Sperrobjekt Weblogsince 2003

I just installed the recent beta 4 release of Firefox 3 (Firefox Portable, to be exact, thus making it run alongside my trusty Firefox 2). Firefox 3 is blazing fast, but this may be due to the fact that I've got almost no add-ons installed. My Firefox 2 has to carry the burden of 27 active extensions that may or may not slow down the whole applicaton, who knows. All in all, Firefox 3 seems to be very stable already, but I need my add-ons for web development and so on. That's why I've been looking for other things to do with the new beta. When I found out that Mozilla Labs released a new version of Prism, their stand-alone XULRunner applicication slash Site Specific Browser. If you install Prism 0.2 as add-on to Firefox 3, it allows you to create and export new applicatons from within the browser. The new apps then use the browser's rendering enginge, it seems (I'm not exactly sure how it works). Yet, again, the resulting app feels considerably faster than the old Prism. I'm using an installation of tt-rss on my server as web based feed reader. Now that it's running as a Prism app, it seems to respond so much faster than before - which reduces the amount of time I need to read all my feeds. Great!

I created an account at Yahoo!'s Upcoming some time ago. One of the features I like about Upcoming is that events are marked up with the hCalendar microformat. But if you subscribe to the RSS feed of your Upcoming events and include them in your blog's sidebar, all markup is lost, of course. So, I've hacked some new feature into my microformats plugin: It's now possible to subscribe to an events feed and merge this feed with the events that are manually entered via my plugin. The result is displayed in the sidebar with full hCalendar goodness. Check it out in my sidebar, and compare it with my page at upcoming.org. The plugin needs some cleanup 'cause it contains dirrrty hacks, but I will release it soon. I might also include the new and shiny wevent, a German Upcoming clone, and Google Calendar.