Author Archives: Richard

Firefox Nightly

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In my last posting I mentioned as a footnote that I am using Firefox 8.

Since then, it has re-branded itself as Firefox 9, and this is how it announces itself to the Web, and how it will appear on server stats and the like.  On the Title-bar however, it calls itself just “Nightly”.

nightly

As I mentioned before, this incarnation of Firefox seems to be concentrating on speed. and therefore the backend, rather than any major changes to the frontend.

The increase in speed is not one that will just appear on benchmark tests, but is something that will be noticeable to anyone using the current version of Firefox.  When I say it is fast, it is fast.

If you want to see for yourself, Then pop over and download the latest for yourself.

One thing I have noticed is that they have made a very small change to the Forward and Back buttons.  Normally if there is no Forward or Back in the history, the buttons will be greyed out.  However I notice lately that instead of greying out, the buttons vanish altogether.  This wouldn’t be a problem, except that The Home, Refresh and address bar then slide over to the left.

I find this mildly irritating and distracting, and frankly I can’t see the point.  I have no problems with them wanting to increase “real estate” but this doesn’t do that.  It just creates a bit of space amongst the toolbars.

It’s not irritating enough for me to revert to the “normal” Firefox though!

Firefox losing its menu bar

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Last night, Herself was browsing the Internet.  She came across a site that claimed that her Javascript was disabled.

The laptop in question is running Firefox 5 on Linux Mint 11.

When I went to check Firefox I discovered that the main menu bar was missing.  The address bar was there along with the favourites bar, but no sign of the all important menu.  I tried some other programmes and they all ran normally, so it was obviously a Firefox problem.

I browsed the Internet and found that that wasn’t much help.

Eventually, by trial and error I found the solution, which is (of course) very simple –

Open a terminal and type ‘firefox –safe-mode’ (without the quotes).

A window will pop up.  Simply select “Reset toolbars and controls’ and that’s it.  Everything will be restored to normal.

-oOo-

While I am on the subject of Firefox, I have been running the nightly version of Firefox 8 for the last week or so.  (whatever happened to 6 and 7? Winking smile ).  Visually, there is little difference between 5 and 8.  The difference though is in speed.  It really is lightning on steroids.  I started using it occasionally, but it is now my default.  I love it!

WP Social Blogroll

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I am not a great fan of Blogger as a platform.

I admit I have never used it with an account of my own, but I do know that it can be difficult commenting on Blogger site.  There is one feature of it that I like however and that is the ability to display links along with the title and time of their last post.  It was a feature I envied and finally I found a solution.

I installed WP-Social-Blogroll on Head Rambles.

I had a philosophy of linking to any site that linked to Rambles and this led to a rather long list.  I therefore set the list up on its own page.  At the time, I could not get the damned thing to work in the way I wanted, as it insisted on displaying the links and the icon, but it left out the latest post, the author and the date.   I left it and promised myself I would address it at another time but never did.

Recently it was pointed out to me that the Links Page wasn’t showing any links at all.  I dived in and for the live of me couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working.  I decided to install the plugin again from scratch.

Originally I just set up a normal page and included the Social Blogroll code.  They did recommend that I install it from a template however.  I tried that [I had never used a template page before but it was simple enough] and the links appeared, but still without title, author or date.  I was back to square one again.

I scoured the Internet but could find nothing relevant.  I don’t know how I found the solution, but I did.  I was using the wrong API key from Google!  I set up a new key, using the precise link to the Links Page and inserted it.  It worked perfectly.

The problem then was that I suddenly discovered just how many sites hadn’t been updated for months or even years.  The only thing is to remove all the links that haven’t been updated in [say] the last six months.  That is going to be a big job.

Maybe I should have left the plugin unfixed?!

What happened on January 11th?

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I’m a grand one for playing around with site statistics.

One day recently I was taking an overview of Headrambles in Google Analytics and noticed something strange.  I had a fair idea of the average rate of page views the site was receiving per month, yet the figures I was now looking at were much higher.  I took a snapshot of the period 1st September to 30th  June and sure enough, there was a distinct jump where the figures tripled.

pageviews

Ignoring the peak on the right [a mention on a high profile site!], the jump is is quite marked.

Looking a bit further, I took a series of snapshots over the same period.  Traffic to the site remains more or less constant over the period, but I hit another anomaly when I looked at the Bounce Rate:

bounce

Once again there was a very dramatic change.

I drilled in a bit further, and the date of transition for each graph is January the 11th.  It was also around that time that I had noticed a jump in Google Rank from 3 to 6, but unfortunately I don’t have a precise date for that.

So what the hell happened on the 11th January?

Google only knows!

Time trials

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I decided to try a simple little experiment today.

My laptop is dual boot with both Windows 7 and Linux Mint 11 installed.  My little personal challenge was to boot into each, with a target of launching Firefox and visiting a particular website. 

The first one to go was Windows 7.

It was slow, but it booted up reasonably well.  Soon I had my customised desktop, but then it went through a process of loading some background programmes.  It also updated the anti-virus software.  As soon as it looked reasonably stable, I double clicked the Firefox icon.  Nothing apparently happened, so a short while later I double clicked again.  After another pause, two Firefox sessions started!  I closed one.  I then had to wait while all the tabs in Firefox loaded.  Eventually it allowed me type in my chosen address and I accessed the site.

Time taken?  4 minutes 35 seconds.

I then powered down and tried Linux Mint.

It booted up and went through that little unnerving bit where the screen goes totally black.  Eventually the desktop appeared and I clicked on the Firefox icon.  As soon as the programme had loaded, I typed the target address, and accessed the site.

Time taken?  1 minute 40 seconds.

Quite an impressive difference?