Thin & Light

Gmail is my Firefox home page and is always open as long as Firefox is there. So I wrote this Greasemonkey script to show Google Reader’s unread count in the nav-bar of Gmail. A good place, isn’t it?

The script checks for the unread count every 8 minutes. But after you click the “Reader” link, it checks the count 1 minute later and extend the interval by 1 minute after every check until the interval returns to 8 minutes again.

Install Greasemonkey，and then install this script。

Page on userscripts.org.

Half a year ago I wrote a small tool for customizing MyBlogLog widget. And, since then I didn’t notice the changes MyBlogLog has done.

As I noticed there are some problems with the widget colorer, I checked MyBlogLog and found that they’ve changed the widget theme.

Well, the new theme is polished and cool but lacks flexibility due to the gradient background.

So I must mark the project as “obsolete”. But people still can play around with it, and the “obsolete” code can still be used on websites.

Handy new feature coming soon…

I use Gmail instead of iGoogle as browser home page. But I don’t want a complete integration. Just alert me the unread count and I will check it when I have time.

OK, tinyurl is short enough. But is.gd is even shorter.

Many tools use tinyurl to shorten URLs, because it was the origin of this wonderful idea. TwitterFox is such an example.

I prefer TwitterFox to twhirl because as a Firefox add-on, the url can be inserted into the tweet with a single click (Besides, word “twhirl” is hard to remember ). But why didn’t it provide an option of URL shortener to use?

We can modify its source to achieve this, though. Open the file chrome/TwitterFox.jar!/content/twitternotifier.js and find the line where TINYURL_CREATE_API is defined. Change the constant value to “http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=”, which is the API of is.gd.

There are countless URL shorteners around the web. Just choose your favorite.

As you may noticed, when you drag some selected text or an image, Firefox 3 displays the “ghost” with fading effect. This feature can be used to create a fading image.

First choose your image to fade. If it’s on your disk, just drag it into a Firefox tab. Press Ctrl+T to open a new tab as the fading image background (white).

Open the tab containing the image, and drag it onto the blank tab in tab bar. This should open the blank tab. Continue dragging the image into the blank tab, and press Print Screen before releasing the mouse button. Then you can simply use mspaint to crop the proper area.

That’s fairly easy. No “advanced” tools involved.

Sample image:

Fading produced by Firefox 3:

Note that Firefox will fade the image from the drag “handle” point. So choose the correct point to drag.

Of course the function is very limited for producing such effects. But sometimes this may be handy and useful.

After I saw this news on digg, I sent a tweet saying:

Mozilla’s next attempt will be setting a memory leaking record. (I don’t care, though)

I was just joking. I really love Firefox. I really don’t like the people complaining “Firefox used up my memory!”. Go buy some more, for RAM is so cheap today. These misers always keep their task manager open with descending order of memory usage, seeking the top one.

What made me surprise is the reply from a user on Twitter hours later:

@qingbo Firefox 3 should use less RAM than other browsers See http://is.gd/FpN & http://is.gd/mbI for benchmarks. Perhaps add-on bloat?

It’s from “firefox_answers“. He is monitoring tweets with keyword “firefox” and trying to help the troubled people.

Just want to say thanks to these people who help spreading firefox (As a developer who hate Internet Explorer very very very … much).