Entropy

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Seeing as I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days, I thought I would make one post with all the things that have caught my eye.

• Maximize Firefox without extensions
• Gmail hacks for better spam protection
• 7 of the best designed sites on the web
• 60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding
• 3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

Maximize Firefox without extensions

We have made a couple of posts relating to improving FireFox and getting the best out of your FireFox experience and plugins. There are plugins that could do what this article details, but with the release of Beta builds quite frequently over the past 2 months or so, not all plugins work the whole time.

If you type about:config in your address bar, Firefox opens the master directory of user-defined preferences and built-in settings. The ultimate arena for performance tampering, the about:config settings are the foundation for programming Firefox extensions.

We’ll show some simple about:config modifications below. Even if the word “Boolean” means nothing to you, we’ll try to make it easy to understand about:config settings

Gmail hacks for better spam protection

I happen to have a ‘.’ in my gmail address just by chance, and also use the + tip for signing up on certain sites to keep things more organized. But you could just as easily use them to help combat spam.

You can create alias emails for things like shopping sites, places you know will spam you, or anything you want to track to see who they are sharing your email with. To do this, simply put a “+” after your account name and add words.

Apparently, Gmail doesn’t really acknowledge dots in your account name. So I can use “mr.marky.mark@gmail.com” or “mr.markymark@gmail.com” or without any dots at all, “mrmarkymark@gmail.com”.

7 of the best designed sites on the web

Titles of this nature always grab my attention. I’m constantly trying to see how designers are innovating using the latest techniques. While I may not completely agree with this list, I do agree that the sites are visually appealing, even google.com, and that they have crisp layouts.

A sites design is its identity. It can make the biggest difference in attracting and keeping traffic, keeping visitors happy, promoting products and services and establishing an identity on the web.

Website design has come a long way. Previously, down-to-the-point, straightforward sites with minimum graphics and fastest loading and easy navigation were considered the “best” sites in terms of design.

60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding

AJAX is one of the most commonly used techniques for creating seamless webapps these days. However, if you have ever tried to develop something using AJAX, you may have found that it can be frustrating sometimes trying to accomplish the crazy idea that you have set down as your goal. Infact, I was wrestling an AJAX idea in the office today that was partially solved with the scriptaculous javascript library.

When it comes to design of modern web-applications, Ajax is considered as a standard approach. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, search, tooltips and tables are developed using Ajax libraries and nifty Ajax scripts. Ajax is useful and powerful. However, when using Ajax, one should keep in mind its drawbacks in terms of usability and accessibility. With an extensive use of Ajax, you can easily confuse your visitors offering too much control and too many features.

3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is something that we are all used to by now, it’s those barely readable images we have to re-type to prove that we are human. Turns out that computers are becoming more and more human with spam bots being able to break CAPTCHA codes, in record time, to webmail sites bypassing the human requirement of owning an account. However, it is still seen as an important part of a website where differentiating a legitimate user from a spam bot is required and even though it is being beaten more and more these days it is still one of the best ways to help combat spam.

Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.

• You Used JavaScript to Write WHAT? [via Zemanta]

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With the slew of free mail solutions around, often you might find yourself in your GMail account looking for a contact on Hotmail; or on Yahoo looking for a GMail contact. Keepm solves that problem.

Keepm imports your contacts from popular applications like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL, Linked In, as well as from vCards or Outlook. When you need to search for a contact, you can go straight to Keepm and be comfortable knowing that the information you need is there regardless of where you originally created that contact. You can also export your contacts from Keepm at any time as vCards or a CSV file, which means it would at the very least work well to consolidate and export your contacts.

Keepm on LifeHacker…

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CNET has a guide on how to GMail search like a real professional, with advanced parameters and a full explanation of how it works and what options there are. Check it out here.

The first app I open and the last one I close each workday is Gmail. Even though I use the service’s labels and filters to sort my mail, I often found myself scrolling through the 600-plus messages in my Gmail inbox to find the one I need. Then I discovered Gmail’s search operators, and my scrolling days were over.

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Ever wanted to run GMail but had too many mails on your current client? Now you can Import (technically, export to GMail) your mails into your GMail account with Google Email Uploader!

LifeHacker has a great post on setting it up with screenshots and more, or go straight to Google to get their Google Email Uploader.

Ever wished GMail had themes? Well it doesn’t, but now you can theme it yourself? If you like the kicking view to the left be sure to pay a visit to UserStyles for the GreaseMonkey script. LifeHacker has promised to include it (once done) in Better GMail so you can optionally wait for that.

Everything in the Gmail Redesigned interface is darker and a touch sleeker than the default Gmail interface, which hasn’t changed all that much since Gmail launched four years ago today. Right now the developer is issuing updates to this style almost every day.