A week or so ago, a new bunch of icons were included in one of the nightly Minefield builds. These are more than likely going to be the same, or very similar to the buttons that will be part of Firefox 3.0. They have changed a little, and the first thing you will notice is that they are shiny. The back and forward buttons are closer together and take up less room on the Navigation Toolbar, the drop down arrow buttons have merged into one and feature both previous pages and pages you have went back from, and the refresh button and the cross on the stop button have lost a bit of weight.

The home button has been moved off the Navigation Toolbar and has moved down below to the Bookmarks Toolbar. It also features a shiny new icon. I think it is nice that they have relocated that button because personally, I never use that button. All my homepage tabs open up on startup and I don’t end up closing them, or my last session loads up. Having it down there shows that it is a secondary function and is less important that the forward, back, refresh and stop buttons.

These new spunky icons should be included in Firefox 3 Beta 3 which will be released sometime in the next fortnight.

As you all know, I have been using Minefield, also known as Firefox 3.0 Alpha/Beta. This has become my primary browser and I have had to live with the bugs and the lack of extensions. I know there is a way, and an extension, tomake incompatable extensions compatible and I have used them. The only problem is, with all the under the hood changes that are happening, some of the extensions don’t work properly, others that work but cause problems and even some which don’t work fullstop.

I eventually came to the point where I have disabled every extension, that is except one that I really need for productivity reasons. That extension is FaviconizeTab. I open a lot of tabs up. At start up, I have 20 tabs, which then expands as I open and close other tabs but I always have those 20 main tabs open. Without FaviconizeTab, my tab bar would be completely full and I would have to scroll to switch from tab to tab. With this extension, it gives me a lot more room on my tab bar. To be honest, the favicon is enough for me to identify most of my tabs anyway. I do not need the full name because I already know it. Also for the sites and pages with no favicon, I get use to their position on the tab bar that I can remember its location.

All the other extensions I use, well use to use, are just handy things to make things easier and give me extra functionality. They are more luxuries than necessities. Like FoxyTunes. I love that extension. It allows me to control and see what iTunes is doing and give me a lot of functionality in the browser so I don’t have to leave it. My remote is right there in my browser. Greasemonkey is another nice extension that uses scripts it improve or add functionality to specific webpages. Its nice to have because it makes things easier. IE Tab is another extension that allows me to use sites designed specifically for IE inside of Firefox so I don’t have to have two separate browsers open. Again, its nice to have but having them both open can be lived with.And the extension I miss the most, Tab Mix Plus. This adds heaps of extra functionality to tabs in Firefox. It does a lot for me and really helps me managing all the tabs I have open at a time.

Another this I have gone without is Ad Block Plus. This is an extension a lot of people would use. Why? Because they don’t like advertisements. I don’t really like they either but since I have had to live without an ad blocker, the ads don’t really bug me anymore. The good sites have them positioned in a non intrusive place anywhay where it doesn’t affect the user ability to browse the website efficiently. I’m starting to think that I can live on the internet with ads. Some of the ads even attract my attention because they are on things that are interesting. I click ads on some sites, because they interest me and also because I know that it is helping out the site a little bit. If I love the site, I should support it by checking out their sponsors and this isn’t possible if my browser is set to block them out. I don’t think that I will totally remove ad blocking software but I will have one that blocks only certain sites, ones with ads that are annoying andruin the experience on the site.

All of these extensions aren’t really necessary. You don’t have to have them. You can live without them, as I have seen with using test versions of Firefox where the extensions aren’t compatible. When you are limited to what you can have, the challenge can really show you what you can do without. For me, it is going to cut down the number of extensions I use when Firefox 3.0 is officially released. I remember when I was using Firefox 1.5 and I had 20 plus extensions. I cannot believe I had so many. How could I live with that. Its like a house full of clutter. I don’t know how my computer survived, it must have used a hell of a lot of memory. In Firefox 2.0, that dropped down to around 10 extensions and I can see it drop even further in 3.0. Maybe one day, I won’t have any extensions because everything is either built into Firefox or comes bundled with it. That is going to be an interesting time indeed.

A couple of days ago, Digg rolled out its new profile page on Digg. There are heaps of differences and everything has changed in a way that you can get a little confused when you first use it but quickly find your way around. The main goal to this is to make the site more social and not just a bookmarking/news finding site. Now let me talk about the new profiles as well as give my opinion on them.

As soon as you enter a person profile page, the changes become apparent. First off, up the top we see the 3 newest favoured stories from the user followed about ten of the users most recent activity, including stories dugg, commented on, submitted and even new friends added and shouts. Under that is the last ten shouts you have received. Down the right hand side is a little about section which includes a space for your bio as well as links to your other internet services, photos, friends, and the usual statistics about your digging habits.

The new profile page is really nice looking and smooth. Having more than just the most recent stories you have dugg and one favourite is really what your profile page should have had from the start. It is also nice to see all the types of activity that a person has recently done on the site, it really shows that there is more to Digg than just digging the stories. Shouts are not a feature I think is that great. It is very similar to Pownce, I wonder why. This feature is a little unneeded in my opinion and if they really wanted to do this, they probably could have integrated it with their Pownce service instead of making it individual to Digg. I don’t use the feature because I don’t see any reason to, it doesn’t add anything and is really not worth using.

Being able to see a little About section about a user is good. It gives you a little background information on who the person is and a little bit about their life outside of Digg. Links to peoples Pownce, Facebook, Flickr, Blog or whatever else they have signed up to is nice. It may be a bit creepy if you have a stalker but otherwise it is a nice feature so you are able to follow your fellow Diggers around other services, not only Digg. They also have the ability to upload pictures to the site for other people to see. This is another useful feature which I think should have been cut. They could have found a way to integrate with a popular service, like Flickr, that everyone already uses instead of making a cheap one themselves. It is also great to be able to see a few of the users friends on this page too.

The profile statistics are really interesting. They have added on the page a space where you can see the most dugg topics the person has dugg in the past 30 days. This is cool because it allows you to see which section and which types of stories the user likes to digg and can help with finding new friends on digg with similar tastes to your digging. It still has the same stats from the old profile page with total stories dugg, commented, submitted, the percentage of your stories that make the front page, friends referred and the number of profile views (that number should start to rise with it being more social and profiles more appealing to look at.)

With the profile pages done up, they haven’t gotten rid of your history page, as well as your friends history page. They are still there but the big difference is that there are now useful filters. You can now filter down to the thing you are looking for, whether it is stories dugg, submitted or even comments and shouts. These filters are on both of these pages and make it much easier to filter through the content. You can always view all activity if that is what you prefer.

With these new features, I have been noticing more people adding friends, including people adding me. They have email notifications for activities you select which has allowed me to follow who is adding me as a friend. It seems now that it is so easy to do and follow people, it is becoming more social and randoms are adding randoms, just like of other social networking sites. I personally won’t be adding randoms because I plan on using the site for what it was primarily set for, news and articles. I am only friending my friends and the few people that digg similar stores as I would.

I think it is nice that they are taking a step into trying to make the site more social but I personally could do without it. I think that they should be concentrating on the news side of things and strengthen there instead of moving in a different are, one which is being done so much that they can really succeed or grow because of it. I am going to stick to doing what I do best, digging, and they should do that too!

Well if you are reading this, you are obviously aware of the changes. First off, the blog has been moved off Wordpress MU to an independent blog, it is still hosted my Word Dissociation though. It should look and work exactly the same as it did before with a few minor changes.

The theme is the same as well as most of the plugins. All the posts and comments were imported here so they aren’t gone either. The feed was changed so the Feedburner feed was pointing to the right place. This shouldn’t have effected you but you may have noticed previous posts appearing in your readers.

The only differences are the URL. It should be slightly easier to remember at http://yum9me.worddissociation.net. I am currently working on getting a dedicated domain for this blog and my Tumblr to make it easier to access my sites. There are also two new plugins for comments, Gravatar, which is a avatar service. You can sign up and assign your avatar at their site. The second is Firestats, which shows your country, OS and browser along with your comments.

It was extremely quick migration and would have been unnoticed to a lot of people. I would like to thank Peppery for providing this service to me and for his help with the blog, and other things online. Cheers to him!

Twenty days ago I got an email through Flickr saying four of my photos have been short-listed for inclusion in the third edition of Schmap Christchurch Guide, to be published early September 2007. I was pretty excited and honored that my pictures were considered to be included in a random online guide. I sat here for a while waiting for a verdict and to see if my pictures were or were not chosen.

Yesterday I got another email saying two of my pictures were chosen and included in the guide.

I am delighted to let you know that two of your submitted photos have been selected for inclusion in the newly released third edition of our Schmap Christchurch Guide.

I then went to the site to see my pictures included in the guide, with credit to me. You can see the pictures here under the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. It is positioned at the right hand side of the page and you can click the arrows to see both pictures. Most of you guys will be like “So what? Its a stupid little online guide and doesn’t mean crap!” and you can be like that if you want but I don’t care, I’m honored to be in that guide!

Last night I clocked 10,000,000 keys in the Whatpulse Project. For those who don’t know what Whatpulse is, it is a program that collect statistics about your computer usage, more specifically, the amount of keys you type on your keyboard, the amount of clicks you do on your mouse and also the distance your cursor has moved.

I have been part of Whatpulse for over 35 months. I started on the 30th of December, 2004 and in that time have accumulated ten million keys and just under four hundred thousand clicks. You can see my full Whatpulse stats on my Project Page located at http://whatpulse.org/stats/users/129910.

About two hours ago, Apple’s Presentation would have ended. I have just woken up and don’t know where to go. There is going to be Apple information from the presentation everywhere on the internet. But where sold I go first to get all the information and pictures in a single, easy location so I don’t have to muck around sifting through information to get everything I want to know.

Digg will definitely have this in the top 10 dugg stories. Digg is one of the many bases online for Apple Fanboys and any big technology news is on there. Apple + New Product + Hype = Top Story! My guess would be that the story either links to Engadget, Gizmodo or Mac Rumors or all. If this is the case why not go to the original source first because I’m sure the information is spread across multiple posts.

I could go possibly go to Twitter, Pownce or Tumblr. Someone on there would have definitely linked to a website with a lot of information on it. My guess would be that it would link to the same article(s) as seen on Digg. The only problem is that there will be quite a few people with different links and I wouldn’t want to go to all the sites to find the exact same information on it so this method of getting all the information quickly might not be the best solution.

I could try the my RSS feeds because I know for a fact that there will be at least 5 different sources with information on the new iPods. The only problem is that this information will be mixed with other stuff so I would have to siff through my feeds. Also if I wanted to see any extra content, for example photo galleries, I would end up going to the site anyway to see these so why not just go to one at the start.

I guess I will just go straight to a website and have a look at the news. Now I have the problem of deciding which one would have the best content, whether its Gizmodo or maybe Mac Rumors of possibly Engadget, now thats a big decision. Well off I go. *crosses fingers for new iPods* :p