Most of you who are doing heavy web development work have told us that you're using Firefox as your browser of choice, and if so, there's a few absolutely indispensable extensions that we'd recommend adding to your toolkit. (If you're not familiar with installing or using extensions, the Mozilla foundation has documentation available.)

First, for anyone who uses the web interface of their blogging tool or edits text online for any application, the resizeable textarea extension will let you size text entry boxes to whatever dimensions you prefer.

Once you're set up for resizing text areas, there's a suite of astoundingly powerful tools available for web developers, particularly those...

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The folks at Vpop have made a special version of their UltraBar toolbar for TypePad users, the TypePad UltraBar for Firefox users. It adds some quick links to key TypePad features to your browser if you're using the (excellent) Firefox browser from Mozilla.

This TypePad toolbar runs on any platform that Firefox supports.

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Previous Entry: MultiBlog 1.1 released

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Mark from murky.org has created a plugin for the Firefox browser. It allows users to search MTLookup from within the browser toolbar. You can find the needed information on Mark's website on One more Firefox Plugin.

Thank's a lot Mark! This is a very useful extension.

After installation, the search box in the upper right corner of the Firefox browser has a new entry for MTLookup. If you select it, enter a search phrase, and hit return, an MTLookup search will be executed. It could not be easier.

mgs | 12/05/2005

Feedback is welcome!

What do you think about this entry? Was it interesting or boring? I would like to hear your comments. If the text was...

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A clever new extension for Mozilla-based browsers is JustBlogIt, which differs from a regular QuickPost bookmarklet by letting you have a slick posting form that can connect right to TypePad or Movable Type from within your browser.

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Koldark's Komputer World - Test - October 13, 2004 06:52 AMThis is a test of a new Firefox Extension, JustblogIt. It is kind of neat, but I am not sure it is any better than the "QuickPost" option. Via Six Apart Professional Network Thanks Neil for being my testee....

pixelgraphix - JustBlogIt! - October 13, 2004 10:52 AMJustBlogIt ist eine interessante Erweiterung für Mozilla und Firefox, die direktes Posten aus...

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I had forgotten to share these little goodies that I frequently use. The little search bar in Firefox is indespensible for me and I have all sorts of search engines there including many Movable Type resources. Here are three that I use most frequent. To install just click the link and click ok on the dialog box that appears, restart Firefox and you should have a nice new search engine added to the drop down list of the search box. • MT Plugins Directory • Learning Movable Type • Movalog

Any others? Post them in the comments!

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Gina Trapani has tied together a slick script to Set the Movable Type upload directory when uploading an image in FireFox. You'll need the Greasemonkey FireFox extension, which lets you execute a javascript when a specific web page loads, and then a simple configuration lets you prepend a path to the files you upload using Movable Type.

It's not just a cool idea, it's a good inspiration for other clever hacks using GreaseMonkey. Be sure to let us know if you've got a similar cool idea.

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Looking Out - links for 2005-01-29 - January 28, 2005 10:18 PMMovalog: Password Protect Entries (categories: mt movabletype) Six Apart Professional Network: Upload Directory...

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Red Herring's got an interview with Rob Davis, the man behind the campaign to advertise Firefox in the New York Times. It's especially good timing for promoting every geek's favorite browser, since the updated roadmap shows the browser scheduled for release on November 9th.

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Previous Entry: Advice to the bloglorn

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QuickImagePost is a blogging tool like a QuickPost. But it is especially for an entry to embed image. During surfing Internet, you may find an image with which you want to post an entry. How many images do you see in Internet a day? Do you happen to want to log some impressive images in your blog? You can use default QuickPost of course.

But not just one-click. You have to find image URL AND copy-and-paste it to entry body AND add IMG tag AND if you have a block to quote, again you have to copy-and-paste it. These are routine process.

QuickImagePost makes again just one-click publishing even for an imaget. You right-click on an image(before it, you can drag...

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A great way to easily customize the look of your Movable Type weblog is to replace the default title banner with a banner image. There are two basic methods for adding a banner image - adjusting the CSS or adjusting the index and archive templates.

Before making template adjustments, you first need to prepare your banner image. You might choose to use an image that will take up the entire banner space, or you might want more of a logo-like image that would only take up a part of the banner space, with a solid color making up the difference. Photographic images that extend to the edges of your weblog's container work best for banners in "fixed width" styles, such as in the default...

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It's calling itself "the social browser" and claims to be the champion of Web 2.0.

Visit the site and you'll find humongous type and a free-spirited blurb about the way the web should work, but what is Flock and should you be excited about it? It claims to be one of the first browsers that emphasizes the internet sharing experience, allowing you from within the browsers interface to add and share del.ic.ious links (cf. my post about that), post to and manage your blog(s), add and share Flickr photos and act as a fully functioning RSS news reader. Those are some ambitious goals and certainly some vital needs in this new age of Internet.

Internet Explorer essentially...

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UPDATE: EnhancedEntryEditing has been bumped up to v1.01 to fix a bug where popup windows wouldn't disappear after you were done with them. Grab the update, you only need to upload EnhancedEntryEditing.pl

Ajaxify is a series of BigPAPI plugins that adds various javascript and AJAX widgets into Movable Type's interface. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. The first of which is EnhancedEntryEditing. This plugin adds two widgets into the entry screen: • Resizable Textareas - I personally find the textareas on the entry screen too small and find it annoying to hack the stylesheet everytime I upgrade Movable Type. This plugin now adds "Increase Size" and...

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Web developers have various methods for creating print friendly versions of their websites. By using a server side routine or print stylesheets, the print version may strip out images and navigation that lose their meaning on the printed page, and perhaps display the page in a single column using a different font with a different size.

But what happens when there is no printable version, or the printable version includes ads or other settings that don't suit you, the user? That's where user stylesheets come in. Armed with a little CSS knowledge and some web development tools, you can easily create your own print versions formatted exactly the way you want them....

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If you have a lot of content - entries, categories, sidebar information - sooner or later things may begin to look a little cluttered on your weblog. One way to address this is to make some of your lists expandable and collapsible, as I have done with LMT's Table of Contents. There are probably many different ways to do this. I have found one method, based on Javascript, that is simple to implement and appears to work fine, from Bleeding Ego.

1. Upload listmenu.js to your server.

Copy the following script into a new file with a texteditor. Save the script as "listmenu.js". Upload the script to a location within the public directory of your server using an FTP program. (You can...

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UPDATE files are bundled in an archive.

I was very impressed with the WordPress Suggest plugin and wanted to port it over to MT. The porting was easy but the query was very slow and pulled some bad results from the database. Chad helped me last night and we had almost cleaned it up until v0.2 was released which seems to have fixed the problems I had. Try it using the search form on the sidebar.

This plugin is similar to LiveSearch (and the MT implementation) however the difference is it lets you keep the mt-search.cgi functionality which I liked. Also this plugin works slightly differently to LiveSearch, I prefer this!

Implementing it with MT is very easy, you need to have PHP and be...

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Designing our company's website in CSS was coming along nicely until I hit a roadblock. The challenge was to create two columns of bulleted lists in the flow of the text. The layout I had in mind was something like this:

Paragraph 1 Bulleted list | Bulleted list Paragraph 2 Bulleted list | Bulleted list Paragraph 3 Bulleted list | Bulleted list ...and so on

I tossed around some lists that worked fine in IE 6, but caused a headache in almost every other browser. Perhaps I could have smashed through the roadblock using horizontal lists. But I've always found it easier to float, so that's what I did.

Floating ULs

To solve the problem with floats,...

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Master hacker Phillip Torrone's documented some of his tips and tricks for working with Movable Type on the Make magazine blog. Take a look at Make out with FireFox for highlights on adding spellcheck, streamlined uploading, and automated entry of frequently-typed text to your blog using Firefox extensions and Movable Type.

Trackbacks:

Asa Dotzler on firefox, cats, mars, and more - firefox fun for movable type users - July 5, 2005 07:00 PMIf you're a Movable Type user (like me) then you'll appreciate this article, Make out with FireFox. The article introduces a spellchecker and handy greasemonkey scripts. (link via anil dash)...

AdvisorBits - No more speeling erroser - July 13, 2005 08:08 AM...

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The default Movable Type MT3.2 templates come with one sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page. With a little template manipulation you can have an additional sidebar on the left - a 3-column layout.

The MT3.2 stylesheets and templates are designed to have the columns laid out in order, starting with the column named "alpha". The columns, in order are alpha, beta, gamma (for a 3-column layout), and delta (a hypothetical fourth column that one could create). In the default MT3.2 Main Index template, the sidebar is on the right and is in a column named "beta.

To add a third column, you will make a copy of the default "beta" column code and put it before the "alpha"...

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I'm happy I could provide this plugin to the MT community.

This plugin, BigTemplateWindow, is for a really big template editing window. The size of template editing box is only limited by that of your monitor. :) First I developed this just for a big template box. In the process of doing it, several useful features was added. I hope almost all MT users could be a little happy by using this.

Requirement

IE or Firefox/Mozilla.

The use of TAB key and other features was developed and tested only on IE and Firefox/Mozilla browsers. Adaptation into Opera and other browsers are...

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The default Movable Type layouts don't give you a lot of choice in terms of navigation. Clicking on the top bar with the title of the weblog will take you back to the main page of the weblog. Every other nav element is in the sidebar. You can however, pretty easily add a horizontal nav bar, with links to important-to-first-timers, or frequently used areas of your site, such as archives, about, or contact links.

Adding horizontal nav bar requires adding a few lines of code right underneath the banner section in your index and archive templates and adding a few new elements to your style sheet. Once you've created your navigation code, the most efficient way to add the code to the...

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Oh, the fun to be had with Unicode.

Unicode, for those still unfamiliar, is a universal character encoding standard, jointly developed by a consortium with dozens of corporate and individual members around the world. The Unicode character set currently tops out at over 70,000 characters, and contains character sets from around the world, in both modern and ancient forms.

A bit more background follows, and then some usage analysis. Interspersed throughout this article are various Unicode characters; it’s highly unlikely that your browser/OS knows what to do with all of them. So unless you're running Safari, click on any set to view an image-based equivalent (which is a...

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