Tech

Some small tips and tidbits on bytes.

Firefox Facts

I just stumbled upon the site Firefox Facts and on the very first post discovered something pretty cool that I didn’t know existed.  You can turn on Firefox’s spell checker on any website to catch spelling errors.  Great tool if you suck at spelling like me or if you are asked to proof read web pages.   Here is how to do it from the Firefox Facts post Use Firefox’s Spellchecker Anywhere!:

The first step to take would be to bookmark this link (or drag and drop it onto your bookmarks toolbar).

+ spell check

When the bookmarklet is clicked, Firefox will turn on the built in spellchecker and highlight any misspelled words that are on the page you are currently browsing.

Give it a try, just pick any post on this site as I am sure there are errors all over it.

It is worth check out the Firefox Facts site, it has lots of other great tips and tricks.

WordPress – Plugin Changelogs

WordPress » Improving your plugin – Changelogs announces that a new section will be added to the readme.txt files that plugin authors should use to track changes.  As a heavy user of plugins across several different websites this is a very nice improvement.  It will make the plugin update that much smoother, as admins will no longer have to go hunting for changes on another website, it will just show up on the plugin upgrade panel.  It is things like this that make the WordPress UI so good and why WordPress is my favourite framework. Hopefully authors will start using it.

Run Firefox Run

Firefox Updated to Version 3.5 today.  As always it takes a few weeks for add-ons to be updated to work with the new version.  So if you are a heavy add-on or theme user then you might want to wait a week or two.

First impressions is that things seems snappier.  I have nothing to back this up but my usual websites seem to load faster.

A new feature that will be interesting to watch is the support for HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags.  This allows better embedding in sites.  The question will be if they get adopted by the web community.  The demo on the firefox site was pretty smooth.

Another feature that has been in Safaria and other browsers in a Private Browsing Mode (nicknamed “porn mode” by many).  The idea is not record anything about the sites you are visiting (cookies, history, etc.).

MySQL management with Navicat 8

For a new web project I had a large amount of data (over 7000 entries) that I had to load into several tables in a MySQL database. I originally went down the path of attempting to do this via SQL commands, but realized this was going to take more database knowledge then I had. So I went looking for a tool that could help me do this.

After trying out a few free demos I found Navicat 8 for MySQL. They had a free 30 day demo that did everything I needed. The upload of the data was a big success (took me 5 times to get the data exactly how I wanted it) and with Navicat I was able to do the data upload directly from an Excel spreadsheet. I was so impressed with this tool that I ended up buying a licenses. I have now made it part of my normal web project work flow: database backups, database repairs and browsing database structures when working on new projects.

Google Earth 5.0 is Under this World

Google Earth 5.0 has been released with some pretty amazing features added to an already great program.  My favourite – I am an avid diver and water lover – is the new ocean features.  Previous versions of Google Earth did amazing things on the terrestrial side, now the ocean part of our planet is getting some need attention.  You can now plunge in under the water to get a great view of the formations around islands.  Check out the Hawaiian Island chain for a great example. Also they are pulling in data from many other sites to provide a wealth of information about different parts of the ocean.

Another really interesting tool is the ability to see an area in different times. For example you can see the areas around New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. You can also see urban sprawl happen right before your eyes.

Other thing to check out are the sky and Mars views.

Happy earth viewing.