arcadiy.org » Technology

Scriptacular restlessness

arcadiy — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:17:43 +0000

If you haven’t been here for a while, you might be surprised by two things: one, that the site looks different again, and two, that I didn’t bother preserving all the comments that my posts had accumulated over the past few years.

This is not because I don’t love you, but rather because my insistence on using odd random scripts like Chyrp meant that I had to transfer my blog posts into this (WordPress-powered) system manually. That was sufficiently little fun in and of itself that moving comments did not seem worthwhile. My apologies.

Now that this site is running WordPress, though, I can do nice things like using Windows Live Writer to update, and take advantage of the vast ecosystem that surrounds the most popular blog engine. And ultimately the goal of that is to enable me to blog more often—something I’ve committed to for 2010.

Till then, please let me know if anything doesn’t look right.

Bing, Opera Style

arcadiy — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:04:16 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, you should try it out. It actually works surprisingly well. Unfortunately, the Opera browser does not currently include Bing in its search box, so you have to add it manually. Here’s how:

Go to the Bing home page at bing.com. Look at the pretty picture and read the fun captions. Then right click on the search box and select “Create search.”
In the Create Search box, you can leave the “Keyword” field blank, or assign it a letter or two to quickly perform a Bing search from the address bar.
Click on “Details.” Tick the two check boxes that appear: “Use as default search engine” and “Use as speed dial search engine.”
Click “OK”

And you’re set!

Opera bookmarklet for tr.im

arcadiy — Sat, 02 May 2009 05:14:04 +0000

I signed up for the pretty cool URL-shortening service tr.im today, mostly because of the statistics it enables users to view about each link. (Yes, there are issues with using URL shorteners, but if you have to use them, you may as well use a good one.) To make using it more convenient, I wanted to add a button to my browser to automatically shorten a URL.

They had a convenient bookmarklet that worked in Opera, my web browser of choice, but when I added it, I realized all custom buttons get the same default icon in Opera, the “new bookmark” icon. I was already using that for my delicious bookmarklet, and I didn’t want two stars I’d get confused between in my menu bar. So I whipped up a custom button using Opera’s “Fit to width” image. The screenshot shows how it looks. If you’re using Opera and want to add it, just drag this link to a menu bar:

tr.im URL