Author: Teal

Ladies and gentlemen, I think it’s safe to say that Apple owns the world.

**drools**

Habari is a new blogging platform being developed by
a number of well known people, some of which are fed up with open source, others just looking for new challenges.

The thing about Habari is that is starts from scratch, and today. That means it doesn’t have to worry about a lot of existing legacy code and thus, downward compatibility. It is also being designed from the grounds up, using the latest available technology. Heck, it’s full OOP! It abstracts database access! You can plug in different theme engines (and, of course, there are plugins). In short, it could easily be the greatest thing since pressed words.

I wrote my first patches against Habari trunk today, one fixing a locale bug and making basic i18n work, the other mostly style changes. How could I resist joining the development frenzy!

Find me in the habari-dev group and on the Habari IRC channel, #habari on irc.freenode.net.

Recently, Snap Previews Anywhere (by Snap.com) have been proliferating wildly. Some people only experimented with them for a short time, then disabled them again; others are still using them.

I personally find them annoying as hell. They:

• break the user flow, since they just pop up right in the middle and they can’t be anticipated (unlike e.g. intellitxt, where the huge green border is a good hint);
• get in the way, if you accidentally hovered over a link and the bubble pops up over text you were reading;
• block clicks, sometimes even on the very link they triggered on (this doesn’t happen consistenly, but often enough to be annoying);
• don’t add value, or am I just not seeing how previews of the site behind a link somehow improve my browsing experience? (Of course, this is highly subjective.)

Luckily, you can disable Snap Previews Anywhere rather easily – if you know where to look. You can either click the question mark button and search through the FAQ, or just follow this link to disable Snap Previews Anywhere, anywhere. You must accept and keep cookies for that page to work.

Now, I don’t want to be only complaining. A very simple way of making Snap Previews behave would be to a) add a little marker to snappified links, maybe a smaller version of the bubble graphic; and b) only trigger when the user hovers over the marker, maybe even add a small delay. This way, it doesn’t disturb people who just coincidentally hover over a link, it’s visible, and still easily accessible.

Reader Bar marks the previous scroll position (the screen area visible prior to scrolling, to be exact). It helps to keep track of your reading position, especially when scrolling at the very bottom or very top of a page, when scroll steps are not integral.

Available in userscript and bookmarklet flavours. Tested with Firefox and Firefox w/ Greasemonkey.

Changes from 0.2 to 0.21: Added z-index to the marker element, to make it work right on sites like Wikipedia.

Update Jan 10th: The marker currently blocks clicks in a part of the page. This will be fixed shortly.

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I’m looking for a Firefox extension that marks the boundaries of the previous viewport after scrolling, e.g. in most cases, a horizontal bar that, when you scroll down, signals where the bottom of the previously visible screen was.

Does something like that exist, or does anyone have an idea how that could be achieved using only JavaScript? I would be willing to create an extension or userscript but … nevermind, I just thought of something. Stay tuned.

Update: It is done. Enter Reader Bar 0.2, available in userscript and bookmarklet flavours.

Die FDP macht jetzt auch “Internetvideos”. Unter tv-liberal.de kann man einem sekundenlangen Intro lauschen, verregnete Fensterscheiben betrachten, und dann Guido Westerwelle dabei zusehen, wie er steif einen Text abliest. Um das ganze dann etwas aufzulockern, werden wahllose Kamera”fahrten”, Perspektivwechsel, und als Höhepunkt ein Splitscreen-Effekt eingebaut.

In eigener Sache: Ich suche einen Anwalt, der sich im momentanen Dschungel des deutschen Online-Rechts auskennt. Es geht dabei um userscripts.org, es wäre also schön, wenn Konzepte wie clientseitige Scripts bekannt wären ;), ansonsten evtl. um §826 BGB, das Urheber- und Markenrecht.

Ideen bitte in den Kommentaren oder per Kontaktformular.

If you’re running WordPress 2.1 trunk from SVN (currently at 2.1-alpha3, r4663) with Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) 3.141592 (the latest version as of today), UTW will lose all tags on a post when a new comment is made.

To fix this, edit the ultimate-tag-warrior-actions*.php files (in your UTW directory, there should be one -actions.php and one -actions-wordpress2.php, simply edit both). In the function ultimate_save_tags($postID), add the following lines right after the opening curly bracket:

    if (!is_admin()) return $postID;
    if (!isset($_POST['tagset'])) return $postID;

Save the files and you should be all set.

The problem occurs because WordPress trunk calls the edit_post hook when new comments are added. UTW doesn’t check the environment and just assumes the admin wanted to delete all tags, and then dutifully removes the tags from the post.

The fix just does nothing when the edit_post hook gets called from outside the admin publish area.

Update: See also Thomas’ comment for the latest UTW version.

Warum spielt mir last.fm im Discovery Mode “Nevermore – The River Dragon Has Come“?

Kaum hat man seine Subscription um 12 Monate verlängert… 😉

… sind doof. Was ich aber unbedingt bald machen will:

Daheim

• Katerparadies aus Holz und Teppichfliesen
• Katerschlafplatz in der Zimmerecke
• Flur verteppichfliesen (retro style!)

Photographie

• den Rollfilm in der Isoly vollmachen und entwickeln (lassen)
• den Ilford mit der Revueflex verschießen
• eine Mittelformatkamera mit Lichtschachtsucher
• ein Winkelsucher für die EOS
• ein Ringblitz oder Ringlicht
• Krieger der Morgenröte werden (EOS 1D Mark II N)

Video

• einen Musikfilm zu Ulver’s Perdition City
• ein paar der Videoideen umsetzen, die mir seit ewig im Kopf herumschwirren (hoffentlich werden HDTV-Camcorder bald erschwinglich)

Musik

• eine mehrstündige Percussion-Jam-Session

Für schuehsch

• das neue Blog-Design (black box 2.0)
• Daily Reminder

Für Tollhaus

• das Blog bauen
• den Shop “entführen”
• ein öffentliches Wiki / Forum
• einen Inline-Chat mit IRC-Anbindung

Für die CLT

• ein Sofa (CLT-blau, lang genug zum drauflegen, am besten eine Bettcouch)
• ein neues CMS für die Webseite
• eine Lavalampe :p
• das Whiteboard aufhängen
• den CLT-Hiwi-Account stärker promoten (auf dem ?Whiteboard)