Networking

An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don’t tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text.

They have many tools to make editing XHTML (and other bits of code geared specifically for web use) faster and easier, but there’s nothing says you need to use an XHTML editor for web coding. Text editors can do the job as well. If Kate, gedit, or Cream do the job for you, either on their own or with a few plugins, that’s got you ahead of the game.

But there are some XHTML editors that manage to bundle the basic functions and a whole slew of handy extras into a nicely finished package. There are quite a few of them, and we’ll be touching on more of them next week.

This week we’ll take a peek at Bluefish and Quanta Plus. Why? Because they are the two most often included in Linux as the sort of “came with the distro” web development applications. Even if they aren’t installed by default, many people try them first.

One of the great things about shopping on Amazon is that you can read through dozens, if not hundreds of user reviews. While expert and editorial reviews can give you a sense of whether an item is worth the sale price, user reviews will let you know whether you should expect it to fall apart the moment you unpack the box.

But who has time to sift through hundreds of reviews when you just want someone to tell you whether you should buy this digital camera or that one? That’s where Pluribo comes in. This Firefox add-on will read through the user reviews in certain product categories and present you with a concise summary.

The plugin uses some artificial intelligence so you don’t wind up with short, choppy, and unreadable reviews. Don’t expect Shakespeare, but Pluribo will give you enough information that you might not need to read the individual reviews.

Right now, Pluribo doesn’t work with products in every category. For example, digitial cameras seem to be covered, but video cameras aren’t.

[via Digital Inspiration]

As expected, the international body that oversees internet domain names has voted to change the way top-level domains work. Right now there are only about 200 top level domains, with some of the most widespread being .com, .net, .org, and .edu. But under the rules adopted by ICANN today, companies or individuals will be able to register top line domains using pretty much any string of characters.

For example, why settle for www.downloadquad.com when you could have www.download.squad? The advantage to the new system is that it will be much easier to snag the domain you really want. The down side is that most web surfers tend to think in .com. It’s already hard enough to remember whether you need to type in .com, .net, or .org. It could be much harder to find the page you’re looking for if there are literally millions of options.

Of course, it’s not like just anybody is going to go out and register a new top-level domain. The application fee will be upwards of $100,000. And even if we do wind up with 2000 or even 2,000,000 top-level domains instead of 200, odds are it’ll still be easy enough to find the sites you’re looking for thanks to these nifty things called search engines.

ICANN has also approved the use of Arabic and Cyrillic scripts for top-level domains.

I remember being a little girl, and watching my friends fuss about what their babies would like if they married George Michael, or Michael Jackson (so I am not only carbon-dating myself, but I’m also showing how naive my friends and I were). Oh, c’mon, I never fussed about these things. I was too busy playing with the Commodore PET.

The Commodore PET could only dream of doing the things modern computers (or little girls) do. Today, its dreams have come true with the introduction of (cough) MakeMeBabies.com. Okay, this site is for entertainment purposes only. The resulting child of any of these unions, holy, unholy, or otherwise, may not be true to life. Yet all of us here at Download Squad are wasting way too much time spreading our genes throughout Hollywood.

They’ll thank us later, for sure.

The results of our fooling around (hate the game, not the playaz, guys) produced some interesting (if extremely disturbing) results. My (real life) husband and I had a blonde child that was much too good looking to have come from either of us. Never mind that neither of us are blonde. Antonio Banderas and I produced a child that had some serious facial issues. Interestingly enough, fellow Download Squad lady bloggers (why aren’t the guy Squadders doing this too?) seemed to have children with similar facial issues. Actually, we all seemed to have the same child with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Antonio Banderas.

So what do you all think? One trick algorithm putting similar features on generic children’s heads? Or is it a deeper conspiracy? Do all the guys in Hollywood have the same genetic structure? Are they all inbred? Or maybe… Maybe it’s all of us here at Download Squad. We’ll never tell.

[via Jay Martinez.com]

What could be more fun than browsing your favorite sites? Why, browsing your favorite sites while directing a funky-looking avatar to parade around and do your bidding, of course. Unlike PMOG, where your experience is backgrounded until you stumble upon mines or loot (but requires a Firefox extension to work), RocketOn figures it’ll be a lot more fun to disrupt your browsing with some crudely animated avatars overlaid on top of whatever page you’re on. They do this in much the same way Gabbly works, by intercepting the page and overlaying the content on top. Essentially, you’re seeing a browser in a browser.

We weren’t particularly impressed with RocketOn, however. While the tech works well enough, is there really a desire to put an avatar on pages? It completely interrupts the experience and adds practically nothing that you can’t get from a service like Gabbly, save the rather lame avatars. The avatars themselves aren’t very customizable out of the box, although apparently you’re supposed to hang out on the bare pages of RocketOn to “earn” more stuff. Pets, clothes, the usual crap you get thrown at you on Facebook. Ultimately this looks like a nice tech demo that is just a complete waste of time. Or maybe we’re missing the point.

[via TechCrunch]

Gallery: RocketOn

Google may have decided to cease development of the Google Browser Sync plugin for Firefox, but that doesn’t mean the utility will never see another update. Because rather than simply boxing up the source code and packing it away, Google decided to release the source code publicly under the BSD license.

Google Browser Sync is a utility that lets you synchronize your Firefox bookmarks, preferences, and cookies across multiple computers.

Now anyone can check out the source from the Google Code project page. While nobody’s done anything really cool yet like make a version of Google Browser Sync that works with Firefox 3, it may just be a matter of time.

One thing that’s particularly interesting is the fact that Ars Technica reports Google posted the source code online on June 13, the same day that Lifehacker confirmed the death of the official project. It’s not clear which came first, the chicken or the egg. But either way, we’re not complaining. If Google isn’t going to continue developing this useful utility, then we’re just glad that someone else may be able to pick up the torch.

All of us could use a personal assistant every now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you have to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental cars into something you can follow once you reach your destination.

TripIt is a site designed to take confusion out of trying to organize all your reservations by doing it for you. The service takes all the plans you’ve made for your trip such as plane reservations, rental cars, and restaurant reservations and organizes them, adding important things like directions to get to where you’re going and a projected weather forecast for your trip. Your TripIt itinerary can then be printed out and taken with you as well as forwarded to friends in email, synced with your personal calender, or viewed on your mobile device.

TripIt allows you to add information to your trips manually or if you schedule events with one of TripIts supported websites you can just forward your reservations to the site via email and have them added to your itinerary for you. Currently TripIt supports a slew of airline websites, restaurant reservations through OpenTable.com, and they just added support for a variety of event sites such as Ticketmaster.

Read it Later, a bookmarking plugin for Firefox that we first covered last year is now Firefox 3 compatible. The new version also adds a handful of new features that make it even more useful.

What makes Read it Later different from other bookmarking tools like the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox is the fact that Read it Later makes it easy to bookmark pages, but makes it just as easy to delete those bookmarks. While other services let you save pages forever, Read it Later is designed to let you come back to pages you just don’t have time to read fully right now.

The latest version features:

• Offline viewing
• An RSS feed so you can subscribe to your bookmarked pages and keep track of them in a reader
• Synchronize your saved pages with other computers

You can also activate a new “click to save” mode by hitting Alt M. In this mode, any link you click on a web page will automatically be saved to your reading list. Hit Alt M again to deactivate this feature if you actually want to open up pages by clicking on links.

Here’s an interesting fact. Did you know that actress Yasmine Bleeth and US president James Madison were the same height? At 5 foot, 4 inches, Madison was the shortest president in US history. How do we know this? Because we read it on a free ringtones site, and if it’s on the internet, it’s probably true, right?

RingoPhone’s Tall or Not toy is obviously just an attempt to get you to use the service’s ringtone search engine. But that doesn’t make it any less fun to play with. Just enter your height using US or metric measurements and you can flip through a long list of celebrities, public officials, and world record holders to see how you stack up.

The shortest person in the index is Gul Mohammed, the shortest adult ever recorded at less than 2 feet tall. The tallest is Robert Pershing Wadlow, who came in at nearly 9 feet. In between are a wide array of folks, living and dead, including Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Lil’ Kim and Rod Serling.

[via MakeUseOf]