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We visit and revisit web pages. You will find that more than 60% of your web visits are actually revisits of some sort. But web browsers support for such revisitations is limited to bookmarks, history list, URL auto-completion and back button. Here are a few history tools which can greatly improve your experience during web browsing. Tab History: It is the simplest yet very useful extension. Usually when we open a link in a new tab, the back button history for the new tab is empty. This extensions adds the session history from the parent tab to this new tab, so that you are not lost with the question “where do i come from?”. Tree Style Tab: This extension arranges your tabs in a tree structure, like a folder tree of Windows explorer. So whenever you open a new tab from a link, this tab is added as ‘child’ node in the tab tree of the parent node. [caption id=“attachment_595” align=“aligncenter” width=“200” caption=“Tree style tab”] [/caption] You can conveniently arrange these tabs in the tree using the simple drap and drop feature. You can go through an extensive list of features on the official site. One thing I would like to mention is that if you close a tab, its children are orphaned. As the father is gone, no way children would know about their grandparents ;).

Some of the “quotes” I like from South Park, by Chef. Disclaimer: The following contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.[caption id=“attachment_585” align=“alignright” width=“150” caption=“Chef with Boys”] [/caption] Episode 401 Chef: Well look at you cute little crackers with your money and your fancy clothes and your cell phones. It’s almost like you were… Oh my God! Children, what have I told you about drugs Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny: There’s a time and a place for everything and it’s called college.

Today, while I was working on the URL encoding for the recently released Facebook-style Links module, I realized a bug with Link Attachments feature on Facebook. Before I explain, let us reproduce it: Try to attach the following link on Facebook: http://google.com/search?q=blenders%26pride. This URL actually queries Google for ‘blenders&pride’. Facebook converts/encodes the above URL to http://google.com/search?q=blenders&pride which is not the same as above and queries Google for just ‘blenders’. So, why Facebook does this? Probably Facebook tries to encode the URL to remove the characters which are not allowed by RFC 3986 and replaces them with their percent encoding. But there are certain characters which should not be encoded, such as ‘/’, ‘?’, ‘#’, ‘@’ which are the reserved characters and used as delimiters in the URL. So, it decodes these characters and converts their encoding to the original character which gives rise to the problem. Let us see an example:

Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) was released on 3rd March, and currently supports the following features: Automatically downloads and attaches image to the node created by Feeds module. Configurable XPath of the desired image location on the webpage of the feed item on per feed basis (using element’s id or CSS class). Support for FileField Paths module. Configurable maximum image size. Configurable minimum and maximum image resolutions. In this post, I will briefly demonstrate how to configure the settings for FIG to efficiently grab images for feed items.

Facebook-style Links (FBSL) provides the ability for users to attach and submit links along with their Facebook-style Statuses. Combined with Facebook-style Statuses (FBSS), the FBSL module provides an attach link form that loads via AHAH. Users can then attach a link with an (optional) thumbnail, title and description to their status. In the nutshell, it imitates the link attachment feature on Facebook. [caption id=“attachment_484” align=“aligncenter” width=“607” caption=“Screenshot of FBSL on LondonFuse.ca”] [/caption]

Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) is the successor project for FeedAPI ImageGrabber to support the Feeds module. FIG parses the Item URL of each feed-item, downloads the appropriate image from the post and maps it to an image field in the node created by Feeds module for that feed-item. [Google Reader (with thumbnails) can be imitated on a Drupal site by using Feeds, Feeds Image Grabber, FileField, ImageField, ImageCache, ImageAPI and Views module].

I often come across this question from my friends and peers and most of the time I deflect it by saying “it lets you create your website easily, why don’t you look up on Wikipedia?”. Few days ago, one of my friends pointed me that most of the articles start with “Drupal is a Content Management System(CMS) …” which becomes pretty much confusing when one has no idea about what a CMS is. In this post, I have tried to explain what a CMS is and why we need it and how Drupal stands out among various other available CMSs. Let us say you need to create a webpage for your website. Ideally, it would mean you create HTML content that will be delivered to someone who requests it through their web browser. Eventually you grow big and decide to add 100 more pages to your website and therefore create 100 more HTML pages. But then you realize that there is a lot of duplicate content. The footer which contains the copyright information is essentially the same on all pages, therefore if you ever need to edit it then it would mean to edit these 101 pages. This will be a lot of redundant work.

When you need to dump a SVN repository, all you have to do is svnadmin dump REPOS_PATH But wait, then you need to have admin access to the server on which your SVN repository is hosted. Often, that is not the case and you have to contact the company which hosts your repository to do it for you. I have a repository hosted at CVSdude and I needed to dump it. As I am on the Developer Edition plan, I do not enjoy the privileges to backup my repositories from my admin panel. I could have mailed the guys at cvsdude, who according to me are quite supportive and quick to respond, but that would have taken longer than what I am going to describe next. SVN provides a unique utility, svnsync which is a Subversion remote repository mirroring tool. Put simply, it allows you to replay the revisions of one repository into another one. Now, we can create an empty repository on our local system, synchronize it with the remote repository and then dump the local repository. Follow the following 4 step process to have a dump of your repository:

Who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-Il or Google? Google tracks everything, your searches, web movement which arises from your search, what places you went last summer (or are planning to go, thanks to Google maps). Google not only knows about you but also understands you much better than your own girlfriend. If that freaks you out, I’d say you are in your right mind. But now you can avoid it to a certain extent by using GoogleSharing. GoogleSharing is an extension for Firefox, which will anonymize your requests to Google products which do not require you to log in but where your activities can be tracked by Google. Google keep tracks of you through cookies. If you attempt to strip off your cookies from your HTTP request, Google might tag you as spam bot and will force you to type in a CAPTCHA for your every request.

Although the third party bookmarking and sharing tools are quite useful to analyze the sharing trends on your blog, they do slow down the whole process of sharing. Also, as mentioned in my Sharing and Bookmarking Tools post, I was not comfortable with the small icons available with Bookmarkify and Socialable. WP ShareThisPost is a small custom wordpress plugin which provides large icons along with the flexibility to add your favorite sharing and bookmarking sites (if not included by default). WP ShareThisPost includes the following sharing and bookmarking sites, by default: del.icio.us Digg Google Bookmarks StumbleUpon Facebook Twitter Technorati