Weave: The Best FireFox Plugin You Aren’t Using

I’m not sure how I stumbled onto it — I think I was reading something at Ars Technica and saw a link for this article about Mozilla Weave.  I never heard of it before — it sounded interesting.  After a month of heavy use, let me just say that it’s not just interesting — it’s downright, wicked cool.

Let me tell you my pattern — I use FireFox in two places: Work and at Home.  Many times I wish I stumble onto a site I want to read at home.  Usually I just save it to Diigo. But sometimes I forget.  The biggest annoyance is passwords. Yes, I save a ton of website passwords in FireFox.  But it stinks when I save it on the home machine but want to get into my account at work, and I can’t remember what password I used there.

Weave solves all these problems.  And ones that I didn’t know I even had.

So now when am I work, I don’t worry about saving an address to Diigo just so I can read it at home. Instead, I do nothing special.  When I go home, I start FireFox, I wait about 15 seconds and I see that it starts to sync. After that, I have all my history from my last session.  Yes, you read that.  All my history from my work browsing session.  Oh, and if I setup a web account during the day at work and save the passwords, that is synced too.  Preferences?  Check, but in a smart way. Like my proxy server config from the office is not moved to home.  That’s a good thing.  Bookmarks? Check. Yes, I still use bookmarks and I probably use them more now because they are synced between my machines.

A neat feature is tabs.  Yes, tabs are saved across browsing sessions on different machines.  So if I want to quickly see what I was looking at last night at home, I can go to History-> Tabs from other computers while at work.

Many of you may be thinking. “How is this different than the nasty FoxyMarks/XMarks crap?”  Well, not only does Mozilla not publish or track it but they also encrypt all data with a passphrase of your choosing. So, yeah, they thought of that too.  If you are truly paranoid you can setup your own Weave server.

So I think it’s worth a go, especially if you are still using FireFox instead of Chrome (which I still am on the fence about, but that’s another discussion.)

Getting It’s All Text to play with Cygwin

I love the FireFox plugin It’s All Text – it lets me edit wiki pages, webmail, etc. in my beloved editor of Emacs and automatically refreshes the text field in FF with my new text.  But I recently moved from using NTEmacs to Cygwin’s version, and things simply stopped working.  And it made sense — Cygwin is just a layer on top of Windows, but it uses Unix-like paths, while It’s All Text would, naturally, use Windows-style paths.

I put up with this for a few months, mostly because I didn’t want to spend the cycles on figuring this out.  I did spend a few, and they were all pretty much worthless. I’m not sure why — the idea wasn’t hard, but it seemed to be.

A while back I decided to put some dedicated cycles to this.  I found this comment from the It’s All Text developer on his blog — it didn’t work , but it was a start.   I took his work and built my own version.  I was trying to do it with a one-script solution but seeing his I knew I needed two: one batch file and then one shell script.  After some experimenting,

The following batch script should be left alone.  It sets up the Cygwin environment, and then uses Cygwin’s “run” command to start a bash shell, when then runs our shell script.  The “%~f1″ is actually the most important component here.  It is a batch file command that says to give the full path of the first argument. Of course, that assumes that the first argument is a file but considering we are using this with It’s All Text, we are safe with that assumption.

@echo off
SET DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0
SET CYGWIN_ROOT=c:\cygwin
SET RUN=%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin\run -p /usr/X11R6/bin
SET PATH=.;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\usr\X11R6\bin;%PATH%
SET XAPPLRESDIR=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults
SET XCMSDB=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Xcms.txt
SET XKEYSYMDB=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
SET XNLSPATH=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale

rem the %~f1 is the full path name of the argument given to the script.
%CYGWIN_ROOT%/bin/run.exe c:/cygwin/bin/bash.exe  /cygdrive/h/bin/text.sh %~f1

The following is our shell script, which we referenced as “text.sh” above. It’s much simpler — it converts the Windows path it was given to a Unix path and then calls our editor (“emacsclient” in my case, which will load up the file in the current Emacs instance).  You maybe thinking that I could have just was well as done this in the batch file above — and, you are right, I could have ran the editor but I had to also convert the file’s path first.  That is really why we need two scripts — using a shell script is the only way I could find that would let me use the cygpath command in a reliable way.  Note that I used “$*” at the path name — that will give all the arguments, which I need because there are spaces in the full path name (“$~f1″ above).

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/emacsclient "`cygpath "$*"`"

So not easy, but it’s possible. Of course, I made it a lot easier now for everyone else!

Gettin’ Funky With GreaseMonkey

I recently re-discovered Greasemonkey, a Firefox powered, client-side JavaScript library that lets you change the pages your way.  The Greasemonkey Homepage explains it better:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.

I’ve used it before, but haven’t touched it for quite some time.  But I had an itch I decided to finally scratch . . .

For reasons too complicated to explain here, I use SquirrelMail to read my email for hostetlerhome.com.  The interface annoys me and my web hosts provider’s implementation is horribly slow at times. Bored one day, I started looking for ways to tweak it and I found some shortcut keys in a Greasemonkey script.  And then I found a good image viewer for SquirrelMail. And then this one that displays the unread message count in the title. Jeepers — almost like GMail with Better GMail!

Then I started looking at other solutions for web annoyances.  I don’t go near as often as I used to, but I still like Geocaching but their site is fully of click-click-click when it could be much more streamlined.  I found GC Tour script, and it’s better than I could have ever hoped!  You can keep your cache lists inside of GC Tours, download GPX files of them and the whole bit.  A must-have for geocachers.

Now I decided to roll my own. I’d done this a couple of years ago, but I needed to refresh my memory.  And I definitely had a need — on an application I develop at work, we have to interface with another application. We always test with a lot of the same data (because we know what to expect from it in dev and test) so we always enter it over and over again.  It never changes between tests.  So I wrote a quick Greasemonkey script to populate the data when I go to the page. Took me an hour, but saves me tons of time.  The HTML was horrid, but I included JQuery in the script and that took care of most of the mess.

So, yet your funk on and explore (or re-explore) the wonderful world of Greasemonkey.  I’d start at UserScripts.org