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Vi Enabled Firefox

admin — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:12:53 +0000

Vimperator is a free browser add-on for Firefox, which makes it look and behave like the Vim text editor. It has similar key bindings, and you could call it a modal web browser, as key bindings differ according to which mode you are in.

Vim-like keybindings (h,j,k,l,gg,G,0,$,ZZ,,etc.)
Ex commands (:quit, :open www.foo.com, …)
Tab completion available for all commands with support for ‘longest’ matching when set in ‘wildmode’
Hit-a-hint like navigation of links (start with ‘f’ to follow a link)
Advanced completion of bookmark and history URLs (searching also in title, not only URL)
Vim-like statusline with a wget-like progress bar
Minimal GUI (easily hide useless menubar and toolbar with :set guioptions=)
Ability to :source JavaScript files, and to use a ~/.vimperatorrc file with syntax highlighting if you install vimperator.vim
Easy quick searches (:open foo will search for “foo” in google, :open ebay terminator will search for “terminator” on ebay) with support for Firefox keyword bookmarks and search engines
Count supported for many commands (3 will go back 3 pages)
Beep on errors
Marks support (ma to set mark ‘a’ on a webpage, ‘a to go there)
QuickMarks support (quickly go to previously marked web pages with go{a-zA-Z0-9})
:map and :command support (and feedkeys() for script writers)
:time support for profiling
Move the text cursor and select text with vim keys and a visual mode.
External editor support
Macros to replay key strokes
AutoCommands to execute action on certain events
A comprehensive help file, explaining all commands, mappings and settings.

Firefox Plugin: Analyze Web Page Performance using YSlow

admin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:54:59 +0000

YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. It analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites.

It features

Performance report card
HTTP/HTML summary
List of components in the page
Tools including JSLint

Firefox Plugin: Run .NET ClickOnce Application

admin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:22:56 +0000

FFClickOnce is a Firefox extension that adds an extra option when you click on a link to a ClickOnce application.

ClickOnce is a deployment technology that allows you to create self-updating Windows-based applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction.

A ClickOnce application is any Windows Forms or console application published using ClickOnce technology. You can publish a ClickOnce application in three different ways: from a Web page, from a network file share, or from media such as a CD-ROM. A ClickOnce application can be installed on an end user’s computer and run locally even when the computer is offline, or it can be run in an online-only mode without permanently installing anything on the end user’s computer.

FirexFox Plugin: SwitchProxy Tool

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:11:09 +0000

SwitchProxy Tool is a Mozilla tool you can use to organize all your proxies. You can add, edit and remove them from a single master list. When you need to use one, just select it from the list and click apply.

It also has an Anonymous Proxy feature. An anonymizer uses a list of proxies that it randomly switches between at defined intervals. Many people used anonymizers to shield their IP address and protect themselves from hackers, online tracking, harvesting and other website snooping techniques.

View this forum topic to get a list of anonymous proxy lists that many people use

Aardvark Firefox Extension

admin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:29:29 +0000

Aardvark is a Firefox extension that can be used to

Clean up unwanted banners and surrounding “fluff,” especially prior to printing a page
See how the page is created, block by block
View the source code of one or more elements

Pencil: Firefox Plugin for Diagram and GUI Prototyping

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:21:10 +0000

The Pencil Project provides a free and open source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping.

As quoted from the website, it features

Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
Multi-page document with background page
On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
PNG rasterizing
Undo/redo supports
Installing user-defined stencils
Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
Cross-platforms
Adding external objects

It is released under GPL version 2 and is available for virtually all platforms that Firefox 3 can run. The first version of Pencil is tested against GNU/Linux 2.6 with GTK+, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Solvent - Firefox Extension for Screen Scraping and XQuery Generator

admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 07:15:02 +0000

One thing I like about Firefox is the abundance of extensions out there which can do almost anything that you can think of.

Solvent is a Firefox extension that helps you write screen scrapers for Piggy Bank.

Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a mashup platform, by allowing you to extract data from different web sites and mix them together. Piggy Bank also allows you to store this extracted information locally for you to search later and to exchange at need the collected information with others.

Solvent in this case can help to generate semantic data in RDF format from the web pages to be used in Piggy Bank.

Imagine the following XQuery,

/html/body/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/table/tbody/tr/td/table/
tbody/tr[2]/td[2]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td/table/tbody/tr/td/
table[@class=”body2″]/tbody/tr[1]/td[@class=”title_blk”]/a

Without using any tool like Solvent, it is quite impossible to come out with the query manually. In short, Solvent greatly simplifies web page scraping using XQuery. Using it togther with WebHarvest, I am able to write my own custom scraper in Java easily.