I recently discovered Tweetbar, a Twitter extension for Firefox that allows viewing and posting to Twitter. I was very satisfied with the application, but I still thought there could be more things implemented. So, being the DIY person I am, I dug up the code and changed it myself.

The result of two days’ work is a good one—one with new features and ideas implemented into it. Read on to find out about how I changed Tweetbar, and how you can acquire this modified extension.

Changed/Added Features

I changed a ton of stuff in this modified Tweetbar. Here’s a list that summarizes all of (I think) the new features.

• Clicking on a user’s picture prepares a @reply in the status box
• Tweets can be added to user’s favorites by clicking on a heart below the user’s avatar in a particular tweet
• Friends tab now lists all the people you follow and their latest status
• Followers tab now lists all the people who follow you and their latest status
• The Update button has been removed, to allow more space for viewing
• Pressing Enter now sends a tweet instead of clicking the Update button
• “@s” tab shows tweets that are replies to your statuses
• Refresh intervals can now be as low as 30 seconds
• Your Twitter statuses can be deleted from Tweetbar by clicking the delete button below the status
• Viewing area has been extended for easier viewing
• Many style changes

It might be hard to understand some of these changes without seeing them for yourself, so I made a demo video and posted it to Viddler for all of you to see. I have added comments so you can see where each feature is demonstrated in the video.

Download

You can download this modified Tweetbar extension from MediaFire.

Once the .xpi file has downloaded, simply open it with Firefox (File->Open File) and it will automatically start the installation process.

http://example.com/index.php?act=search&query=some%20search
%20query&sessionid=5ef67f1752fe7496

Frankly, I am sick of these kinds of sites. This article digs a bit deeper into why this is bad, and offers solutions for webmasters that do have URLs like the one above.

Why Long URLs Are Bad

Other than the obvious reasons, there are some deeper justifications. Let’s jump right in..

Aesthetics

I (and probably many other computer users) are annoyed by long and incomprehensible URLs. Instead, they should look good by being simple and short.

Readability

By reading your site’s URLs, I should be able to understand what would happen if I visited that page. This is a bad example of URL readability:

http://example.com/actions/?1

I am able to understand by reading the URL that some sort of action will be performed, but the ?1 gives no clue as to what it is. This is a much better URL:

http://example.com/actions/send/

Now it is perceptible that something will be sent. But still, there is no hint of what will be sent. This is an even-better URL:

http://example.com/mail/send/

The user can now understand that by visiting this URL, mail will be sent.

Memorable URLs

The average person could never memorize a URL like the one at the top of this page—that is what the Clipboard is for. Your URLs need to be short and sweet—short enough so that it is easy to remember.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have URLs that are a bit long. Even when using folders for URLs as in the examples above, these links can get a bit long. But so long as the URL makes sense, it will still be memorable. For instance, this long URL is, well, long—but it is still easy to remember because the link is hierarchically sorted.

http://example.com/mail/send/somecompany/jerry/

Solutions for Shorter URLs

Despite the problematic natures of long, hard-to-remember URLs, they can always be easily shortened. Here are some solutions and methods of doing so.

Send POST Data Instead of GET

For those who don’t know the difference, GET data is included in the URL, while POST data is not visible. By using POST data instead of GET data, the first URL shown in this post could be shortened to:

http://example.com/index.php

All of the ugly GET data is now instead being passed via POST, so the URL is much shorter already. But this URL does still not accord to the rule of readability from earlier in this post. Its purpose should be clearly visible, so let’s change the URL.

http://example.com/search.php

POST solves a lot of our URL-length problems, but there are still the problems of readability, aesthetics, and memorability.

Use Apache’s .htaccess To Simulate Directories

In the earlier example of memorability, we finished with this URL:

http://example.com/mail/send/somecompany/jerry/

However, the only real folder in this URL should be the /mail folder. The rest of the folders can be simulated with a file called .htaccess, a special type of per-directory configuration file for Apache servers.

In the .htaccess we can redirect that URL to this new, server-readable link.

http://example.com/mail/?act=send&company=somecompany&person=jerry

In this way, we can simply place one index file in the /mail directory to perform the actions.

You might be wondering why I would suggest that URL, as it breaks all the rules of URL readability, aesthetics, and memorability. But actually, this URL is never shown to the user. Although the server is told to serve the above URL, we can make sure the user only sees the clean and short one with our .htaccess file.

This amazingly simple, yet powerful technology is called rewriting. Rewriting requires the mod_rewrite module to be turned on (by default it is enabled). The rewrite module uses regular expressions to match URLs, so this allows the URLs to be very flexible.

Here is an example of an .htaccess file that we could place in the /mail directory, that would perform what was described four paragraphs ago.

# Turn the rewriting engine on
RewriteEngine on
# Should be used
RewriteOptions inherit
# Base directory
RewriteBase /mail/
# Rule for rewriting
RewriteRule ^(.+?)/(.+?)/(.+?)(/|)$ index.php?act=$1&company=$2&person=$3

This is only an example—there are many more things you can do with rewriting.

Don’t Show Filetypes or Filenames

Most non-literate computer users (who are a large portion of the market) will be confused about or forget endings like .php, .html, .htm, and others. It is much better to show folder names instead of specific files. For example, this URL:

http://example.com/search.php

Should be changed to this URL.

http://example.com/search/

If you don’t want to create folders for every action, you could just keep search.php and use the .htaccess method mentioned above this to serve search.php when the /search folder is visited.

Fin

Thanks for reading! Hopefully these tips will help improve certain (*cough*) websites in the near future.

The Eee’s default interface: Easy Mode.

They really are telling the truth in their slogan; it is indeed “Easy to Learn, Work, and Play.” But if you’re like me and require that default-looking desktop environment to satisfy your needs, probably want to activate the Eee’s Full Mode.

The interface that we’ll be activating, Full Mode.

So! Let’s get started with this. We need to get two packages to make Eee able to run this Full Mode.

Open a terminal (press Control+Alt+T) and type this command:

sudo apt-get update

All we’re doing here is updating our repository so that your Eee knows the latest available versions of the packages that we will be downloading right now:

sudo apt-get install ksmserver kicker

Now, reboot your Eee. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see the Full Mode on your next login, because we still need to tell our Eee that we want to use Full Mode.

Our new option in the Shutdown menu for activating Full Mode.

Click on the power button in the lower right corner on your Eee, or press that shiny power button in front of your keyboard. There should now be an option for Full Mode. Click it, and within a minute your Full Mode will be loaded.

Booting Directly Into Full Mode

There is a fairly easy way to have your Eee PC boot directly into Full Mode so you don’t have to switch to the new mode from Easy Mode.

Open a terminal, and type these commands sequentially:

$ cd ~/
$ nano .xinitrc

Type this content into the .xinitrc file:

#Needed to get automount working
xhost + si:localuser:root
sudo rm /tmp/nologin
#Needed to get the network working
sudo /opt/xandros/bin/start_netserv &

startkde

Save the file (Ctrl+O) and exit (Ctrl+X). Reboot, and you should be given Full Mode immediately.

Enjoy your new Full-Mode-enabled Eee PC!

Did you find this article useful, or have a question about it? Feel free to leave a comment below (don’t worry, you needn’t register for a comment!)

But for now, there are still two versions available: A PDF version and the original OpenOffice ODT file.

Enjoy!

See the plugin page for more information.

A patch file is one of the best methods to do what you think it would do—patch things. This short guide will teach you how to create patch files, and apply them to your files.

Creating Patch Files

Creating patch files requires two things—the original file and the new modified file you have created, that you would like to create a patch for. Run this command respectively:
diff -Naur <original file> <modified file> >> my_patch.patch
Of course, you can change the patch-file’s filename to whatever you would like. Here’s an example of creating a patch:
diff -Naur original.txt modified.txt >> modified.patch

Applying Patch Files

Now we can use this newly-created patch file to patch this same file so it is updated on other people’s systems. To patch a file, run this command, replacing with correct values:
patch -u <original file> <patch file>
For example, let’s patch another original.txt on another system using the patch file we created earlier:
patch -u original.txt modified.patch

That’s really all there is to patching!

While is much more commonly used than whilst. You will almost never hear the word whilst spoken in American English, but in British English it is still occasionally used. It is very likely that you would be laughed or stared at for using whilst in America. Whilst is essentially a deprecated version of while (continue reading for more information).

Back in the times of Middle English, the suffix -s was often appended to words in order to indicate the use of an adverb. (Whiles is an even less common example of a different form of while.) However, somewhere along the humongous timeline of the English language, confusion arose. Superlatives were soon mismatched with this -s ending, and it became -st, as is the ending of a superlative. Soon, many modified words arose, such as the following:

• while/whilst
• among/amongst
• again/against (These two words originally meant the same thing, but against has earned an exceedingly different connotation in modern English.)

In conclusion, it truly doesn’t matter if you choose to use whilst instead of while, or vice versa. In many places in England, using whilst has gained a more formal connotation than while. Whilst is also seen much more in writing than in speech, as to Americans and British alike, it just doesn’t sound correct to say whilst. Phonetically, it is harder to speak whilst, which may have been one of the winning factors for while‘s success.

Source: World Wide Words

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