Stephanie Leary

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Having a geek girl moment

November 13, 2006 Stephanie Leary 3 Comments

I discovered last night that isbn.nu has RSS feeds for books. I can track prices for the books I’m looking for! O how I love you, isbn.nu.

I’m also (finally) making myself switch from Camino to Firefox. Sorry, Camino, I just can’t live without the extensions anymore. Also, you crash a lot, and every time you do, you dump my favicons. Which will become important in a minute.

However. Firefox on the Mac is just plain ugly. It’s also a little slow. The good news? There are optimized builds for Macs with the native aqua form widgets.

That’s a vast improvement, but it wasn’t quite enough for me, so I played around some more and came up with…

  • the Tango theme
  • Favicon Picker, which lets you replace bookmarks’ favicons
  • Faviconize Tab, which lets you reduce tab width by removing the site’s title
  • Magnolia
  • Nightly Tester Tools, which will repair extensions that don’t quite work

Oddly enough, I had trouble finding a theme that supports favicons in the bookmark bar. I really needed them, because I wanted to do this:

My bookmark bar in Firefox

Left to right, that’s Yahoo, my Netflix queue, IMDB, movietickets.com (local theaters’ showtimes), TWOP, weather.com, my Google calendar, the add to LibraryThing bookmarklet, my LT library, my ma.gnolia bookmarks, a bookmarklet to create an Amazon Associates link, my Amazon wishlist (which I use more like an organizer of things I intend to read), my Livejournal friendslist, my coComment threads, Google Reader (for those isbn.nu feeds, which I didn’t want cluttering up NetNewsWire), Daring Fireball, tamus.edu (my work site), Basecamp, and Sharepoint (work intranet).

(Superquick howto: Create your bookmark in the bar. Edit its favicon if you need to — right-click; properties, assuming Favicon Picker is installed. While you’re here, delete the bookmark title. Voila.)

Luckily Tango does what I wanted. It also has nice buttons, less obtrusive text in the bookmarks, and it fixes some weirdness with the default tabs.

What I’ve ended up with is a version of Firefox that looks a lot like Camino, supports all the extensions I want, and doesn’t dump all my favicons when it crashes. Whee. Now I just have to get used to Firefox’s quirks instead of Camino’s….

Next project: see if I can finagle something in Automator to automatically sync my Firefox profile — bookmarks, prefs, passwords, history, extensions, themes, everything — with my Subversion repository. I actually have the SVN thing working, but it’d be nice if the sync could happen automatically when I open or close the browser.

…. and yes, folks, this is what happens when I’m awake at 3 a.m. Thank you; I’ll be here all week.

Techy Goodness

Comments

  1. Homebrew says

    June 2, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    Is this the same sillybean who used to play Spearhead with clan T*B*A and then Cafe Malta??

    Kevin

    Reply
  2. Stephanie says

    June 2, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    Sorry, no!

    Reply

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