Webflicker 0.1b2 out!

Webflicker 0.1b2 has now been released. It’s not a big upgrade, just some incremental improvements to tie it into the interface a bit better.

Seraphiel 0.64 released!

Well, the latest version of Seraphiel is now available for download, and includes a few nifty new things.

• Highlights low food situations
• Shows raw offense currently being sent on war room
• Compatible with the new Great Utopian War

Enjoy!

The putty monster

One of my favourite desk toys is some nice silly thinking putty. Anyway, I was messing around with it a bit today, spreading it out thinly. And then… I wrapped my hand in it. Try it at home!

Anyway, next, I tried spreading my fingers out, with my hand encased in putty. Turns out that’s pretty good hand exercise. And whilst you’re there, you may as well make the Vulcan salute:

Also, try curling your fingers over to touch your palm, and then spread them out again. If your hand starts to look like a swamp monster, or emo-Peter from Spiderman 3, well, that’s good too.

Webflicker 0.1b1 released!

For a few weeks now, I’ve been using DVD rental site Webflicks. It’s… ok. Turnaround could stand to be a bit faster (so far, I’m finding that if I return a DVD the day after I get it, a new one turns up a week later).

To date, the only DVDs that I haven’t found in their catalogue are seasons of The IT Crowd - but, that said, it’s possible, at this stage, that some of the DVDs in the catalogue aren’t actually there. But I don’t know that. I don’t think I’ve been with them long enough to properly evaluate their range - so far, they’ve been sending me DVDs *mostly* from the first few preferences.

Ok, enough with the reviews. The big thing that irks me about their site is that their user interface is a bit… unusable. I really, really wish that their cookies didn’t expire so fast, they override the “Enter” key in all their forms in unfortunate ways, and the commonly used Account pages take more clicks than they should to get to.

Webflicker is an attempt to fix a few of the problems. It doesn’t make their cookies last longer, though it does automatically redirect you from the useless home page to the login page. It doesn’t stop the overriding of the “Enter” key (yet…). And it provides a few handy links to commonly used (I think) Account pages on the left hand side of every page.

Anyway, hopefully this will prove of use to someone. Enjoy!

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A few notes for Seraphiel fans:
I also updated the Seraphiel FAQ. A new version of Seraphiel, with a few ice extra features (based on user input), should be coming out soon(-ish).

Seraphiel 0.63 released!

Just a few more small improvments.

• The top bar has been “thinned” out a bit, fixing some problems a few people have been having seeing any of it.
• It’s now slightly easier to temporarily (temporarily, right ) disable Seraphiel. Granted, if you’re using the Greasemonkey version you could just click the Greasemonkey icon (it’s a monkey face) to disable Greasemonkey temporarily - but this works for both the extension and the script. It’s available from Utopia’s preference page, like all of Seraphiel’s other options.

You can download Seraphiel 0.63 now! Enjoy

Add custom commands to Explorer’s context menu

Just a nifty little tip I picked up today.

I’ve added links to commands to open up a Command prompt, or Metapath, a nifty little file browser that I use as like a “solution explorer” when, say, editing lots of HTML, PHP or CSS files (from Florian Balmer, the creator of my favourite “lite” text editor, Notepad2).

So, how do you do it? Simple(ish). Open up regedit* and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell. Create a new key (doesn’t matter, AFAIK, what you call it), and set the (Default) property to whatever text you want to appear in the context menu. Next, create a key under that, called “command”. Set the (Default) property of the command you want to run when that is selected.

So to open up the command prompt:

cmd.exe /k pushd %L

And for Metapath (this is assuming you’ve just dumped it straight into C:, you can modify this as appropriate):

c:\metapath.exe "%1"

Of course, you could just use the “Open Command Window Here” PowerToy - but this is geekier. And more general

Please note that this all assumes you’re running Windows XP. I have not, and do not intend to, test it for other versions of Windows.

While we’re at it, Oren explains how to replace Notepad with Notepad2 under Windows XP SP2.

Notes:
* To start regedit, go to the Start Menu and select “Run”. Type “regedit” when the Run dialog comes up. Be careful with regedit. You can do some serious damage to your environment with regedit, so you may want to back up the registry first.

Update, 25/11/07. Added link to Notepad2 replacement procedure. Also, worked around WordPress’ annoying tendency to replace quotes with fancy-looking but useless Unicode characters (presumably, they do this in order to serve you better). It’s rubbish like that that makes me want to write my own blog engine and be done with it.

Seraphiel 0.62 released!

This is pretty much just an update for the new age.
So go download it now!

Also, the extension now has an icon

OMG! Digg is censoring 09-f9…!!!

Arrrrrhhh, me hearties, it be Talk Like a Pirate day, says I. Avast, you’d best all be keelhauling me for that title.

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Shiver me timbers! Can it be that scurvy Slashdog “dfk” has found a solution for landlubbers being so ignorant of sarcasm on forums? We be needing some more XML namespaces over here.

Why you shouldn’t use LinkButtons

ASP.NET has a LinkButton control, which looks like a link but works like a button. Almost.

Generally speaking, when you hover over a link in your browser, you get to see the URL of the link, so you know where you’re going. With a LinkButton, however, you get gibberish.

Normal link	LinkButton

Right-clicking a link gives users a range of options for doing what they want with that link. A LinkButton doesn’t allow this - it looks like a link, but it doesn’t work like one. Not doing things like your users expect leads to confusion.

Normal link	LinkButton

In some browsers, you can middle-click to open up a link in a new tab. Personally, this is something I use all the time. Indeed, there’s even a Firefox extension, SubmitToTab, which lets you do the same thing with a button. LinkButtons, however, break this, and break it badly. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but it also sends you to a blank page with gibberish in the address bar.

Now, granted, so far, everything’s working as though it was a button, not a link - and a LinkButton is supposed to be a button, after all (which happens to look like a link). However, a user expects that if it looks like a link, then it will be a link, and behave like a link, and vice versa. Putting actions behind (what looks like) a link is dangerous because users might not realise that they are committing an action. If it’s supposed to be a button, why use what looks like a link? You’ll just confuse things!

Anyway, most of the sites that I’ve seen using LinkButtons have been using them for what is, effectively, navigation.

None of that, however, compares to the big weakness of LinkButtons - and that is Javascript. Using a LinkButton unnecessarily requires Javascript to be enabled in the user’s browser. Otherwise, they end up getting a Page Not Found error message when they click it!

Some percentage of your users will have Javascript disabled. Perhaps they’re using a mobile phone or PDA which doesn’t support Javascript, or using NoScript, or maybe it’s company policy to disable Javascript on Internet Explorer (and, frequently, this can’t even be changed by the users). Do you really want to stop all these users out from using your site?

There are alternatives. For example, if you have a button, and, for some reason, you absolutely need to display it as a link, you could use a little CSS magic to get pretty much all of the way there. The results work without Javascript and will degrade even if CSS is disabled (unlikely) or the user is using a browser that predates CSS (it will just look like a button).

Seraphiel 0.61 released!

The new version will remember your attack force (briefly) to make it a bit easier to double/triple/etc tap.

It also fixes up a couple issues:

• Doing a SoM on a Gnome no longer results in an annoying error message
• Issues with copy/pasting into Angel have been resolved
• A couple tweaks to the kingdom page

And the code continues to get cleaner, little by little :p

Both the extension and the script have been updated (granted, I have been somewhat more consistent about doing both lately).

Enjoy!