Yeah, I’m a little crazy about screen space. I don’t like the statusbar on the bottom of my firefox window. The only thing that I really use it for is to check the address of links that I’m hovering over.

I like the way Chrome and other browsers do this – a little box appears with the link address. So I decided to do this to Firefox. This isn’t an extension, just a little userContent.css hack and some icons. The screenshot above shows what it looks like for me in Firefox when I hover over a link.

Download Zip File – August 19, 2010

• August 19, 2010 – fixed variable margin/padding bug
• August 9, 2010 – initial upload

To summarize, the zip file above contains a few icons and a userContent.css file. If you’ve modified userContent.css before, you know how this works. Basically, it applies some styles to certain elements on ALL websites that you browse.

Instructions:

Download and extract the zip file. You’ll find a “README” file that contains these instructions, a “userContent.css” file, and a folder labeled “floating-statusbar-icons”.

Find your Firefox profile directory. In Linux, this is at ~/.mozilla/firefox/<YOUR PROFILE DIRECTORY>. Inside your profile directory is a folder called “chrome”.

The “userContent.css” file and the “floating-statusbar-icons” folder need to be moved into the “chrome” folder in your profile directory. (Note, if you’ve customized your userContent.css before, you need to just copy-paste the code from my provided css file into yours).

Restart Firefox. Go to “View” -> uncheck “Status Bar”. This isn’t necessary, but isn’t the whole point to get rid of your statusbar?

Oh, a cool bonus:

Hover over an image link and you get:

Little icons will indicate the type of file that’s being linked to. There’s also a lock for https links, a “new tab” icon for links that will open in a new tab/window, and an envelope icon for mailto: links. There are several filetypes that will show icons, so have fun experimenting.

Note that this isn’t perfect due to some limitations to CSS and some laziness on my part. This won’t completely replace your statusbar if you use it for MORE than what’s described above (showing a link address when you hover over the link). It won’t show your weather and it won’t show icons for your Firefox addons.

Credit:

I’m using icons from the Silk Icon set (1.3) by Mark James: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/

Want more?

Got something to add? Let me know and I’ll update the zip file. Thanks!

This was not easy.

(You can see photos by clicking the “Photo Gallery” link on the left)

I started at Gold Beach High School around 8:00 a.m. It was a beautiful morning, but quite windy. I looped around the Gold Beach airstrip, up to the highway, and out Jerry’s Flat Road toward Agness. This is the route used by the Ride the Rogue event in September, which I can HIGHLY recommend after doing this ride. This was my favorite part of the ride, beautiful and a very rideable road. It’s capped off near Agness with a long (and fun) descent to a great bridge. The pavement is great for riding, lots of patches but pretty smooth overall.

A couple miles after the bridge, I took a right turn on Bear Camp Road. Here the fun begins. It’s a 16-mile uphill from the river to the Bear Camp overlook at around 4,800 feet up in the Klamath Mountains. There are a lot of beautiful views but the miles tick by slowly. There are two overlooks: the Siskiyou overlook about 10 miles up the hill (near milepost 26; the mileposts are painted on the road and start at the eastern end) and the Bear Camp overlook 16 miles up the hill (at milepost 21). The road is windy and steep in places, with only a little relief from time to time. Pavement is good, with some cracks & patches but overall great for riding. There are a few very short gravel stretches, maybe a total of 1/4 mile on gravel over the entire road.

After a nice stop at the Bear Camp Overlook (where I ate some food in the car due to being bombed by gigantic flies) I took off for a 21-mile mostly-downhill ride to the Galice area. There’s a little uphill on this stretch but nothing too bad. After a while I passed out of the Siskiyou National Forest and the road goes to county maintenance, and the nice smooth pavement changes over to a kind of rough chip seal.

Most of the downhill was great, but the worst part was from milepost 8 to milepost 4 where the road basically drops straight down the side of a cliff (actually “straight” is a bad word, it’s really curvy). I’m not one to just coast down this kind of stuff at 50 mph, especially with the chip seal, so I was leaning on the brakes for a while. After milepost 4 things get much better.

I hear talk of a “shoe tree” but didn’t see it.

I was pretty spent at the bottom of the hill but wanted to ride along the Rogue River for a while again. It was hot enough, and I was sore enough, that we decided to call it good at Indian Mary Park.

Total mileage: 72

One more time: See some pics! Click the “Photo Gallery” link at left.

I’ll be posting some pictures in the photo gallery section of my site pretty soon. (and now I have – see my photos page for those pictures!)

I might also need to be changing a couple things on Steph’s photography website …

“Obscure”?

I didn’t check just now, but I’m sure Firefox is the most popular Linux browser. There are, however, a number of people in the Linux community who harbor a dissatisfaction with Firefox and use an alternative browser. So, while the browsers described here are not widely used overall, they are pretty well-known among Linux users. The browsers are:

• Konqueror, the KDE web browser. Konqueror uses the KHTML rendering engine, which (back in the day) served as the basis for the now-popular Webkit engine.
• Epiphany and Midori are Webkit browsers. They both use the new GTK port of Webkit to render pages. While Webkit-GTK is very similar to the Webkit engines that power Safari and Chrome, there are a few minor differences. One of the differences is the treatment of @font-face syntax.

The Basis:

I’m starting from Paul Irish’s Bulletproof @font-face syntax here: http://paulirish.com/2009/bulletproof-font-face-implementation-syntax/ and modifying it a fair amount. That article is good reading and my intent is not to repeat it here. I also don’t intend to be speaking with any authority on this subject, I’m just sharing what works for me. Anyway, read that article. A fair amount of what I’m writing is under the assumtion you’ve read it.

Here’s the Bulletproof syntax by Paul Irish (happy face and all):

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Graublau Web';
  src: url('GraublauWeb.eot'); /* for IE */
  src: local('☺'),
    url("GraublauWeb.woff") format("woff"),
    url("GraublauWeb.otf") format("opentype"),
    url("GraublauWeb.svg#grablau") format("svg"); /* these are for other browsers */
}

Issues and Resolution:

• GTK-webkit seems to choke on “local” and doesn’t read the rest of the final “src” line above. Therefore, @font-face doesn’t work. To resolve this, I moved “local” to a new “src” line. This makes IE choke (that is, the custom font does not display), but I’ll take care of it later:

  src: url (...the eot file
  src: local('☺');
  src: url(...lots of stuff

• Then I found that no matter where the “local” declaration is, Konqueror chokes. So I just got rid of it. IE still chokes.
• To fix IE, I use a conditional comment to include the IE declaration separately:

  <!--[if IE]>
    @font-face {
      font-family: 'Graublau Web';
      src: url('GraublauWeb.eot');
    }
  <![endif]-->

  I actually just put this in a separate IE stylesheet. This isn’t a problem for me since I almost always use a specific IE stylesheet. My normal stylesheet contains:

  @font-face {
    font-family: 'Graublau Web';
    src: url("GraublauWeb.woff") format("woff"),
      url("GraublauWeb.otf") format("opentype"),
      url("GraublauWeb.svg#grablau") format("svg");
  }

Implementation:

Fontsquirrel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com) has many @font-face kits available for download as well as a generator that will allow you to upload a font and create the woff, ttf/otf, eot, and svg versions of the font. They provide the Bulletproof @font-face syntax which I then modify as described above.

Update: Note that Konqueror will require that you use the correct name of the font. You can’t just call it whatever you want.

Browser Support:

I tested this in:

• Firefox 3.6 (Linux)
• Opera 10.5 (Linux)
• Midori, using WebkitGtk+ 1.1.22 (fixed!)
• Konqueror 4.4.2 (fixed!)
• IE6, 7, 8
• Google Chrome (Windows)

All these browsers display the @font-face font using my syntax above.

IE Gotcha’s:

• I don’t completely understand the 404 problem described in Paul Irish’s post and my syntax may be causing a 404 error as IE looks for the WOFF font. I’m kind of dense and I don’t really know how to check for this besides looking at server logs. The custom font DOES display when the IE conditional style is added. (SEE UPDATE BELOW)
• Not using a separate IE stylesheet? You won’t like this solution, sorry.
• Microsoft has expressed support for the WOFF format. This is good in the long-term but in the short-term I wonder if it could create more problems with the release of IE9 and the need to support older versions of IE as well. An alternative syntax may be needed to deliver the WOFF font to IE9 and the EOT to earlier versions of IE.

IE Update:

IE does indeed get a 404 as it requests the WOFF font (actually, it requests a really long string that’s not even a real address… Paul Irish’s post describes this in more detail). The Mo’ Bulletproofer syntax by Richard Fink (mentioned below) prevents this so my current syntax is as follows:

<!--[if IE]>
<style>
  @font-face { /* I actually put this in my ie.css file */
    font-family: 'Graublau Web';
    src: url('GraublauWeb.eot');
  }
</style>
<![endif]-->

<style>
@font-face { /* this goes in my normal css file */
  font-family: 'Graublau Web';
  src: url(//:) format("no404"),
    url("GraublauWeb.woff") format("woff"),
    url("GraublauWeb.otf") format("opentype"),
    url("GraublauWeb.svg#grablau") format("svg");
}
</style>

Again, this syntax works in all the browsers listed above. And guess what… I’ve basically arrived at the Mo’ Bulletproofer. So I have my recommendation!

A few new features of that page:

• The pictures expand to fit the width of your monitor (that is, they will be narrower on a narrow monitor and wider on a wide monitor)
• Hovering over the pictures will make a caption show on top of the picture that gives links and a little information about that particular website
• If your browser supports CSS3 Transitions, the captions will fade in and out. Webkit browsers (Chrome, Safari) and Opera will support this. Firefox 3.7 alpha (the next version of FF) will support this as well.

Overall I think it’s a cleaner and more attractive way to present the information. Cheers!

• I have a domain name expiring within a few months
• I should transfer registration of the domain name to DRoA and renew through them

Here’s a scan of the letter (click for bigger):

The letter itself seemed kind of shady and after Googling the company, I’m pretty annoyed with their “marketing” tactics:

• The letter has a large heading in the top right that says “Domain Name Expiration Notice”. While I suppose the letter is, in a sense, a notice that I have a domain name that expires (fairly) soon, it’s misleading because it implies the company has some sort of authority on what will happen with my domain name and that I should take immediate action with them.
• The bottom third of the letter is a detachable payment form where I can fill in my credit card info and a couple other things and (I guess) automatically transfer/renew the domain name with DRoA. Again, it appears misleading because it looks like a bill. They do note (in the middle of the letter) that “This notice is not a bill” but the letter seems to be formatted to take advantage of people who scan and act immediately.
• Wikipedia mentions that the company is located in Canada but has a mailing address in Buffalo, NY. Not a problem, but odd for a company called “Domain Registry of America” and the separate mailing address gives off bad vibes.
• Wikipedia also says the following [quoted directly from the article]: “In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with the company for practices such as transferring domain registrations to their service under the guise of domain renewal, a practice known as domain slamming, and having hidden fees. Despite this action, the company still sends mass direct mail to consumers resembling invoices with ‘domain name expiration notice’ in bold print.”
• One more Wikipedia quote: “They have also now (Aug 2009) started emailing potential customers with an email scam, purporting to indicate that the transfer of a domain is ‘not complete at this time’, and requesting the domain owner follows a series of steps to complete the transfer to DRoA. These are highly misleading emails.”
• They charge $30 to register a domain name for one year. Many companies charge 1/3 to 1/2 that price, including my current registrar.

So… what to do?

• Note, I’m not calling this a “scam” though that word has been used by others in connection with this service. However (even without any research), I would guess that they actually provide the service they advertise.
• If you get a letter or email from this company or another, remember where you’ve registered your domain name and who you SHOULD be receiving notices & bills from.
• Read the letter carefully.
• Rather than renewing your domain name by clicking links in your email, instead use your browser and go directly to the site where you registered the domain.
• It is OK to transfer a domain name if you want, there’s no problem with that. There are many other registrars that do a good job and are competitively priced. And that don’t spam people with misleading letters.

In defense of the DRoA, I would imagine it’s tough to market domain registration services in a way that’s interesting and creative .

Some time back, I put together this Scary Hen template and created a basic wordpress theme for it. I just found it again, and decided I’d release the theme for free. Download and use for personal or business use, but note that you need to keep a link to my site in the footer.

The theme features three widget areas – one in the header (I am using it as a text box here), one directly above the content area (the main menu) and the usual right sidebar.

A few more previews: click for big:

Since this theme is pretty old (to me) I’m releasing it pretty much as-is. I did a little cleanup on it, and you’re welcome to ask me to fix various things, but if I am busy I may decline.

I think it’s a fun design, though, I had fun creating it. As you can see, it’s quirky and colorful (not actually scary at all!) – Enjoy!

Download the theme here

The Zim Desktop Wiki is a note-taking program that I’ve been using to keep track of all kinds of information – it’s my digital notebook.

I’ve always liked the Evernote-style clipping functionality, where I can select some text in my web browser or another program, hit a key combination, and have that text “clipped” or saved to my note-taking program.

Some time ago, I posted a small Linux bash script that accomplished this. It gets the job done but has several obvious drawbacks (I basically pieced it together with little knowledge). I’ve noticed my post has been linked from the Zim Wiki Tips and Tricks page, so I’ve been motivated to make the script a little better. Please note that this is just a temporary solution – the Zim author appears to be implementing this feature with tighter integration into Zim itself. Until that is complete, you’re welcome to download this and go crazy.

My new script (presented below) has a few improvements over the bash script I posted earlier:

Basic functionality: Select text that you want to remember. Hit a key combination, provide a title and location for your note, and the script will create a Zim page with the proper parameters and the selected text.

Problem with old script: Too many popup windows! The old script would pop up three windows in succession, asking for the note title, then the note location, then asking for any additional text to add to the note.
Solution: Ask for everything in one window. The new script pops up a single window with fields for the note title, note location, and the text for the new note. The selected text is already entered in the text field.

Problem with old script: Dependency on xsel, a little utility that doesn’t come installed by default in (for example) Ubuntu.
Solution: Uses Python (see below) gtk.Clipboard, as kindly suggested by the Zim author.

Problem with old script: Written in bash by someone (me) who doesn’t know how to script in bash.
Solution: The new script is written in Python by someone (me) who doesn’t know how to write Python. Actually, it’s kind of an improvement because from here I can start to learn Python, and continue to refine the script. I may post updates here from time to time, but don’t count on it.

Directions (sort of detailed):

• Download and extract the file below
• It contains three files: zimclip (the python script) and two ZimclipWindow UI files that create the window.
• Move the UI files (ZimclipWindow.ui and ZimclipWindow.xml) to a location where they’re out of your way. Note where you’ve put them.
• Open zimclip in a text editor. There are two user-configurable lines near the top (yeah, I know this is bad, just do it, OK?).
• Enter the location of the UI files (the folder that you put them in)
• Enter the location of the Zim notebook/namespace where you want to file the notes created by this script. Remember that with Zim, Folders ==  Notebooks (and namespaces are in sub-directories). You will be able to choose each time you use the script, but it’s nice to have a default.
• Move zimclip to your executable path and create a global keybinding to launch it.

To use it, select some text and hit the keybinding. You’ll need to provide a title for your note and a folder location (Zim uses a pretty straightforward folder structure for pages). Hit “Ok” and (when you’re ready) go to Zim and choose “Tools” -> “Rebuild Index”. Your note should show up in the index sidebar.

Finally, here is the download link for the zip file.

Contact Me with questions, comments, suggestions.

Clear Paths is a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center located in Keizer, Oregon and Dallas, Oregon. I designed their site and implemented WordPress as a content management system so the staff can quickly edit the pages of the site if they choose.

The site uses a few CSS3 enhancements to add subtle visual effects in some browsers.

http://www.c-paths.com