Macslocum over at O’Reilly Answers is asking people to submit their favourite browser plugins and extensions. No prizes for guessing which one I chose!
Thursday 18th March 2010
Tuesday 07th July 2009
As you’ve seen I’m somewhat obsessed with privacy and security plugins for Mozilla Firefox. Since writing my latest list of them, I’ve installed two more that I’m surprised I didn’t discover before.
The first is Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out with the cute acronym of TACO. According to the extension description, it sets permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioural advertising by 84 different advertising networks including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all members of the Network Advertising Initiative, and many other companies. What I love about it is it installs cleanly into Firefox without any configuration required.
The second is Master Password Timeout. If you’re like me and use Firefox to remember your passwords for sites, it’s critically important you assign a master password by going into Preferences > Security otherwise a malicious user accessing your machine could get your passwords in the clear. Master Password Timeout re-locks the master security device after a predefined period of inactivity which is useful if you tend to leave your browser open for long periods of time. Unfortunately it’s not currently available for Firefox 3.5 but I’m hoping that will change, it works great in Firefox 3.0.11 on my FreeBSD box.
All these extensions might seem like a symptom of paranoia, but personally given the Wild West nature of the Internet and how much of my life I spend on it, I couldn’t think of using anything else at this point.
Saturday 27th June 2009
A few months ago I lampooned Wordpress for it’s need to have the term "category" appear within every category URL. It appears I’m not the only one who found this irritating.
For me I wanted to merge all my disparate nonsense blogs into one meta nonsense blog (Rubenerd.com) which would be easier to maintain, then use categories with their own CSS to make them still appear separate. A shrewd, devilish cunning plan worthy of Baldric himself, but alas having the term "category" in all the URis spoilt the illusion.
Original blogs Ideal new sub-URI Wordpress illusion screwup Rubenerd Show rubenerd.com/show/ rubenerd.com/category/show/ Fun Facts rubenerd.com/nonsense/ rubenerd.com/category/nonsense/ Intranet rubenerd.com/anime/ rubenerd.com/category/anime/ Studies rubenerd.com/studies/ rubenerd.com/category/studies/
Fortunately having played with and been disappointed by so many plugins in the past, I’ve finally found one that works so beautifully I’m thinking of sending the writer a grilled cheese sandwich: the adeptly-titled WP No Category Base. Not only does it work right out of the box, but it also redirects your previous category permalinks which means you don’t need to mess with .htaccess files. A beautiful, elegant solution!
As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory "Category Base" from your category permalinks ( e.g. "myblog.com/category/my-category/" to "myblog.com/my-category/".
The plugin requires no setup or modifying core wordpress files and will not break any links.
Now I can finally start to import all my other posts. Apparently the anime category gets the most hits here anyway despite it having nothing of value in it! Crazy, grilled cheese sandwich stuff.
I’ve already figured out how to exclude certain categories from certain places so they act like separate sites with their own styles and whatnot, now I just need to work out the feeds. I know Wordpress allows you to generate separate RSS and Atom feeds for different categories, but how do I customise them? For example, add iTunes information to the Rubenerd Show category feed, but not any others.
If I spent as much time blogging and talking about interesting topics on my blog and podcast as I did blogging and talking about blogging and talking, I’d get much more blogging and talking done on my blog and podcast. Wait, what?
Wednesday 06th May 2009
My post about Michael Franks was the last to use the SimpleTags plugin. Couldn’t think of any other picture to put here!
When I started using it for this blog back in 2005, WordPress didn’t have native tagging abilities. The Ultimate Tag Warrior was the most popular third party plugin to provide them at the time as evidenced by the importer available for it in more recent WordPress versions. I chose not to use it because I’ve never been comfortable with plugins altering my blog’s database.
The solution I found at the time was Broobles’ SimpleTags which allowed tags to be defined within the text of a blog post either inline or in a block. When the post was rendered the plugin would generate a nice list of Technorati tag links with the rel="tag" attribute so they’d be recognised as such. No muss, no fuss.
ASIDE: All posts here that used SimpleTags have since been mass tagged with the simpletagged tag using WordPress’s tagging system. That’s right, I have an internal tag for posts that have been tagged in another system. I also had a grilled chicken sandwich for lunch, and I don’t hear anyone complaining.
When WordPress implemented tagging support I stopped using SimpleTags, meaning most of my posts from 2006 (and very early 2007) still have them. Fortunately SimpleTags still works even with the latest versions of WordPress so I can keep it installed to generate those links. For example, I can define a few right here:
tags, tagging, simpletags, wordpress, php, plugins, grilled cheese sandwiches, jaffles, software, reviewsThat was fun, I haven’t done inline tags in a long time!
Even though I’ve moved over, I can see situations where SimpleTags would still be preferable to using WordPress’s tagging abilities. Unfortunately (in my opinion) WordPress handles tags very much like categories in your blog database, meaning if you don’t want your tables to get ridiculously huge and therefore take longer to backup, you have to be more restrictive in your tagging. With SimpleTags you can tag a post with as many as you want; I remember on many posts I would include several different spellings of the same word, and with posts about software I’d include a generic name tag along with a more specific name and product version tag.
So I did end up reviewing SimpleTags, it just took 4 years to do it ^_^.
Tuesday 24th February 2009
That’s a lot of filtered spam!
You may recall I recently gave a glowing review of TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter plugin for WordPress. Now that a few weeks have past I thought I’d give an update on how it’s working out in real world usage.
After several weeks of adding keywords from incoming spam messages every other day, TanTanNoodle’s Simple Spam Filter is now taking care of virtually all my spam messages. By virtually I mean it’s taking care of thousands, while Akismet is taking care of a couple. This is a staggering ratio that I never dreamed a filter could reach, and a real sign that a simple, clean, no frills plugin can outperform a much bigger, collaborative commercial plugin such as Akismet.
Below is a quick table I drew up that shows the number of spam messages Akismet and the Simple Spam Filter blocked. While Akismet can be reset, the Simple Spam Filter simply shows the cumulative number of blocked messages, so I simply subtracted the previous weeks total from the one reported at the date shown.
Date Akismet Simple Spam Filter Unfiltered 2009.01.20 4291 n/a 29 2009.02.01 2499 1913 12 2009.02.06 44 2070 (=3983-1913) 1 2009.02.10 12 1767 (=5750-3983) 0 2009.02.24 2 6014 (=11764-5750) 0
Now of course there are several caveats to this table: I didn’t bother doing checks at predetermined intervals, and given spam is an unpredictable, living beast the fact one filter did a better job than the over when compared just on one day doesn’t give an accurate picture. Still, the overall trend is clear: with some adaptation over a period of weeks to the kinds of messages I receive, Simple Spam Filter is now more effective than Akismet, while using a fraction of it’s resources.
To appreciate these numbers, you also have to keep in mind how Akismet and the Simple Spam Filters differ in function. Akismet allows all comments into your blog’s database then filters what it thinks is spam into a spam folder. The Simple Spam Filter rejects blatant spam messages outright: these messages NEVER alter your database. What this means in practise is the Simple Spam Filter puts much less load on your systems and keeps your database much cleaner.
Spam instead of baked beans?! So you want spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…
Of course we must also remember that no spam filtering system is perfect and that there are bound to be false positives. Again Simple Spam Filter works great for this because it only filters spam messages with obvious strings of keywords; as you can see in the table this takes care of the bulk of the spam. This means the more intelligent but heavier Akismet is left to deal with the rest of the comments that are harder to discern, and any messages it does flag as spam I can more easily skim through for false positive because there are only a few messages a day instead of a few thousand!
If you are using Wordpress on your website, you absolutely want to download and install this, right now! I mean it!
Monday 09th February 2009
Aww shucks :(
While I prefer to use Firefox and Camino on my MacBook Pro and iBook G3, my sister still prefers Safari on her pretty white MacBook because she says its faster and looks better. I’m under the impression Sharon in Singapore uses all three in different capacities too (I think!). Each to their own, right? ^_^
Well this morning I finally got around to installing a new hard drive in her MacBook and installed Mac OS X Leopard fresh for her. While searching for the usual plugins she uses for Safari I came across one that looked so interesting and useful I was about ready to go onto my own Macs and install it myself: GlimmerBlocker.
GlimmerBlocker is an advertisement filtering system that uses a proxy server on your Mac, which means it filters ads on every application you launch (very cool) and as a bonus it doesn’t need to hack anything to work (it’s not a haxie to use the Mac lingo).
While it seemed like a great idea, upon installing it on Elke’s MacBook and my MacBook Pro (my iBook couldn’t use it because it has Mac OS X Tiger), the internet connections on each machine failed and we were presented with the cryptic error message shown above upon entering our System Preferences screens.
As it turns out, when the application activated itself it changed the proxy settings on the machines automatically, so when it failed it blocked any internet network requests. By doing so, it seems it also blocked its own attempts to connect to its own server to download the appropriate files. A Catch 22 perhaps? I’m not Bill Kurtis.
The only way to get internet back on our Macs was to uninstall this plugin and restart Mac OS X. Fortunately the GlimmerBlocker folks had good instructions on how to do so on their Trac wiki.
It’s a shame, the premise for GlimmerBlocker was intruiging and the features looked promising. Perhaps the next release will work, but I’m somewhat nervous about trying again considering it failed so verbosely on two seperate machines.
Monday 02nd February 2009
For those of you who use WordPress, you’re probably used to using Akismet for your spam blocking needs. While I’ve found it to be a useful way to block the torrents of comment spam I get on a daily basis, it certainly isn’t perfect. The problem is, aside from simply tagging comments as spam, there really isn’t any way you can customise or fine tune Akismet to block the specific types of spam you receive.
ASIDE: For some reason, my blog elicits spam that advertises suspect banking services and pharmaceuticals. Spammers apparently think I’m a terribly depressed person who needs contraception and a bulletproof offshore bank account to store my millions of dollars of embezzled funds. Hey, one out of three isn’t bad I guess!
Enter the TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter. This tiny plugin does two critical things that Akismet doesn’t: blocking comments with multiple links which spammers universally use to pedal their advertisements, and defining keyword filters. In this way the Simple Spam Filter doesn’t replace Akismet, it complements it by taking care of obvious spam messages before Akismet even has to deal with it.
While blocking comments with multiple links is useful, it’s the flexible keyword filter that’s the killer feature. On the simple, easy to understand configuration screen you’re presented with a text box to add keywords to, along with a list of suggested keywords from messages currently in your spam queue. You can add them to your custom filter by simply clicking them, too easy!
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…
One final whipped cream feature which tops off the simple chocolate fudgy goodness of a plugin is the ability to present a user with a reCAPTCHA if someone is suspected of submitting a spam comment. I haven’t enabled it myself because the keywords I’ve assigned it to filter wouldn’t be ones that a person who’s comments I approve of would use, but the fact it’s there is very compelling.
Since installing this plugin on Saturday (two days ago now) it has automatically rejected 1913 comments, more than Akismet ever did. I’ve also had no spam comments make their way to my legitimate comment moderation queue which when working by itself Akismet let slip quite regularly.
I’m completely sold. If you’re using WordPress and only intend on using one other plugin other than Akismet, make it this one.
