The Reasons

1. You need to store different cookies for the same website. (What is cookie?) As to myself, I've got two Google accounts, and I want Firefox to remember both of them.
2. You share your computer with someone else.
3. Since the more addons you have installed, the slower Firefox becomes. Using separate profiles, you can install plugins for specific tasks in each profile.

The Solution

There are instructions on solving this problem with the Profile Manager plugin, such as this tutorial by Ross McKillop. However, what I'm going to describe here is a simpler solution.

1. Modify the shortcut to firefox.exe. Mine had an argument "-profile 'path\to\the\profile\folder'", then I added the argument "no-remote" and it became "-no-remote -profile 'path\to\the\profile\folder'".
2. Create a new folder where fits, which will be your new profile container.
3. Create a new shortcut to your firefox.exe with the command line arguments "-no-remote –profile 'path\to\the\new\profile\container'".

All set & start to enjoy two Firefox instances at the some. You'll see that the whole point of this method is the command line argument "no-remote", which enables Firefox to run with multiple profiles. You can find an incomplete list of Firefox command line arguments here.

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As we know, Windows Live products can only be installed on specific OS like Windows XP SP2 or later, or Windows Vista. Unfortunately, I'm currently running Windows 2003 Server on my laptop for development reasons, which does not meet the system requirements for Windows Live components.

There're workarounds for this, and I'm introducing to you the most simple one: use the MSI installers and the system requirements check will be bypassed.

Download (links updated at 2009-07-29)

• Grab the Windows Live Writer 2009 Build 14.0.8050.1202(MSI)
• Show me the Windows Live Messenger 2009 beta Build 9.0.1407.1107(MSI)

Notes

1. Other components like Toolbar, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker are not so popular, so they're not provided here.
2. No prompt or notification dialog will show during the installation. Don't worry, go straight to Start –> Programs –> Windows Live, and you'll find them.
3. No entries will be added to the Add/Remove Programs panel, so you can not get them uninstalled there. Right click the MSI installer and you'll see the commands Install, Repair and Uninstall. Do whatever you want here.

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Features include:

• Customizable colors all around in a theme option page
• Admin shortcuts on the homepage
• Highlight author comments
• Separated comments and trackbacks/pingbacks
• And more

Plugins supported:

• WP 2.3 Related Posts (similar plugins are also supported with a little modification to the sidebar.php file)
• WP-PageNavi
• WP-PostViews
• Clean Archives Reloaded
• Get Recent Comments
• Subscribe to Comments

Download:

Current version 2.7.3 of Always Twitting can be downloaded here.

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Juice is an intelligent discovery engine that integrates seamlessly with Firefox. It has features like:

• discovering deep-linked content
• multi-task while browsing
• media storage and organization

Highlight and move a chunk of text, and Juice directly delivers a set of rich, relevant content to you.

Drag & Drop

It’s easy to use Juice and feel its magic. Just grab a chunk of text, image or video and Juice will start performing its tricks. When dropping text into Juice, Juice will try to understand its meaning and serve you with context-relevant information. In the case of images or videos, it will let you store them for later viewing, while you keep browsing just the way you like!

Intelligent Discovery Engine

The developers didn’t use the term search here in order to distinguish Juice from other search engines. Juice digs into the keywords and looks for more info in various formats.

Juice's discovery mechanism is grounded on Linkool Labs' proprietary intelligent discovery engine. This engine, comprised of a natural language processing system and a dictionary management system, helps to evolve the semantic web by connecting keywords with the most relevant, rich content from third-party web services.

Discover & Organize

The use these two words as a combination not individuals, just like Drag & Drop. Because you can bookmark and organize rich content discovered for you! For example, when Juice delivers a video to you, you can simply add the video into your personal video playlist – for current or future viewing! You can also do this with the videos and images you discover yourself while browsing the web, by dragging the image or tab attached to the videos.

Take a look at the video below to see how Juice works as if by magic:

This article is part 2 of the 2-part series Make Full Use of Your Firefox Side Space, discussing excellent Firefox extensions to fill out the side spaces of wide-screen monitor. For part 1 of the series, refer to Yoono - SNS All in One in Your Firefox Sidebar.

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Strictly speaking, Yoono does not take over the sidebar space or resides in the sidebar, and it is just positioned at the left side of your Firefox, which means, normal sidebar elements like “Bookmarks” and “History” can be shown with Yoono at the same time.

There’re a bunch of widgets that you can use to integrate almost everything into Yoono, including:

Friends to

• gather your friends from all social networks and IM services
• see your friends’ status and be alerted of their updates
• filter and prioritize your friends’ updates
• change your status and send direct messages to your friends
• drag & drop photos and videos directly into and IM session

Supported networks & IM: facebook, myspace, imeem, twitter, flickr, friendfeed, piczo, msn, aim, gtalk, yahoo.

Discoveries to

• get recommendations of sites similar to the one you’re currently browsing
• find users who share the same interests
• sort by site, people or tags

Web Notes to

• drag & drop text, videos, pictures directly in web notes
• classify your web notes: love, rant, laugh or your own online files
• share it with all Yoono users, your friends, a list of friends or keep it private
• send your web notes through Yoono or post them directly to your blog

Videos to

• get recommendations of videos related to the site you’re surfing
• see your friends’ favorite videos
• get a selection of videos from major video sharing sites
• search for videos directly from Yoono
• drag & drop all videos to your friends

Photos to

• get recommendations of pictures related to the site you’re surfing
• see your friends’ photos
• get a selection of pictures from major photo sharing sites
• search for photos directly from Yoono
• drag & drop any photos to your friends

Music to

• choose a radio station
• listen to free radio while surfing: no pop-up window, no track download
• search and file radio stations by type of music or preferences

News to

• manage all your subscriptions and social news
• get all your feeds right in the sidebar
• check to see what your friends are digging
• share, email and add notes to stories

Supported: googlereader, digg

Mail to

• toggle between messages and refresh your inbox
• easily flip between email accounts
• add or remove accounts
• preview your attachments right in the sidebar

Supported: gmail, yahoo

Shopping to

• choose between major retailers and second-hand bargains
• rank by price, category and stores
• run direct search for any product

This article is part 1 of the 2-part series Make Full Use of Your Firefox Side Space, discussing excellent Firefox extensions to fill out the side spaces of wide-screen monitor. For part 2 of the series, refer to Juice – Intelligent Discovery Engine in Your Firefox Sidebar.

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When you encounter this problem and you google around, you’ll probably notice a Firefox preference general.useragent.locale quickly. Then you change the value of this parameter as what is told, but nothing happens when you restart Firefox.

Why’s that? To find out the reason, we have to dig deeper into the concept user agent and locale. The user agent string is a piece of text which identifies the name and version of a given browser. It is used by websites to determine which browser you use. That is to say, the user agent is your browser’s identity. The current locale in use by Mozilla is stored in the preference general.useragent.locale, and a variety of components consult it for localization information. Remember when you visit YouTube for the first time and the page prompts you for the language you are using intelligently? Oh yeah, that’s the magic generated by our user agent string. You get it now, simply altering this preference just changes how your browser identifies itself, not necessarily  its appearance.

Hence what you need essentially to get a different UI language is the language pack, besides changing this preference. A language pack is an extension that changes the language of the user interface in a Mozilla application. Alternatively, you can assign a different user-interface language to each command or icon that you use to start the Mozilla application. For example, to use French you can specify either: -uilocale fr or -uilocale fr-FR. On a Windows system the entire command might look something like:

C:Program FilesMozillaThunderbirdthunderbird.exe -uilocale fr

To download the language packs, visit

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/your-firefox-version/win32/xpi

In my case, that is

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.5/win32/xpi

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The Scene

If you are playing with domain hack as I am, one thing to think about is to redirect the visitors reaching the primary domain to the sub-domain. For instance, I want to make sure whoever visits "http://icio.us" gets redirected to "http://del.icio.us" properly.

How do we do that? The answer varies depending on the method we take. I'm introducing a way which takes advantage of the mod_rewrite feature of apache servers.

The Solution

The relative paths look something like this:

/ <- http://icio.us

/del/ <- http://del.icio.us

Establish a .htaccess file in the root directory with content below:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^(.*) http://del.icio.us/$1 [R,L]
</IfModule>

This way each request to "http://icio.us" will be redirected to "http://del.icio.us". Follow the htaccess tutorial and modify RewriteRule to create more complicated redirection rules as you wish.

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What Is Flickr Photo Album(FPA) Plugin?

Flickr Photo Album for WordPress is a fantastic plugin that allows you to pull in your Flickr photo sets and display them as albums on your WordPress blog.

There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates 100% to match the look and feel of your own site.

And this post will guide you through the process of the customization. It’s pretty easy thanks to the great structuring of this plugin. See FPA in action here.

Preliminaries before We Start

From the “Look and Feel Customization” part of FPA’s wiki, we know that to customize this thing, we have to make sure the photoalbum-index.php template file (which is located inside the “template” folder in the plugin’s directory) closely match your own theme’s page.php.

Let’s first take a look at what the photoalbum-index.php file is like:

It is just like a standard page template of WordPress theme, isn’t it?

Then we shall look into the page template as indicated. There should be a page template file sample in your theme’s directory, named page.php or something like that. Take my current theme as an example, the codes inside look like:

Compare these two code snipplets and you’ll realize that the main structure is nearly the same. Hence what we’re going to do next is pretty simple bearing this in mind. Besides, those comments inside photoalbum-index.php almost have told you everything you need to do(not very much, though ^^).

Step 1: Merging the two

First thing’s first, copy everything between <?php get_header(); ?> and <?php get_footer(); ?> from page.php to photoalbum-index.php to replace its counterpart.

Step 2: Main Replacement

Our purpose is to make the structure of photoalbum-index.php accords with that of page.php. So we ought to wipe out lines between <div id="secondary"> and its closing </div>, then add following codes there:

Keep the promotion link as a tribute to the author.

Step 3: Tiny Moderation

In fact, we’ve already finished the job. But there’s a little more to be done: Make the patching where necessary. In my sample, the navigation title should be fixed as below:

<div id="location">
<p><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>">Home</a> / <?php e('Gallery'); ?></p>
</div>

Mission Accomplished!

Now the photoalbum-index.php should look like this:

In case you need more customization like hooking FPA up with Lightbox or any other display libraries, you can find out more info about how to customize this plugin here.

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Solution 1: Vidalia bundle + Firefox + FoxyProxy plugin

This one comes in handy if you were a user of Tor. When the tor circle is established, you just need to configure the FoxyProxy and add some URL patterns to use it. I used to use Torpark to do that, during which time IE-core based browser was my primary choice. To be honest, I was not content with the speed surfing with Torpark. Howerver, It’s not tor’s fault, since the network environment is so choky all along. Unfortunately, the low-speed connection still drives me crazy that I have to give it up. Pretty good project though, Vidalia.

BTW, you don’t need to install Privoxy in the bundle, Vidalia and Tor is enough for normal user to get FoxyProxy to work properly.

Solution 2: Hotspot Shield (VPN)

VPN = Virtual Private Network, which tends to create another wide-area network through Internet with users of this technology. This way you could stay secure and anonymous while being connected to the Net. Hotspot Shield is a typical application of VPN produced by AnchorFree. It not only hides your IP while you’re online, but also ensures your access to all the content without censorship. (Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m looking for. Break through the Wall!) What’s more, you don’t need to know how it works because no configuration is required at all. Install and run, that’s it!

BTW, I heard that there’s a bandwidth limit to this app: 3GB per month. I’m not quite sure if it is still the case, but 3GB is way more than enough as long as you’re not downloading media files through it.

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Image via Wikipedia

Just finished integrating OpenID support into this blog. It’s even more convenient to make comments here now. Without registration or leaving username and email information, a simple line of URL is sufficient for you to say anything you want.

What is OpenID anyway?

OpenID is a simple registration solution across Internet. Register once with a trusted Provider and you’ll get a unique URL that identifies you. Then you’ll be able to login to a bunch of sites (including RiWiA) using that URL. No more registration, no more username and password. For a complete list of organizations which support OpenID, check this page out (Wow, look what we’ve got, Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki, WordPress, 37Signals, etc). In a word,

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.

How to add OpenID support for self-hosted WordPress weblog?

It’s easy. The OpenID plugin will help you out with this. It’s as easy-to-use as other WordPress plugins. Upload the necessary files and activate it. Then go to “Users” –> “Your Profile OpenIDs” in the admin panel and add your OpenID URL to your account. Now you’ll be able to login to your blog with that URL, and your OpenID Provider will take care of the authentication.

If you’d like to use your own blog URL as your OpenID instead of the one with Provider info in it, just add following lines of code to the <header> of your theme (take myopenid.com as the Provider for example):

That’s it.

Why would I use OpenID?

Er… It’s a good question. I think

1. It’s fun.
2. It simplify the process of leaving a comment for those who have an OpenID, so it’s an enjoyable experience for them to comment in your blog.
3. Everybody else are using it, so why shouldn’t we?

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