Technocrank

Flashblock 1.5.8
Firefox 3.x+
MySpace

I find MySpace is only tolerable if you have the Flashblock add-on in Firefox.  My primary complaint is the preponderance of Flash media players assaulting your senses all on auto-play.  Some clowns have auto-play on all the media on their page and the hilarious cacophony of their favourite Daily Show clip blasting along side a Slipknot/SystemOfADown/Gwar medley is just sometimes too much.  My secondary complaint is with the Flash Player in Firefox 3.x+ on a Mac which, for some reason seems to wind up the CPU making any other activity on your computer a chore.  So Flashblock allows me to whip around the site without slowing down unless I really want to hear MGMT again (which seems to be inserted into every second page) .

Recently, MySpace’s media player started doing something strange with Flashblock on Firefox.  If you click on the Flashblock placeholder icon, the <div> where the media player should re-appear goes blank and nothing fills the space.  However…music will start playing (if it’s on auto-play).  So you can’t stop it, nor can you change songs.  Whitelisting myspace.com in Flashblock works…but that’s not a solution.  MySpace is the whole reason I installed Flashblock in the first place.

It’s not Flash dependent: I’ve tried it with Flash 9 & 10 and on Windows and OSX.  I haven’t tried it with many versions of Firefox – just 3.0.5 and 3.1b2.

A related issue has been flagged as a bug in the Camino Bugzilla database.

There is some speculation that there is some code in the new MySpace player that can be addressed by the MediaWrap plugin. This didn’t solve anything for me.

Update: One of the Flashblock developers, Philip Chee, has gotten back to me about this and they’re looking into it.  They’re not pointing fingers since it’s not obvious who’s side of the court this ball is in.  However, if anybody knows how to actually get ahold of the MySpace admins it would probably help to get to the bottom of this (do you just send Tom a message on the site?  After all, he’s “friend”, right?).  The Flashblock Bugzilla report is filed here, but Philip recommends tracking the bug on the Camino site.

Update 2: I’m running AdBlock Plus as well, as I’m sure a lot of people are who don’t like noise in their browser.   I tried disabling AdBlock Plus for that page and the player reappeared when I refreshed the page.  However, it doesn’t behave consistently and sometimes loads, sometimes doesn’t.

Update 3: Seems like Philip may have found a solution described on the Mozdev site.  The Flash player settings manager has a tab called “Global Storage Settings”.  Follow Philip’s instructions but if your “Allow 3rd party…” checkbox is already checked (like mine was), toggle it off and then on again.

Typogrify 1.6

Something’s a little loose in Typogrify’s pattern matching code.  There’s an option for it to

Add <span class="amp"> to ampersands.

…which does just that, but it doesn’t check the context of the ampersand’s placement.  It will grab an ampersand in the middle of an anchor tag, for instance say, in a title attribute and nuke it.  The results are this:

<a title="Bob <span class="amp">&amp;</span> Doug McKenzie" href="http://www.hoser.com">Take off, eh?</a>

…which leaves a broken link and HTML guts all over the page.  Like, you really don’t need that many double quotes in there, do you now.  The regex code in Typogrify works if instead of “amp” it used ‘amp’ with single quotes (unless your attribute is enclosed with single quotes).  At least it doesn’t break the HTML into tiny little pieces.  However, there’s a larger question as to whether or not you really need a span inside an title attribute – or even anywhere inside HTML code.  It’s more code to do a check that you’re not pattern matching inside HTML tags, but it’s been done.  Maybe this will be addressed in wp-Hyphenate when it gets rolled in.

There was discussion at the Firefox developer meeting on Wednesday that the upcoming version 3.1 should maybe be released as 3.5 instead.  Personally, I think that would be awesome as 3.5 is clearly better.  0.4 better to be exact.  That’s an almost 13% improvement.

All In One SEO Pack 1.4.7.3
WP Super Cache 0.9.1

WP Super Cache supports server-side compression which you’d think is a good thing.  It doesn’t seem to play nice with the All In One SEO Pack, though.  You’ll need to turn compression off and delete your cache to get the two to work together.  Funny trade-off, though: if you’ve installed the SEO pack then you obviously want to increase traffic to your site.  Assuming this works, it would be of benefit to have server-side compression working to reduce the load on your server.

As an aside, I like the second comment on this forum posting:

“Why are you using crap like Super Cache anyway? Get rid of it entirely. Get 1BlogCacher — it’s simple, it works without problems, and it’s very, very good in making your blog static. And yes, it works with all other plugins without trouble.”

I assume he’s referring to a different caching plugin.

A little discussion over at Slashdot about this daft blog posting which claims that Dreamweaver is dying.  While the claims of the changing nature of the web (2.0, AJAX, RSS) are valid, they don’t negate the usefulness of a tool like Dreamweaver.

I haven’t used Dreamweaver in years which is testament to absolutely nothing.  But the claim that a CMS like Drupal or CMS-cum-blogware, WordPress, are killing Dreamweaver ignores the fact that if you’re not a coder or simply want to hack a page together quickly Dreamweaver is quite a decent WYSIWYG tool.  It’s clunky at times but it has made improvements over the years.  Will it be able to keep up to the web?  Well…does it have to in order to be useful?  In fact, both Drupal and WordPress have been designed to allow their front ends to be templated/skinned/themed – whatever you want to call it – and the basis of that is initially going to be HTML & CSS.  If you’re a bona fide designer, layout and typography are going to be on top of your list.  Even if you’re not a designer, you’ll just want to see how things will look.  I’m not saying Dreamweaver is the perfect or only tool for this, but it’s one of them.

In my experience, designers will typically fire up Photoshop or Illustrator and start their mock-ups in the graphics program they’re most comfortable with instead of Dreamweaver.  However, the integration that Adobe has been building in over the years with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and (shudder) Flash has been getting tighter and more and more useful.  You can do a good 80% of a page in Photoshop and export it in slices to HTML in a format that Dreamweaver can handily import and start adding bells & whistles if you want (or if you prefer, just clean up code and add a bit of CSS).  Of course, one hilarious commenter at Slashdot jokingly (or not) says that Gimp, Vim and Firebug are a great combo and then, “How do Dreamweaver compare to Vim? Is it advanced enough to not fool users to use css styled text for strong expressions?”

Well, at least one person on Slashdot gets it:

“…Dreamweaver is a website design tool, Drupal is a website management tool. A smart person would use both…”