Firefox is a widely popular browser among technologists, in no small part for its easy customization with user-contributed extensions. I install the following extensions on every machine I use.

Core Functionality

• SessionSaver .2 (Extension)

  Considering how frequently Firefox crashes on both my Windows XP and Mac OS X machines, SessionSaver is a life saver.

• Adblock (Extension)

  I have a difficult time using the internet at all on computers which don’t have this installed. I suppose I’m depriving some sites of revenue, but the sheer joy of making flashing monkey banners leave my screen far outweighs any guilt here.

• Tab Mix Plus (Extension)

  Tab Mix Plus gives you more control over Firefox’s tabs. I have my suspicions that this occasionally causes trouble with JavaScript-intense sites, as I’ve noticed errors pop up in my FireBug display. The abilities to re-order tabs and force address bar changes to spawn new tabs are very convenient.

• BugMeNot (Extension)

  BugMeNot is absolutely essential for reading sites like the New York Times or the Washington Post, who confusingly still mandate registration to read the free content. This extension cuts the trip to bugmenot.com out of reading the news.

Thirdparty Integration

These extensions really only have value if you use these sites. I’m an avid user of all three, so I get a great deal of mileage out of them.

• Del.icio.us (Extension)

  With a simple toolbar “Tag” button, posting to del.icio.us becomes an easy task.

• GMail Notifier (Extension)

  The GMail Notifier is a simple grey / red status bar indicator with a number letting you know how many unread messages you have. The only problem is a bug preventing the notifier from consistently logging back in if disconnected, so the notifier can sometimes stay grey for a day or two until you get suspicious and check.

• Bloglines Toolkit (Extension)

  This extension has two parts: another simple notifier (a blue icon with a additional red dot for unread posts), and additional options in the context menu to help add new feeds to your Bloglines account. The context menu options seem to have a lot of trouble consistently functioning under Firefox 1.5, though, which can lead to a lot of frustration.

Developer Tools

• FireBug (Extension)

  Allowing far more powerful JavaScript debugging than Firefox’s already reasonably good native console, FireBug has the additional benefits of integration into the status bar and inline display of DOM element data. This extension also provides the ability to monitor XMLHttpRequest activity in detail, which is hugely useful when debugging JavaScript apps.

On Wednesday, 25 January 2006, Google began providing filtered search results on Google.CN, contributing to the Chinese government’s ongoing censorship of the internet. This side-by-side viewer is intended to illustrate the implications of this censorship by providing side-by-side comparisons for search terms.

A few interesting queries:

• Tiananmen (Images)
• Falun Gong (Images)
• Taiwan Independence (Web Search)

It seems that, even for terms like “democracy” and “freedom“, Google.CN still returns a reasonably good spread of links. Whether or not these pages can be accessed from within China itself is a far different issue, of course.

Please leave a comment if you find any search terms with frighteningly different results between the two versions; I’d be interested what other people can find.

The OpenSearch API provides a flexible common standard for XML-powered searches. WordPress OpenSearch 1.0 worked on WordPress 1.5, but a few changes in the way WordPress deals with DB configuration and HTTP GET parameters caused it to fail in WordPress 2.0. Thanks to tips from James E. Robinson, III, version 1.1 of this plugin now wraps WordPress 2.0’s search functionality. This code should be generic enough to allow anyone to quickly add OpenSearch RSS feed functionality to a WordPress 2.0 site.

The source of version 1.1 is freely available for download here.

Today, Williamsburger upgraded to WordPress 2.0.

I ran through the DB backups easily, as well as the very quick official upgrade script. I’ve reactivated most of my plugins, although Akismet doesn’t seem to be working anymore. I’ve fixed problems with Williamsburger Maps, as well as an issue I already knew I would need to deal with to patch the WordPress OpenSearch Plugin.

The changes I needed to make to support WP 2.0 are as follows:

1. The .htaccess file needs to have all non-WordPress regexp’s before the WordPress section, or else the new default rules will simply override any additional rules you’ve added. This appears to be a change since Wordpress 1.5, where your custom regexp’s needed to be after the WordPress section.
2. If you want to directly access a HTTP GET parameter, you can’t simply reference the variable by name, as is often the case with PHP, but instead need to use the internal $_GET function, as such:

     $id = $_GET['id'];
   

   Thanks to James E. Robinson, III’s post explaining how to patch my OpenSearch plugin for this tip.
3. Something strange is going on with relative links within JavaScript GXmlHttp.create calls. Previously, this code worked fine (there’s a .htaccess redirect behind the scenes, but I haven’t changed that):

     request.open( 'GET',
                   'wbmaps-map-info-' + WbMaps.Version + '.php?id=' + mapId,
                   false );
   

   With WordPress 2.0, I needed to change this to the following:

     request.open( 'GET', 
                   '/wb/wbmaps-map-info-' + WbMaps.Version + '.php?id=' + mapId,
                   false );
   

   Note the addition of the absolute directory path on my server, something I’d obviously prefer not to need to hardcode into JavaScript.

4. The default editor for managing posts provided by WordPress 2.0 fails miserably when formatting the interiors of <pre> tags. Granted, this isn’t an issue that most writers need to care about, but considering the tool offers an “edit as HTML” button, one would hope that it would at least attempt to respect what’s been typed into that field. Also, in the case of Williamsburger, there are enough code snippets posted that <pre> absolutely must work as expected.

   Additionally, the Markdown plugin provided with WordPress 2.0 has major troubles with <ol> and <ul> elements within table <td>’s, turning them into long hex strings, and the Textile plugin inserts unwanted <br>’s between <li> elements. None of this behavior is appropriate, although Markdown’s problems are particularly unacceptable. Markdown worked fine in WordPress 1.5, so I suspect it simply needs patching for WordPress 2.0, especially considering its “Extra” version is the eventual solution I’m now using.

   PHP Markdown Extra 1.0.1 seems to solve all of the other plugins’ problems, and my posts now render as they used to, although it seems that multiple carriage returns within <li>’s don’t seem to act as they do outside of <li>’s, causing some mashed-together paragraphs if extra attention isn’t paid to adding your own <p> tags.

As a developer, I constantly find myself reading code, sometimes with its developer at my side to clear up ambiguities, but obviously, far more frequently, the author is nowhere in the vicinity. Maybe I’m trying to sort out a bug, maybe I’m trying to figure out functionality, or maybe I’m trying to optimize performance. My first priority is to understand as much as possible about the code while wasting as little as possible time and effort.

What simple steps can developers take to help out the next reader down the line?