Switching hosts
June 27th, 2008
Well, Dreamhost has informed me that my hosting costs for the next year are going to triple, so it’s time to find another host. As soon as I figure out who that host will be, I’ll move the blog and update the extensions on Mozilla’s site to point to the new homepage, or possibly even a dynamic redirect from DynDNS so I don’t have to do this again next year.
CopyURL 0.1 addon for Firefox released
June 24th, 2008
An Affiliator user (who had just moved to Firefox 3 from Safari) requested some help with copying links formatted in HTML, which Affiliator does automatically, though only for Amazon, and which Safari apparently does natively. Not finding anything, I decided to rip out that portion of Affiliator, spruce it up a bit, and throw it in the toolbar.
CopyURL was the result.
Load up the addon in Firefox, then either go to View->Toolbars->Customize…, or right-click the toolbar and choose “Customize…”. Drag and drop the CopyURL icon anywhere you like on the toolbar, and you’re set. Click the button on any page or image on the web, and it will do one of two things:
- If you’re on a webpage, it will create an anchor tag to the current page, using the page’s TITLE element text as the link text. If the TITLE element can’t be found, it will prompt you to enter the link text.
- If you’re on an image, it will create an image tag.
No more having to remember HTML syntax when you want to post a link, or BBCode or Wiki syntax, either. Clicking the drop-down arrow next to the button will give you a list of formats to choose from, as well as the ability to add your own.
Hopefully this will make things a little easier for everyone.
Also, a new (minor) version of Affiliator is probably coming tomorrow, as the same user who prompted CopyURL informed me that right-click context menus are particularly difficult with one-button mice on OSX. In response to that, Affiliator’s getting a toolbar button as well, though it won’t be as full-featured as the context menu.
Lastly, I’m aware the icon sucks. Despite minoring in Art & Design in college, I can’t make icons for crap.

