Sillybean

Having a geek girl moment

I discovered last night that isbn.nu has RSS feeds for books. I can track prices for the books I’m looking for! O how I love you, isbn.nu.

I’m also (finally) making myself switch from Camino to Firefox. Sorry, Camino, I just can’t live without the extensions anymore. Also, you crash a lot, and every time you do, you dump my favicons. Which will become important in a minute.

However. Firefox on the Mac is just plain ugly. It’s also a little slow. The good news? There are optimized builds for Macs with the native aqua form widgets.

That’s a vast improvement, but it wasn’t quite enough for me, so I played around some more and came up with…

• the Tango theme
• Favicon Picker, which lets you replace bookmarks’ favicons
• Faviconize Tab, which lets you reduce tab width by removing the site’s title
• Magnolia

• Nightly Tester Tools, which will repair extensions that don’t quite work

Oddly enough, I had trouble finding a theme that supports favicons in the bookmark bar. I really needed them, because I wanted to do this:

Left to right, that’s Yahoo, my Netflix queue, IMDB, movietickets.com (local theaters’ showtimes), TWOP, weather.com, my Google calendar, the add to LibraryThing bookmarklet, my LT library, my ma.gnolia bookmarks, a bookmarklet to create an Amazon Associates link, my Amazon wishlist (which I use more like an organizer of things I intend to read), my Livejournal friendslist, my coComment threads, Google Reader (for those isbn.nu feeds, which I didn’t want cluttering up NetNewsWire), Daring Fireball, tamus.edu (my work site), Basecamp, and Sharepoint (work intranet).

(Superquick howto: Create your bookmark in the bar. Edit its favicon if you need to — right-click; properties, assuming Favicon Picker is installed. While you’re here, delete the bookmark title. Voila.)

Luckily Tango does what I wanted. It also has nice buttons, less obtrusive text in the bookmarks, and it fixes some weirdness with the default tabs.

What I’ve ended up with is a version of Firefox that looks a lot like Camino, supports all the extensions I want, and doesn’t dump all my favicons when it crashes. Whee. Now I just have to get used to Firefox’s quirks instead of Camino’s….

Next project: see if I can finagle something in Automator to automatically sync my Firefox profile — bookmarks, prefs, passwords, history, extensions, themes, everything — with my Subversion repository. I actually have the SVN thing working, but it’d be nice if the sync could happen automatically when I open or close the browser.

.... and yes, folks, this is what happens when I’m awake at 3 a.m. Thank you; I’ll be here all week.