July 2003

Saw this in one of the Mac OS X mailing lists. The discussion centers around Safari but it work just as well with anything that supports JS. I’d seen this before at Bookmarklets but forgot about it until I saw it on the list. See the Bookmarklets site for a description of bookmarklets, what they are, how to use them and so on.

This will move the window to the upper left corner of the screen and resize it to 800×600 (note that 800×600 may not be the size of the actual display area of the window):


javascript:self.moveTo(0,0);self.resizeTo(800,600)


This will move and resize it so it’s an 800 pixels wide window that runs the entire height of the display:


javascript:self.moveTo(0,0);self.resizeTo(962,screen.availHeight)


self.resize or window.moveTo can be used instead to put the work into the hands of the user.

Not a bad list here and it looks like it’s been updated recently … well, about 3 months ago, but, still, it’s a pretty long list and includes browsers, word processors and HTML editors.

Yesterday’s Lockergnome Webmaster’s Weeky points out that www.example.com, www.example.org and www.example.net are all domains reserved for use in documentation. There are a couple of top-level domains (TLDs) reserved, too. See RFC 2606.

Web2POP costs about $20 and supports just a whole bunch of webmail accounts including Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape.net, MSN, AOL, OneBox and Excite. it acts as a POP3 proxy — you point your email client at Web2POP (localhost, 127.0.0.1, using the standarde, but modifiable, POP3 port of 110) and during the login process Web2POP will log in to your webmail account, retrieve your email and pass it back to your POP3 client. It won’t send mail but there’s gotta be an SMTP proxy for that, too, doesn’t there? 🙂

Pirillo’s amazing! He’s so on top of things it almost makes me sick. He writes about a real-time weblog monitoring service called BlogChatter. The weblog maintainer’s gotta send the updates to BlogChatter (called a “ping” in weblog-land) but, still, it’s too cool!

Just got a card in the mail from T-Mobile. Since I’m a customer I can get unlimited T-Mobile Hotspot access at all hotspots (most Starbucks, Borders, etc.) for $20/month on a month-to-month basis. That’s about 50% off their normal rate. See http://www.t-mobile.com/getmorehotspot.

McDonald’s is supposed to be launching their “get an hour for a meal” WiFi access here in San Jose soon. Mercury News said they’d be announcing something next week. See “McDonald’s serves wireless“.

Played with Bloglines and found a couple of problems, the first of which was a real concern to me. You can import OPML channel listings so you can easily bring your existing subscriptions to it. I tried importing an OPML file created by FeedDemon and it failed with a server error. Fired off a comment to their support and got an answer back within an hour that included an update to their server code! Now, that’s what I call service! Course, like I said, they just launched it and, having done stuff like this before myself, I imagine they’re probably shepherding it along, keeping a very close eye on things.

Also sent off a couple of suggestions.

* When subscribing to new channels, there’s a subscribe radio control on the page which is redundant with the subscribe button. I understand the desire to have a confirmation so how about a “subscribe” and a “cancel” button?

* (You have to experience this to really understand it, I think.) It’s difficult to move subscriptions from one folder to another, especially if you have a number of subs you want to move. How about making it a two-step process? Have check boxes next to each subscription and allow the user to select multiple subs. Then, click on a “move” button and select the target folder (only one selection allowed, here). Could do the same with delete and even create (select the folder in which you want the new folder or subscription to go in to).

And here’s an excerpt from their response:

Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 09:24:12 -0700
From: Customer Support
Subject: Re: [#128] Web Form: [Suggestions]

Hello,

Thanks for the suggestions. Both are great ideas. We’re definitely looking
for ways to improve the manage screen and I like your multiple move idea.

Thanks for using Bloglines.

I just signed up for Bloglines — a free web-based service that will monitor the RSS feeds you specify and allow you to read them via the web. That means no more downloading/running/evaluating RSS readers. It’s a brand new service, just recently launched so the UI is still a bit … uhh … utilitarian but I’m gonna give it a try. I’ll let you know what I think. I’m gonna be hard pressed to give up FeedDemon.

See this article in the WinInformant. The article link is to his “Short Takes for the week of June 30” — look for Office 2003.

This is a very interesting development. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the sites. See this weblog about it. Saw it in an article in today’s Lockergnome Bits and Bytes.