever I add a new Google calendar, I always forget this step and wonder why it’s not working. It’s such a simple step that I bet you’ll do the same. Just head on over to m.google.com/sync, log in with your Google account, and pick which calendars you want configured. Bookmark the page so you can update your options in the future.
6. Play in the clouds
Now you’re set up with your data in the cloud! When you put new people in your phone book they’ll instantly be transferred to your Google contacts, and events you add to your calendar will always stay in sync between devices. Fiddle with the options, and suss out how to make it best work for you. Just remember if you’re going to play in the clouds, don’t forget to bring your umbrella!
Bonus!
For those of you who’ve made it past the corny images, here’s a bonus Facebook tip. With the latest version of the Facebook iPhone app, you can enable automatic synchronization of your contact’s profile pictures. Enable this using the “sync” button at the top right of the “Friends” page (choose both options). If you followed the above instructions, the pictures will also float up into the cloud and be added to your Google contacts!
In the future I’ll show you how to add Facebook events to your calendar, and how to share calendars with family and friends, but are there any other ways that you synchronize your data and live in the cloud?
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