Entries Tagged 'Tech Tips' ↓

Im not a programming freak but programming simple things intrests me. I prefer learning by example rather than getting all the concept, thats how I learnt HTML and CSS, ofcourse CSS and HTML are not programming languages, anyone who has some common sense and who is not afraid of computer code should be able to write CSS and HTML.

But lately I have been thinking of building some web application, you know Im also inspired by the Web 2.0 boom . And where ever I go, I see people praising Ruby on Rails (not really) So I thought of giving it a shot.

I have already installed Ruby on Rails (RoR or just Rails) and tried out some tutorials by Onlamp. Felt it was pretty powerful as they said, it can do a lot of things for you!

What I think is a good installation guide was lacking on the Ruby on Rails website

I thought of writing one the next time I find time so here Im to tell you Im not able to write one now so will do the next time

I dont know how you feel but I really didnt like the Firefox 2 visual updates named as FX2 Visual Update/Default Theme Update by Mozilla and you can see that they have put a lot of effort into this. The only thing I liked is the glow around the feed button in the address bar
I was expecting Mozilla to include the old theme along with Firefox 2.0 so that those who liked the Classic version would switch to it but they didnt. There is not much to worry about because it is Firefox not IE. There are some hacks and a theme which allow your FF 2 to look just like FF 1.5

Initially to change the look of icons to Firefox 1.5 use this theme

Tip: Theme files (and Extensions) can be saved to the harddisk(instead of installing it) by Right clicking on the download link and selecting Save Link As option. The theme can be installed later on by dragging the .jar file into the Add-Ons window of Firefox

Then there are a few more things which you may not like. Im not forcing you, change if you want to

For all the hacks below you need to open about:config in Firefox (Just type about:config in addressbar and press enter)

The first one that irritated me the most was the Close button on every tab and no common Close button for tabs like in 1.5 then the Tab scrolling and the easy-to-read list of all your open tabs was no relief either.

• Common Close

To remove individual close button for each tab and display a common close button like in 1.5

change browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3

• No Tab Scrolling

change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 (zero)

• Remove Easy-to-view list

Add

/* Disable Container box for "List all Tabs" Button */
.tabs-alltabs-stack {
display: none !important;
}

to userChrome.css

This file sets the display rules for various elements in the Firefox user interface and is located in the sub-folder called chrome in your profile folder. This file does not exist by default, so you need to create it before you can start adding your preferences. There’s actually an example file that exists by default, called userChrome-example.css. Basically, you can just rename that file by removing the -example part

To know more see this Mozilla help page

Update: The inbuilt Import feature works now for the new version of blogger or the blogger beta. Read more here

Ever since I switched to Blogger Beta, I have been having compatibility problems which put me at a do-nothing but wait situation.

Initially I was trapped behind the development cycle of Windows Live Writer because the initial release was not compatible with Blogger Beta but Microsoft was quick in releasing an update to that with a few more cool features added. I felt relieved.

Now again there was this big deadlock! Really big one this time. I was all ready with my new website, Wordpress installed, Template custom modded for some style changes and some scripts installed but the posts from my old blog wont Import! Wordpress Import feature doesnot yet work with Blogger Beta and the great thing with Blogger is that you cant switch back from Beta. What a frustration it was
When I did a simple search for “Import from Blogger Beta” I found there were a lot of other people who were also trapped and were praying for a fix, but there was a solution too which I didnt even care to try because it had too much labour like saving each months posts in a folder and so on :!:. In the middle of the prayer I thought of trying the ‘ Import from RSS’ feature in Wordpress a try. My hope was soon washed away when I found that Blogger didnt have an RSS feed but only an Atom feed or atleast that’s what Firefox detected. I browsed through the code in my Blogger template and found only one XML file which obviously corresponded to the Atom feed. But still i tried imported using the Atom XML file but no use, nothing no posts were imported. I even tried a converter to convert the Atom feed into RSS, it didnt work either.

But then when I opened my blog in IE7, the next generation Internet Explorer from Microsoft, it intelligently detected an Atom feed and an RSS feed tooooo!
I quickly saved the XML file corresponding to the RSS feed and imported it into Wordpress. Bingo! Import Successful! and here Im blogging on my Wordpress blog with all my old posts moved. I felt so happy when I accomplished this task that I recalled the saying

Fruits of Hardship are always Sweet

or may be I made it up
I have separated the Import from Blogger Beta tutorial from this post and put it here. What I did here may not be the only way to Import from Blogger Beta but it works for sure.