It’s been said that 10% of U.S. households still use dial-up internet to access the web.  This could be due to the lack of high speed options in their area, unwillingness to pay the $50+ a month for high speed, or no real need to go faster.

Over the past weekend, I was trying to figure out how to make my Mom’s internet experience faster.  She lives on a farm in rural Minnesota and, believe it or not, only gets 28k connection speed.  Qwest says that’s as good as she can get since she lives in the country.  Her only other option is to purchase high speed via DirectTV for about $60/month.  Needless to say, her browsing experience is OK for the price.

So I did a little digging to see what I could do to make pages load faster in Firefox.  Here are 4 extensions that helped.

ImgLikeOpera - This is a great extension.  It allows the user to disable all images, all but cached images or all images not loading from this site.  This was a big enhancement for my Mom’s computer.  I told her that if she’s just looking for a phone number or address, to browse without images on.  The extension also allows her to choose which images she’d like to load on a page.  This helps cut down on loading all the un-necessary, and often large, images on websites.

Flashblock - Flash is not necessary on most websites.  It’s often used as an accent or for advertising.  So I blocked it.  Chances are she won’t miss it and the pages will load faster.

Fasterfox Lite - I’m not 100% convinced that this works that well, but if we gain a few seconds, then it’s worth it.  Fasterfox Lite tweaks some of Firefox’s settings that provide faster loading pages.

Adblock Plus - I understand that advertising is needed on the web, but flashing image banners and Flash ads just take additional time to load.  So I blocked them too.  Normally I wouldn’t do this, but at 28k, I’ll try anything.

The biggest benefits for slower connections will be blocking images and Flash.  Text renders quickly and if you can avoid the graphic elements, chances are your page will load faster and you’ll get the information you’re looking for quicker.

I’ve never been more excited about politics than I have with Obama.  There is something about the man that makes me feel energized and that change is coming.  I’m ready to see what he can do.  It’s a new day!

For those that want the song, it’s now available in iTunes for $0.99.

Tinseltown Updates Include:

• Right click menus have new snow graphics.
• URL bar auto complete menu has been re-designed with a snowman.
• Back/Forward drop down arrow has a flake behind it.
• Star graphic in URL bar is now prettier.
• Tab hover text color is now easier to see.
• Addon window has snow.
• Download window has snow.
• Preferences window has a selected text color.
• Many other tweaks to clean it up a bit.

URL bar auto complete with snowman.

Right click menu with snow.

I hope everyone enjoys the updates!  You can get more information, and a download link, from the Tinseltown page.

Since we have two cats, I decided to make my own Halloween LOL cat for all to enjoy!

Evil - No Costume Required v1

Evil - No Costume Required v2

There are two versions because I didn’t know which picture was better.  I think our cat, Sassy, looks more evil in v1, but v2 is a nicer picture.  Which one do you think?

Either way, Happy Halloween from Thomas & Christi!!

Much like my many other Firefox sidebars, it simply works as a shortcut to access the mobile version of a site.  This time it’s Ping.fm.

Yes, you could easily do this with a bookmark in Firefox, but I prefer to have an icon in my toolbar and a keyboard shortcut at my disposal.

The Ping.fm Mobile Sidebar comes complete with Firefox 2 & 3 support, a blue P button for your toolbar and a keyboard shortcut. The actual features of the Ping.fm sidebar application are under Ping.fm’s control.

Download the Ping.fm Mobile Sidebar extension.

To install: Download the extension to your desktop. Then go to Tools -> Add-ons and drag ping.fm1.0.xpi to your add-ons window. It’ll install and you’ll have to restart Firefox.

To use: Go to View -> Sidebar -> Ping.fm Mobile Sidebar, or hit control+alt+shift+p, or customize your menu bar to add the Ping.fm button.

Enjoy

Known Issue: The mobile version of Ping.fm has no background color so the sidebar version currently takes on your current sidebar background color.  If you have a dark background color, this may make the text hard to read.  I’m looking into a way to fix this.

Thoughts Wanted: The iPhone version of Ping.fm works in Firefox’s sidebar, however the sidebar either needs to be about 480px wide or it’ll scroll left and right.  The iPhone version looks much nicer, but it doesn’t fit quite right.  Would you like to keep the current version or have me code in the iPhone version?

iPox Remix is a set of tutorials on creating your own Firefox theme.  You are provided with a starter theme that contains all the necessary files and images to get you going.  It also contains a set of tutorials to help you customize the files and create your own theme.

Unfortunately I don’t have a tutorial for converting themes from Firefox 2 to 3.  I did it manually and re-coded everything.  It’s what worked best for me.

If you do use the iPox Remix tutorials to create your own Firefox theme, please let me know.  I’d love to showcase some of your creations!!

What’s an early release?  Well it just means that it’s not completely updated.  I didn’t spend to much time theming all the new elements in Firefox 3.  I just quickly coded them to match with the theme.  There is so much more I want to do, and will do.  But for now, the early release will bring back the familiar Tinseltown look and feel for those that want to get int he holiday spirit now.

In November I’ll sit down and update Tinseltown even more.  For now, it works for Firefox 3 and it should make quite a few people happy.

PinkHope is a perfect match for Pink for October.  The Firefox theme is bright pink and integrates well in to the campaign.  PinkHope has also recently been added to the official Pink for October downloads page.

What do you think?  Are you going pink for October?

President 2008

While at the MIMA Summit on Wednesday, I got to talk with Ryan Evans.  Little did I know at the time, he was running for president!

Since I’m still an undecided voter, Ryan Evans is as good as any.  His lack of political experience and ability to dodge questions is on par with any other candidate.  He takes on real topics too, like the Facebook re-design.  Plus he’s a local guy (Minneapolis) so I guess that makes him an even better choice.

If you want to check out Ryan Evans, go to www.helpryanevans.com and vote for your right to not change a thing.

It’s already at the correct iPhone size and the placement of the graphics is optimized for for the iPhone as I left space at the top for the time and date and Jack is nicely centered on the iPhone screen.

Enjoy Nightmare Before Christmas fans!

Also, be sure to check out my Firefox theme HalloFF featuring Jack Skellington.

Here is what is new in the most recent version.

• New scrollbars featuring bones.  Jack Skellington is the Bone Daddy after all.
• New right click menus featuring orange options with green highlights.
• New tabs that should resemble grave stones.
• New creepy fence background for the bookmarks toolbar and other toolbars.
• New light up pumpkin throbber.
• Added a bit of orange to the find bar background.
• Cleaned up the big back button as there was some minor issues that only I probably saw.
• Green highlight when the URL or search bar is active.

That’s the bulk of what was updated.  I wanted to take HalloFF farther away from MidnightFox and have it stand on it’s own and I think I accomplished that.  I hope others like the updates as much as I do.

Please Note: If you get a -228 error when trying to download, that’s an error with Mozilla’s servers and I have alerted them.  Hopefully they fix it soon.

Have you heard about Twitterkeys?  It’s a site that puts together a list of special characters that you can just copy and paste and put into a Twitter post.

Where as they are marketing to Twitter, these symbols work great for Plurk, ReJaw, Facebook, email or whatever you want to use them with.

Twitterkeys offers lots of different symbols from hearts to stars and even a snowman.  I think there are about 200 symbols to choose from.

Check them out as it may come in handy.

It’s a dark theme with quite a few elements shared with MidnightFox, however, the buttons are orange with green rollovers and Jack Skellington shows his face a few times throughout the theme.

Enjoy this little Halloween treat from me to you!

iPox Aqua has the same style and feel as iPox, with a bit more colorful buttons and brighter blues.

Now I think I have only 3 more to update.

Check out these stats!

Miint
Total downloads since April 8th 2007: 234,303
Active Daily Users on Wednesday September 3rd: 35,425

PinkHope
Total downloads since January 29th 2007: 530,214
Active Daily Users on Wednesday September 3rd: 80,814

iPox
Total downloads since January 4th 2006: 1,479,462
Active Daily Users on Wednesday September 3rd: 79,518

MidnightFox
Total downloads since March 30th 2006: 1,960,530
Active Daily Users on Wednesday September 3rd: 166,482

This is only a sampling of the themes I have available, but all represented above are available for Firefox 3.  Knowing that so many people enjoy my themes makes me happy.

Thank You!!!

The Firefox 2 version never made it out of the sandbox over there and was never publicly available.  It bugged me, but there wasn’t much I could do.  However now, MidnightFoxy can get the attention it deserves.

MidnightFoxy is a dark theme just like MidnightFox.  The main difference is the buttons are square and they get larger when you rollover them.

Give MidnightFoxy a shot if you like MidnightFox or dark Firefox themes.

On a recent search for “implus iphone application” I came across the iTunes store page ranked at #8 in Google.

Yes, the iTunes Store may be built on WebKit, or some sort of web application on the back end, but how exactly does Google get there?  Does the Googlebot run iTunes?  Ohh there is a possibility.

I checked the cache version of the page and it’s just text on a basic white background.  Looking at the source of the cache it appears that’s it’s an XML document.  Apple is feeding Google XML documents for iTunes products!

Now that’s pretty smart.  Not sure if it’s really fair as you can’t get to the page without iTunes, but it not only helps Apple but all the products in the iTunes store as well.

Like the others, the entire theme was re-coded and some elements may be different.  I don’t aim to make an exact duplicate of the Firefox 2 version, but rather an upgrade.

For those that don’t know, PinkHope is a bright pink theme that takes aim at creating awareness for breast cancer fighters, survivors and supporters.  It’s also great for anyone who likes pink.

If you look close I think you can see a hidden message that says “Enjoy Bacon and Beer.”

Give Wordle a try. It’s just a fun little tool to play around with.