Troy's Twitter Script

Enter Troy's Twitter script for Firefox that I reviewed in detail a few months ago.

Troy's script added the RT button to my stream (along with inline picture and video embed, auto url expander and shortener, name autocomplete, and other things) way before Twitter introduced it.

It also allowed me to add a couple of words or rephrase the retweet to make it more relevant to my followers.

Here is what clicking on the Retweet button used to do after you installed the Twitter script:

Twitter's Own Retweet

After Twitter rolled out their own Retweet, it simply took over the Retweet button that Troy's script added and everyone was happy. Right?

Wrong. Many users, including myself, were left craving the old functionality back.

The Newest Version Of Troy's Twitter Script

About an hour ago, Troy announced version 10.9 of his script which brings back the old functionality in the form of the "Comment" button. Here it is pictured below:

which yet again gives me the opportunity to edit the retweet:

Now we can have the best of both worlds – the new Comment button lets you retweet and edit while the Retweet button remains the same Twitter's own one-click Retweet.

Download Troy's Twitter Script

Again, here are the simple installation instructions to get Troy's Twitter script:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Credit

As before, all credit goes to the awesome Troy.

Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions

Are his other tweets just as original as "Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where just a second ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #weddingday"?

Not so much… After looking at TheSoftwareJedi's (that's our Dana) timeline out of curiosity, I saw the following gem which definitely takes The Most Useless Tweet To Date award in my book. Here it is:

Yup, it's real and it was not rhetorical or followed up by some witty response. Nope. This was it.

Well, the answer is right there, Dana, below the tweet. Also on your hand, in your car, house, and pretty much everywhere else. Oh, and since you posted from Twittelator, which is an iPhone client, my guess is your phone knew it too.

/Sigh

• Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• Random Questions and Thoughts. Password Protected Garage Door Remotes, Twitter Security, MUNI Drivers, Burgers, etc
• Have You Pre-Ordered Starcraft 2 Yet? No? Here’s What You Need To Know
• Some Fun At Work

I was really glad to see Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, and the whole StackOverflow team in person, as well as listen to great talks in the following topics:

9:00 – 9:50    Joel Spolsky Opening Keynote
9:50 – 10:45    Mark Harrison Python
11:00 – 11:55    Rory Blyth iPhone
11:55 – 12:25    Joel Spolsky Fogbugz
13:30 – 14:25    Scott Hanselman ASP.NET-MVC
14:25 – 14:45    Jeff Atwood Stack Overflow
14:45 – 15:40    Daniel Rocha Qt
16:10 – 17:05    James Yum Android
17:05 – 18:00    Yehuda Katz jQuery

My own favorite topics were in the following order of fun/usefulness level:

• iPhone (though I'm interested in Android development myself but it's always good to check out the competition) – it was fun and not boring. Quirky, jittery, OCD all come to mind.
• Joel's keynote (Hi, Joel, I'm @ArtemR ) – I welcome the discussion of simple vs feature rich, though Joel has talked about this on his blog multiple times.
• jQuery – nice intro into history of jQuery and competition with other frameworks. The technical level of specific examples was quite basic.
• Android – this is the topic I'm mostly interested in and unfortunately the main speaker got substituted by a guy who has obviously not presented in front of a large crowd before (sorry, I have to criticize – you'll do better and better each time! Just don't worry so much and know your stuff) and was pretty much a recent college grad from the looks of it. He did a pretty decent job at making the code run but a really poor job of marketing and explaining Android's weaknesses and strengths, as some people on twitter pointed out.
• StackOverflow review – quite brief but fun. Thanks Jeff!
• Python – very odd that it was even there – just a look at a few lines of code from the infamous Python google-like suggest algorithm.
• Qt – didn't really care for it but sat through it. Nokia, meh. Next!
• ASP.NET, Fogbugz – I skipped as I didn't care much for those

Overall, I feel like the information presented in all sessions was pretty basic but I guess that was the idea – a little bit of everything for everyone.

The absence of WiFi was pretty disappointing as I think it was advertised but I didn't care much for it. Kept everyone more concentrated anyway.

The free memory upgrades by Microsoft was an AWESOME move (though mine is already at 4GB and they didn't give out 4GB sticks)!

Lunch was decent – Boudin. Lots of drinks and snacks.

Well worth $99.

Twitter #devdays results.

Cross-posted to Meta-StackOverflow.

• Hidden Features Of Perl, PHP, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, And Others [Collection Of Incredibly Useful Lists]
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• Monitor All Your Domains From One Location
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• Minority Report Becomes Reality

Welcome to part 2 of the Essential Firefox Extensions And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide series. In this article I’m going to describe a number of time saving pragmatic extensions that make me a better, faster, more efficient browser user (browserer?).

Pragmatic Extensions

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures introduces customizable gestures for all kinds of actions. To perform a gesture, hold the right (by default) button and move the mouse in the specified direction, drawing the needed shape.

I use it mostly for 3 things: history back/forward and close tab (see below). Once you start using gestures, there is no going back.

Download Statusbar

Download Statusbar is a handy extension that will show your downloads on a dedicated bar right above the status bar. It also adds a much needed “Delete from system” option to each download (why, Firefox, would you not give me an option to delete my downloads at all?). The Download Statusbar only shows up if there’s at least one download not dismissed yet. Double clicking on a finished file will both launch and remove it from the bar.

OpenDownload

Running downloaded files without saving them is probably the only Internet Explorer feature I actually missed, until I found OpenDownload that is. This extension will give you an option to launch a download upon completion in addition to just saving it. I don’t have to worry about finding and deleting it from my system later as it goes to Firefox’s temporary folder.

Tab Mix Plus

This extension is very powerful and versatile. It controls various aspects of the browser tabs, windows, session, and mouse. Here are the settings I find useful:

• open links that open in a new window in a new tab instead
• open all javascript popups in tabs (I hate popups)
• in fact, I enable the single window mode, in which all attempts to open a new window – by webpages or by you, including starting a new Firefox – will be redirected to a new tab
• highlight unread tabs, which would italicize the tab titles of pages that had something new loaded since you last opened them
• show progress meter on tabs
• close tab button on all tabs (instead of a single one on the right side)
• hide the new tab button that occupies extra space
• customize the tab menu options

Here are some option screens:

Google Toolbar

The google toolbar is historically sort of a must for me. It adds a couple of nice features on top of the default search box and frees the latter, so that I can set it to another search engine (IMDB in my case). With the amount of searching one does on google daily, the sheer number of clicks and keystrokes saved will be in the thousands. Daily. I search a lot, OK?

In addition to providing an always present search bar, the toolbar carries a number of useful features, such as live search suggest, instant PageRank (unneeded if you install SEO Toolbar or SearchStatus), search Gmail and News buttons (and many others), clickable search terms good for in-page search, highlighting of the said terms, a simple autofill (though I use an irreplaceable AI Roboform instead), spell check (Firefox has one built-in now), translate (I use the gTranslate extension instead). All in all, one can do without google toolbar, depending on the needed functionality.

Linkification

Linkification is a really pragmatic extension. It hyperlinks any url-looking strings that aren’t already hyperlinked. Take a look.

Linkification off:

Linkification on:

The extension has a variety of options to satisfy even savvy users but I found that defaults work really well. If for some reason you want to momentarily turn off linkification, just tap the button in the tray and the page will revert to its original form. By the way, if you really want to put it to the test, install it and head over to the comprehensive test case list.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is the most versatile extension available for Firefox, as it’s essentially a whole framework for scripts that can manipulate any aspect of any page. Head over to userscripts.org and take a look at the myriads of scripts written and submitted by other Greasemonkey users.

Still not clear what these can do? Let me list some that I use and their brief functionality:

• Digg Top 10 Direct – automatically rewrites the digg’s top 10 links to go straight to the articles, instead of the digg comment page. Clicking on the digg icon still goes to the comments page though, and I think this is the ideal functionality.
• Google Image Relinker – rewrites google image search urls to go directly to the corresponding images rather than the page they were found on.
• YousableTubeFix – adds a small smart menu that dynamically shows which qualities a given youtube video is available in and automatically picks the best one, adds download links to the each quality (FLV and MP4), resizes the player to your liking, and a few other things. It is also quite customizable.

• The now world famous Troy's Twitter Script that I reviewed a few week ago – it does everything Twitter currently doesn't, including Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, and more.
• AideRSS Google Reader Integration – adds AideRSS feed rank to each entry in Google Reader, which allows eyeballing more important articles within a few seconds of seeing a feed. Also available as a separate extension for those not using Greasemonkey.

Show MyIP

Show MyIP does exactly what it says: it displays your current IP. What I like about it is that it queries for it on demand, after you left or right click the icon. This approach avoids unnecessary queries going around.

-> ->

What I don’t like about it is that there seems to be no way to copy this IP to clipboard. Ideally, a right click option would work great (that’s the way the next extension ShowIP does it). I left a comment about this fact on the extension’s page, so hopefully the author will implement it shortly.

Also, if an error occurs, be prepared for some good old German cursing:

ShowIP

ShowIP, in contrast to Show MyIP, actually displays the IP(s) of the website I’m currently on. It then allows me to copy it (or all of them) into clipboard and provides quick information links, such as whois, ip2country, and traceroute.

ShowIP is useful for both developers who want to know which dev server they’re currently working on as well as regular users who are interested in the location or whois of a site they’re visiting.

iimmgg.com Tools

iimmgg.com is a picture hosting site similar to tinypic.com and photobucket.com. Generally, it allows quick picture uploading with thumbnail creation. This extension makes this process insanely simple, I can’t say enough praise how good my user experience was with this extension. Check this out.

The extension has 2 modes:

1. If you right click on a picture, there’s a single option to upload it to iimmgg.com:

As soon as you click Upload, you are almost immediately redirected to a page on iimmgg.com with your picture and thumbnails already generated. Swoosh, that was fast. Internally, the extension sends the user to something like http://www.iimmgg.com/upload.php?u=http%3A//beerpla.net/wp-content/uploads/BenefitsofMUNI_1E7D/image.png&r=about:blank&s=1&t=, which then redirects to the final picture.

2. If you right click anywhere else on the page, there are now 3 ways to capture an image to iimmgg.com:

Select either of the 3 options: Visible Page, Full Page, or Select Area. Let’s say I select Select Area. A resizable overlay that I can drag it around to select the area I want shows up. Brilliant.

After I figure out what I want to capture, I click on the Capture Selected Area button in a bar that just showed up (btw, the styling of both the bar and the selector are very reminiscent of the Web Developer extension):

The next and final prompt shows up with the Image Format selection (PNG – High Quality, JPEG – High Quality, JPEG – Medium Quality, and JPEG – Low Quality), SFW selection, and capture name:

Click Capture and upload (or save to disk, which is not as fun but also useful):

Voila – the picture is ready for sharing.

Remove Cookie(s) for Site

Remove Cookie(s) for Site does exactly what it says – removes all cookies that belong to a domain and all subdomains of the site you’re currently on. Right click anywhere on the page, click Remove Cookie(s) for Site and the taskbar will update with the number of cookies removed.

->

You can also pull out a nice little button to a location of your choosing, like so:

Oftentimes I don’t even bother looking for a logout button – deleting all cookies is a lot faster.

Signature

Signature, as you probably guessed, inserts a signature into a text form. It supports as many signatures as you want. The uses can be versatile, here are just some:

• the obvious “first and last name” signature
• a full signature with your site link which can help in site promotion. Mine, for example, is
  Artem
  http://beerpla.net
  http://twitter.com/ArtemR
• disclaimers
• coined replies to emails
• various addresses
• repetitive urls
• any other frequently used set of strings that you have to continuously copy-paste

QuickRestart

QuickRestart adds a Restart Firefox option to the File menu. This is quite handy, especially when you have a lot of extensions and it may take Firefox 30 seconds to shut down.

The only downside of this is that it seems to lose the protected and locked tab properties set by Tab Mix Plus. Shutting down Firefox and starting it manually does not lose such properties. This is no longer a problem in the latest Tab Mix Plus version.

Resizeable Textarea

Ever seen a comment box this big and got annoyed by the idiot who designed it?

Fear not, as Resizeable Textarea adds resize capabilities to any text area. Move the cursor to the bottom or right borders, or the bottom-right corner, and drag all you want:

TryAgain

TryAgain is a great and very simple extension. It retries loading a failed page up to 5 times instead of just sitting there. This screenshot explains everything:

View Cookies

View Cookies is a simple extension that adds a Cookies tab to the VIew Page Info box. The tab allows viewing, removing, and copying cookie info for the site you’re currently visiting. There is a number of extensions that do similar things, like Firebug and Remove Cookie(s) for Site, but I install View Cookies anyway because its functionality makes sense.

Google Gears

Google Gears is a very useful extension, and it’s a shame that a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it does. Think of it as simply a secure local cache (developed by Google). Quite a few popular websites support Gears, and I think it is best to just give a few examples of actual usage.

• gmail.com – gmail rolled out offline email support quite recently, which is the most useful implementation of Gears to date.
• wordpress – if you host a wordpress blog, you can opt in to cache a few hundred files in Gears that will speed up the wordpress admin interface. WordPress calls this Turbo mode.
• rememberthemilk.com – RTM, the most advanced and functional TODO list site, offers an excellent implementation of Gears. If you lose your connection, you are free to create, modify, and delete any tasks you want – all the changes will be synchronized when you go back online.
• google reader – the reader can download feed items for offline viewing but the implementation is not very good – you have to explicitly go offline by clicking a button, at which point Gears will download 2000 items.

Installing Gears on its own will technically not do anything for you. You will need to enable support for each site individually. For example, Offline gmail is available from the gmail Labs by clicking on in the top right corner.

From a technical standpoint, Gears uses a local SQLite database for storage. The Gears security model is described here.

gTranslate

GTranslate translates selected text into a language of your choice. It can be set to autodetect the source language or forced to a specific one. I must say so far it worked very well and detected the source language automatically without flaw.

Once the translation is received, gTranslate shows it and links to the google translate page:

Additionally, if the selected text is in an editable field, gTranslate will offer an option to replace the selection with its translation:

SearchStatus

SearchStatus is a useful and relatively simple SEO extension. It shows a quick roundup of page rankings for the current page from Google (PageRank), Alexa, and Compete. This lets me quickly check how popular [or lame] the site I’m on is and keep tabs on my own online properties. Right clicking each metric grants access to a few useful shortcuts and for the lazy pragmatic, right clicking the little symbol has such links as Show Whois, Show robots.txt, Show sitemap.xml, and others.

Another not so obvious but useful feature of this extension is the ability to mark rel=’nofollow’ links. You rightfully obsessed SEO junkies can quickly see which parts of your site leak the valuable link juice and which ones don’t. Take a look at these nofollow links that SearchStatus marked with light red background:

SEO Toolbar

This toolbar is probably going to be useful for relatively hardcore SEO fiends as most people would do just fine with the above SearchStatus extension. The toolbar seems a bit bulky and slow but has a ton of SEO related functionality. It is, of course, free. It shows Google PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo page links, DMOZ directory, Yahoo directory, Best of the web directory, Archive.org, Compete uniques, and SEMRush traffic value:

It also links to a bunch of tools, like quantcast analysis, google trends, and alexa:

For a quick, more in-depth, exportable overview, press the info button :

However, the 2 most useful to me features are probably the Rank Checker :

and Compare Sites :

End of Part 2

This marks the end of part 2 in the series. I expect this page to update pretty often, whenever I find new extensions, so bookmark it using your favorite method by clicking the button below.

The next part in the series (available soon) will describe a number of useful web development extensions.

• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals
• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Thoughts on Google Chrome

Introduction

Let’s face it – the majority of the population doesn’t understand twitter. They don’t get its true value – all they see is an obnoxious social network full of exhibitionists tweeting about millions of mundane things of every minute of their lives.

Except, twitter is much, much more than that. In addition to all the wankers talking about themselves 24/7, of course. Twitter is what you make it to be. You can follow boring, uninteresting people with interests in growing cactuses (cacti?) and collecting fur balls. But you can also follow people sharing piles of interesting and useful information (see bullet points below). Just do me one favor and repeat after me: twitter is not only for publishing your detailed crapping schedule. Get over it, step over your prejudice, delay arriving to conclusions until after trying it yourself.

Don’t get me wrong – I was one of those people before and resisted joining twitter for many months, even years. I didn’t understand it either and didn’t want to voluntarily sign up for just another source of distraction. Here are my findings after joining twitter 2 months ago.

Real Reasons To Use Twitter

1. Most up-to-the-second updated search engine on things going on now

This is invaluable. Plane crash? Digg,com down? Searching twitter would yield instantaneous results because somebody somewhere is tweeting about it. And I’m not talking about biased and edited media – just real people.

Here is the perfect example of something that happened while I was writing this article. I was sleeping happily when some shaking woke me up. I couldn't figure out if I had just dreamt about an earthquake or one just actually happened. There was no more shaking, so I stumbled to my computer and did a quick twitter search for “earthquake”. Within seconds I knew it was indeed an earthquake, and within minutes what the magnitude was. Do you see value in this? I do.

2. Following important people in your field

Whatever your field is – web development, brain surgery, economics – anything, you will find colleagues whose ideas are interesting to you. You can also just follow plain geniuses, like Matt Cutts of Google or Om Malik of GigaOM. Believe me, a smart and interesting person makes sure to be interesting and smart on twitter as well, otherwise their audience drops off. Either way – you are in control. X and Y too boring for you? Stop following them and start following Z.

3. Keeping up with the latest news and updates

You can use twitter as pseudo-RSS by following, say, @cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News), new posts on FML @fxxxmylife, or jQuery updates at @jquery. As events occur, you get instant notifications in your twitter feed.

4. You can talk to companies directly, in a public, open way

For example, I’ve gotten personal replies from Comcast (@comcastcares) and Hulu (@hulu) within minutes of tweeting to them. Because the tweets are public rather than private the way emails would be, there is more pressure to respond to everyone and do it faster. Got a problem? Chances are twitter can help. I also noticed that everyone is inherently polite on twitter – there are no dumb flame wars.

5. In my experience, you will actually get a lot fewer “taking a dump” messages on twitter than on Facebook

… especially with Facebook’s new design. Let me tell you a little secret about your friends – they are not all geniuses and their comment rate seems to be inversely proportional to their brilliance. So before you say that twitter is useless, think about your Facebook account.

6. I’m not one to care much for following celebrities or famous people

… however I still think it’s fascinating that more and more celebrities and prominent people get on twitter, seemingly bridging the difference gap between themselves and regular folks. For example, Ashton Kutcher @aplusk constantly tweets and takes pictures with his phone (mostly of his wife Demi Moore, who is also an avid twitterer @mrskutcher). The fact that you can tweet @ Ashton and he’ll undoubtedly read your message and maybe even respond is kind of cool if you think about it. What kind of a fan club gives you such proximity to your favorite celebrity? What kind of fanclub is better than twitter for celebrities themselves?

Twitter is what you want it to be. Twitter is what you make of it.

140 Characters

Twitter’s 140 message limit, is it a curse or a blessing? My opinion is that it was an absolutely crucial element in site’s appeal and remarkable growth – an average person wants to skim through headlines and read in detail only what seems interesting. Too much information = information overload, even if it’s only a few more characters. I don’t think twitter would have picked up, had it not had this harsh character limit.

What do you think? Did you even have enough attention span to read the above 3 sentences?

Want To Make Twitter More Fun?

Check out my cleverly named Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More article.

Use Digsby, Tweetdeck, and other apps to take twitter with you to your desktop. See Top 10 Reasons Why Digsby ROCKS for more info on Digsby.

Check out this greasemonkey script that augments your google search results with Twitter ones:

Twitter Prediction?

Will my twitter predictions come true by the end of 2009? Read them here (hint: they already have, see below).

• Top 10 Reasons Why Digsby ROCKS
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• Random Questions and Thoughts. Password Protected Garage Door Remotes, Twitter Security, MUNI Drivers, Burgers, etc
• Proof That God Does Exist – You Can Finally Block Those Insanely Annoying Facebook Quizzes For Good

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

Before:

After:

Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

Before:

After:

Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

Before:

After:

Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

Before:

After:

Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

Before:

(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

After:

Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

Before:

After:

Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

Before:

After:

Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

Before:

After:

User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

Before:

After:

Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

Before:

After:

Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

Before:

After:

Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

Before:

After:

That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)

Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. A vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function (credit: Wikipedia).

Clickjacking is hard to combat. From a technical standpoint, the attack is executed using a combination of CSS and iFrames, which are both harmless web technologies, and relies mostly on tricking users by means of social engineering. Additionally, the only server side technique against clickjacking known to me is “frame breaking”, which would cause a legitemate site to break out of any iFrames it may be embedded in. This is not always the desired behavior and is generally frowned upon.

Generic Example

In laymen’s terms, clickjacking means that it is quite possible for websites to trick you into, for example, clicking a button to show a cute kitty while in reality prompting a deletion of all your hotmail email. A malicious site uses an iFrame (which essentially allows embedding sites within other sites) with hotmail loaded inside and hidden using CSS (which is a web language for styling HTML elements). A button named “Show Me The Next Awwww Kitty” is then placed by the malicious site and positioned below the iFrame layer (manipulated by CSS, yet again). However, because the iFrame is hidden, it looks like the “Aww” button is all you’re clicking. Wrong!

Latest Example: Twitter

This morning a new, though harmless, epidemic hit twitter. Hundreds and thousands of messages saying “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6” started showing up. Clicking the link shows a simple page with 1 button:

Clicking (which I of course did) uses clickjacking to repost the message to your own twitter account. Take a look yourself: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=don%27t+click.

All of these are a result of an experiment by some French guys to mess around with twitter and show the effects of clickjacking. Thank you for that, French guys. Creating awareness via the most social platform on the web is the best thing they could do for us.

Fight Clickjacking

James Padolsey recently wrote an excellent blog post about clickjacking and mentioned Twitter specifically. Because clickjacking relies mostly on social hacking (i.e. tricking people into clicking malicious links and buttons), Twitter is nothing but a perfect platform. James gives some nice background info and code examples. He correctly highlights, as I did earlier, that clickjacking is not a software bug – it’s a malicious technique exploiting harmless technologies.

So how does one fight clickjacking?

At this point the most reliable way is to use Firefox and the NoScript extension. NoScript provides a simple, yet amazingly effective feature, called ClearClick. From their site:

“…it's enabled by default, protecting NoScript users from Clickjacking everywhere: it even remains active if you switch NoScript in the less safe Allow scripts globally mode. How does it work? Clickjacking hides or displaces or partially covers something you wouldn't want to click, if you could see it in its original context. ClearClick does the opposite: whenever you click a plugin object or a framed page, it takes a screenshot of it alone and opaque (i.e. an image of it with no transparencies and no overlaying objects), then compares it with a screenshot of the parent page as you can see it. If the two images differ, a clickjacking attack is probably happening and NoScript raises a "ClearClick warning", showing you the contextualized and "clear" object you were about to click, so you can evaluate by yourself if that was really something you wanted to do.”

Did ClearClick work in the earlier twitter attack? Sure did! After I clicked the “Don’t click” button Noscript promptly popped up a warning showing the hidden iFrame (since the original malicious page has been removed, I found another similar page from the same author for screenshot purposes).

So, even if you don’t want to enable NoScript globally, install it anyway, just for ClearClick.

That about covers what I had to say about clickjacking. Stay safe, folks!

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The main reason to use Digsby

1. Digsby saves all information, including IM names, groups, nicks, its own client settings, themes, etc (of course this excludes the password). If I'm logged in from two places, Digsby shows both away messages (at least in the widget). It just god damn works. Remember Trillian or Pidgin? You make 10 groups on your home PC, stick 50 people in each, then go to your laptop at work and nothing is the same as it is at home! Digsby to the rescue.

Notice how I'm logging into a Digsby account, which will be used to retrieve and sync all of my settings.

Other reasons (everyone on Digg loves top 10 lists, right?)

2. Digsby seems to have great fast developers really in touch with the community. Any time there is a problem, they push a message to all users that comes in a form of a Digsby announcement popup. They try to fix problems and usually do it fast. There are bugs here and there but they're nothing critical. If you tried Digsby a few months ago and didn't like it for some reason, I encourage you to give it another try – they really do develop fast. From revision numbers, it seems Digsby developers use SVN in the 15,000 revision number range (that sounds pretty active) – hooray! I can monitor how relatively active Digsby is by comparing this number from time to time. When was the last time Trillian released anything that wasn't a miniscule bug fix? Trillian Astra reminds me of Perl 6 (ha ha, programmer joke).

3. For the first time ever I feel comfortable combining the same people that have multiple IM accounts into one entity (and renaming them whatever I want). I don't really care what IM pops up on their side as long as it reaches the destination. I can also arrange the IM accounts for that person in the order of IM preference, so if AIM is on top and MSN is on the bottom, Digsby will show the AIM icon next to their name, and if they're not on AIM, then MSN. You get the point. I can always pick which account to send from and to at any point during the conversation.

Thaya, you're now popular (Sorry!). And a freak, with so many accounts. Do I give a crap which of his 7 accounts Thaya is logged into? That's right, I don't.

4. Digsby supports Facebook chat just as if it were AIM or MSN (except people sign on and off a lot more often and you can't delete them from the list). It also supports Facebook, twitter, and MySpace (ugh) mini-feed-like updates straight to my desktop. In fact, I get to actually see every Facebook update, which is not the case with the mini-feed (it filters way too much). Additionally, I can set my current status without logging into facebook.com.

5. The Digsby widget, yeah, check it out on the right. There's no need for you to be logged into anything to send me a message. And the cool part is that all visitors show up right in my list the moment they enter the site and disappear the moment they leave, so I know how many people are online at any given time. Feel free to try it out. I already had a few interesting discussions with visitors who are complete strangers and I'm loving it. You can even consider it a mini live tech support.

6. I LOVE how you can customize where and which icons show up in your IM list. Online status, IM network, and a mini buddy icon, left, right, any combination. Such a fine grained seemingly small feature but a very nice touch.

7. Reply box in IM popups. I just type my short answer in there if I don't want to bother popping the main chat window back up. Now if only there was a keyboard shortcut to activate that little box (who wants to mouse any more?)…

8. The first client where updating my Winamp status to all the networks actually works. Yes, others may have it too but so far everything I've tried was buggy. For example, Google talk updates once, and then forgets about it. Digsby never forgets.

9. Skin support with many customizations. http://digsbies.org/site/project/Skins is a good place to start.

10. New email notifications support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, IMAP, and POP3. The last 2 are of special interest.

Now my wishlist

Come on Digsby, you can do it!

• a Linux client. It's supposedly coming soon, but how soon? Windows is the only platform supported today.
• Edit: steve from digsby messaged me with this: MSN reconnect bug is fixed and will be pushed in the next update. Reconnect doesn't always work when I get my network back or come back from sleep mode. Just make it work, Digsby. Especially bad is MSN, it just never wants to reconnect (but hey, that was my main complain with Trillian for the past 3 years). I see this a lot:

• RSS feed integration, similar to how Facebook integration works. I want to read planetmysql.org posts as soon as they get there.
• transparency. What's up with that? I want everyone to at least squint trying to read my messages behind my back. Ideally, a window would solidify when it gets focus and go transparent again when it loses it (put it all into settings, though, let me control it).
• I can't italicize, bold, etc a word or a selection. It just does it to all the text I'm typing. That should be common sense.
• Added 06/15/08: off the record mode + encrypted conversations would be really sweet.
• sometimes the contact list changes don't sync fast enough, so if I close Digsby and reopen it, they won't be there. I'd like to see a live save status, something that turns green once everything is synced.
• minimize to tray. I can already close to tray, but I want to minimize to it too – hey, I'm used to it from AIM. Wanna fight about it? Fixed a long time ago.
• I'd like to have a setting to not show Digsby in the task bar, like Trillian. There’s a setting for this already that I missed, it’s under ‘Buddy List’, thanks steve from digsby.
• It's not always obvious inside the chat window when a friend goes offline, for instance for AIM. It's also not always obvious if you're IMing someone who is not available (there should be a warning back in response to an IM).
• it's not clear if a person who IMed me is in my contact list. I'd like to know that, as well as which group they belong to.
• the close button that suddenly shows up on each tab when I hover is very annoying and sometimes I close IM windows by mistake.

So take Digsby out for a spin, I guarantee you'll like at least something about it.

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