Google please do not redirect me just because I am traveling
I am traveling a lot for my current job taking me also outside of The Netherlands into Belgium and Germany from time to time. Lately I spent a lot of time around the Brussels in Belgium, which is the French speaking part of the country. As a result all the searches I perform using the Google search bar plugin within Firefox get redirected to a French version of the Google pages and the search result favor web pages written in French.
Since I can hardly speak or read French I find myself constantly typing in a URL for a (in my case) Dutch localized version of Google to do my searches. This totally defeats the purpose of Firefox’s search bar.
Look for a file named google.xml. On Windows systems this file is located at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins. On Mac OS systems the file is inside the Firefox.app. You can get to the file by right (or control) clicking on Firefox.app and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’ from the menu. Within the new Finder window navigate to /Contents/MacOS/searchpulgins.
By default (Firefox 3.0.6) the file contains the following information (except for the Image tag, data for the image itself has been removed)
<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET"
template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>Edit the content of the file like below (bold text indicates the changes made to the file)
<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET"
template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<Param name="hl" value="en"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>This little change ensures that you are still being addressed in English although you are still redirected to a localized Google page. If you totally want to prevent the redirect to happen you could, instead of using “http://www.google.com/search”, use something like “http://www.google.nl/search” or any other of Googles localized search pages.
Keeping my digital life in-sync (2)
Some months ago I wrote the post Keeping my digital life in-sync. At this moment I still haven’t found a good working solution to keep my bookmarks in-synch. This mainly concerns the bookmarks within (Mobile)Safari on my iPhone. FoxMarks does a pretty good job for anything bookmark related in Firefox, which is my preferred browser on all platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).
When it comes to being able to access the same documents from different machines I started to use Apple’s MobileMe by using its iDisk functionality. But for whatever reason it didn’t really work well for me.
Since the time I started using Macs I have been listening to the The Mac Geek Gab Podcast by Dave Hamilton & John F. Braun. For some time now I heard them mention Dropbox. So after hearing about their good experience with Dropbox I decided to give it a try.
At the time of writing I have installed Dropbox on four machines (two Macs and two Windows machine) and I like it! It has a nice feel to it, just by looking at the Dropbox folder I can see what the status of my files are (All done or still folders/files to be synched).
One thing that I have found that does not work (not sure that it should) is when you use Dropbox for folders that also contain hidden files. I have some folders that also have files that start with a dot, making the files invisible on Unix based platforms (Mac, Linux, etc.). When these files got synched to the Windows machine the files and folders where created but where visible. When synching between two Windows machines these attributes are also lost. So it is my guess that file and folder attributes are just always lost.
For not a real big issue but I can imagine that for others it is a big deal, so let’s hope Dropbox will find a way of fixing this issue cross platform.
You can get Dropbox for free including free 2.0GB of storage, which if needed can be upgrade to 50GB for $9.99 per month or $99 yearly.
Just so you know…
Add news feeds to NewsGator from Firefox the easy way
When I am working on my Mac it is easy to add new news feeds to NewsGator since I have NewNewsWire installed, but when I am not working on my Mac, for instance when I am at my work doing some research I would still be able to add news feeds I come across to my NewsGator account.
I know that NewsGator provides toolbars for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but I do not like to install additional pieces of software just to add a news feed. Also when I am working at clients using their hardware mist of the time you will not be able to install software anyway.
Firefox itself has support for adding news feed to some online services (Bloglines, My Yahoo and Google) as well as Firefox’s own bookmarking system (local to the browser itself).
Although Firefox by default has only three services defined, there is room for a total of six services (0 through 5). The settings for these services can be found within the ‘about:config’-page of Firefox. Staring from version 3 of Firefox when you try to open the ‘about:config’-page, Firefox warns you about the damage you could do to Firefox by changing settings using this page. So you have to confirm that you will play nice with Firefox by clicking on the button “I’ll be careful, I promise!”.
On the ‘about:config’-page type the string ‘browser.contentHandlers’ into the Filter-field, this will make sure only the relevant settings are displayed.
The settings for a unused entry (most likely this will be the one numbered 3) are
| Preference Name | Status | Type | Value |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.title | default | string | chrome://browser-region/locale/region.properties |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.type | default | string | application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.uri | default | string | chrome://browser-region/locale/region.properties |
To add NewsGator as a content handler for news feeds we will change the settings for the first available unused entry
| Preference Name | Status | Type | Value |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.title | user set | string | NewsGator |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.type | default | string | application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.uri | user set | string | http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=%s |
Now it is time to restart Firefox to let these changes take effect.
From now on every time you click on a RSS feed, Firefox will give you the possibility to add the news feed to your NewsGator account.
Keeping my digital life in-sync
In the wake of my new iPhone I am working on making the efforts needed to keep information synced between the several devices I am using easier. Currently I am using at least 4 devices, being;
- an iPod, soon to be replaced with an iPhone depending on the speed of both Apple and T-Mobile
- an iMac
- a MacBook Pro
- a regular laptop running the Windows OS for work
The information I am currently most concerned about keeping in sync are;
- Contact information
- Calendar information
- Bookmarks
- News feeds
Contact and Calendar information
This one I have solved by buying myself a MobileMe subscription from Apple. Despite all of the negative responses revolving around the Push not being a real push and numerous outages around the world, I find myself among the lucky ones. So far I have no real issues when using MobileMe. I had however some issues with the iPod Touch initially, it would sync over the complete calendar down to the iPod regardless of what settings I was using. After some fiddling with the settings I found what was working for me
- Set the iPod Touch up for manually syncing
- Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to off
- Fetch mode to ‘Manually’
- Open the Calendar application and wait for it to (first clear and then) receive all of your data
- Set the iPod Touch up for Push
- Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to On
- Fetch mode to ‘Every 15 minutes’
Bookmarks
Since I mainly use Firefox for my internet browsing, keeping my bookmarks in-sync could be easily achieved by using the brilliant addon named Foxmarks (see also one of my earlier posts). The only downside is that Firefox is not running on the iPod Touch or iPhone. This means that I don’t have direct access to my bookmarks when I am on the road. I could be using Foxmarks website to access my bookmarks, but I would much rather have a way of syncing my Firefox bookmarks into Safari.
This is something I still need to figure out.
News feeds
For getting the latest news from several web sites around the world I have been using NewsFire on my Mac OS X based machines. This has always worked fine for me, but since the introduction of the new software version for both the iPod Touch and iPhone combined with the introduction of the iTunes App Store a whole new world of abilities has been opened for these two devices (unless you had jail broken your device, then you had access to third-party apps for quite some time already).
On the iTunes App Store I found the application NetNewsWire (the link will take you to the iTunes App Store), which is a RSS news feed reader. I already knew this application as a regular Mac OS X application, but I had never really looked at it since I liked NewsFire and was not looking for a replacement for it.
With the possibility of running NetNewsWire on the iPod Touch this has totally changed. So yesterday NetNewsWire has replaced NewsFire on both my Macs and has been installed on my iPod Touch.
The synching of the RSS feeds is handled by using the services of NewsGator. Just sign up for a free account and your are pretty much set.
NewsGator also provides toolbar applications for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but since these are provided as a downloadable executable, these are unusable on a Mac. I have found another way which allows you to add news feeds to your NewsGator account without the need of an addon or applications. I will describe this in a separate post.
Firefox Addons
Ever since the release of Firefox 3 I seem to a rekindled interest into the Firefox Add-ons out there. Currently I have a total of 10 Addons installed. Here is a quick run down of all of ones I got installed.
This one tries to block adverts from being displayed. Based on filter it decides whether or not a certain image or plugin is considered an adverts and if so it hides (or removes) the element from the page. So you never have to search between the adverts to find the content you wanted to read.
This one I really like. Form my daytime job I need to build web sites from time to time. But not that often that I consider myself to be an expert. This addon got tons of goodies that will help you view the layout of your site, validate your (x)HTML code, switch between style sheets and much, much more.
Just a few days ago I used it to finally make some of my web pages pass the XHTML 1.0 strict test. Of course I could have done it without using the addon, but it surely helped me getting the issues resolved much quicker, than I could have done manually.
To be honest I haven’t used this addon a lot yet, but it looks very promising. What I have seen so far looks nice. Definitely the inspect window is very powerful, on the left you see the structure of your web page and on the right it displays the related style sheet information. Within the style sheet you can see what gets inherited from other parts and gets ignored or has an override.
Combined with Web Developer Firefox becomes a very fully featured development environment for HTML designing/coding.
Just a little neat addon show a country flag for the sites you visit. Very funny to see, certainly when visiting web sites from larger companies, where all of there data centers are located, just as an example
www.oracle.com Finland
forums.oracle.com United States
otn.oracle.com Finland
blogs.oracle.com Singapore
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
This one I really love. For my work I travel from customer to customer. Depending on the customer I can either use my company laptop or I need to work on a machine the customer provides me. This is all fine, but every time it is a pain to the bookmarks I need to do my job. Previously I just copied the bookmarks.html file to an USB stick or mailed it to myself. But more often than not I forget to copy or mail the latest version of my bookmarks.
With this addon I can always access my bookmarks. You just add/remove bookmarks within Firefox, press a key and they get synchronized to the server. From another PC you do the same and everything gets nicely synchronized. I have been using it for about a week now and I already find myself
You need to signup for this service to make it work or move it to a private server.
Remove sections from web pages. Useful when you want to print a web page has not implemented a style sheet for printing the page. Using the addon you can remove to side banners and all the other clutter that really does not need to get printed.
ScribeFire is a blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. See also on of my earlier posts on ScribeFire.
Used ScribeFire again to post the blog message ;)
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more. Just as Foxmarks you need to sign up for a service to be able to use it. So far I like it, this has brought me to some really nice pages that I would never have visited. I find myself pressing the ‘Stumble!’ button constantly, just wondering what comes next. It is just like an addiction, you know you need to do other stuff but just can’t wait to see what gem might be lurking around the corner.
Not only does TwitterFox notify you of updates to your friends’ statuses of Twitter, but it also allows to you make posts to Twitter, reply to posts. I am just to lazy to visit all of the individual Twitter pages, now the updates popup when the addon checks for them.
Fake your User Agent. Comes in handy when for instance a certain web site only will show a page when it detects Internet Explorer. Just select ‘Internet Explorer’ from the ‘User Agent Switcher’ menu and revisit the site. None the wiser :).
This addon generates errors within the Error Console of Firefox, but it seems to work regardless.
ScribeFire
Just configured ScribeFire so now I can add posts to my blog without having to go to the WordPress site itself.
Not sure if ScribeFire allows for enough customizations to the post, but I will notice that soon enough.
For now it seems to work fine, better than it was working with the XS4ALL blogger site.
Social Networking
Wakoopa
