Lee Kelleher’s Weblog

I’ve just installed Operator - a Firefox extension that highlights microformatted data on web pages.

So far I haven’t noticed any performance issues, and it’s been playing nicely with all my other Firefox extensions.

As a web developer, Operator makes me want to add more semantic mark-up to my websites, (which I already try to do). This extension will make it easier for testing purposes.

I decided to read more about the extension on the developer’s blog - to which I was pleasantly surprised to find that it uses my Category Cloud widget (plug-in for WordPress). Along with a kudos-link back to my personal website. (Thanks Mike!)

A while ago I was curious to how many people were using my Category Cloud widget plug-in, so I added an opt-out “powered by” link. This way I could check my referrals or Google results count for “Powered by Category Cloud”.

I’ve been amazed by the outcome of this. I honestly thought that everyone would opt-out of the link, yet they didn’t! So now my PageRank has increased; I’m in the Technorati Top 10K (which I definitely don’t deserve!); and I get a steady flow of traffic (low, but consistent).

I’ve tried to support the Category Cloud widget as best I can… so maybe it’s good karma?

We’ve got an old laptop that we keep under the coffee table, so that we can quickly check IMDb or Wikipedia for mid-conversations things (very geeky I know!)

Since Katelyn arrived, we’ve been using it for web-cam too.

Yesterday we were having a few problems with voice chat on MSN, so we installed Skype on the laptop.

A couple of clicks later, Skype was installed, all was good. Then about 5 mins later I notice a little Skype toolbar at the top of Firefox! Very very sneaky!!!

There were no options during the install to let me opt-in/out of adding the Firefox Extension! Bad Skype!

I’m not impressed by companies who try to sneakily install additional software just because you use related software… *cough* Apple Safari *cough* (The number of people I’ve spoke to about it didn’t know how it got on their computers!)

I do know that Apple at least give you an opt-out of Safari (as they pre-select the checkbox for you) - but Skype didn’t even offer that choice!

Regardless of how useful the Skype Firefox Extension is… I’ve uninstalled it - just because I can!

I used all sorts of add-ons and extensions for Firefox, (I’ll get around to writing a blog post on that soon too). Since I do a lot of web-development, I switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer frequently during a build.

To make this easier, I’ve been using Grayson Mixon’s IE View Lite. But with the latest upgrade (version 1.3.2), it broke in Firefox 2.0! (This made me sad)

I’d been holding out for the next upgrade - to see if that would fix the problem… but nothing came.

So I emailed Grayson to see if there was a potential fix in a future release; which he promptly replied:

IE View Lite 1.3.2 and 1.3.3 are Firefox 3 only. If you want to continue using Firefox 2, you should use IE View Lite 1.3.1, the only difference being compatibility updates for Firefox 3 that broke backward compatibility.

I’ve now uninstalled version 1.3.2 - reverting back to 1.3.1 - and everything is good again! (Thanks Grayson).

It does concern me that support was dropped for Firefox 2.0 in favour of version 3 (which is still only in beta) - cutting out a large proportion of the user-base. But I guess once Firefox 3 has shipped, no one will be bothered anyway.