Carl’s Blog

By now most people are aware of Firefox Quick Searches (Keyword Searches) are and how to use them. In brief, they are a bookmark that you can access by using a keyword while passing additional information. The standard quick search is to search Google. I have mine assigned to “g“, the obvious one letter abbreviation. When I want to search Google for something, I type CTRL-L to get to the address bar, then type “g my search terms” (no quotes) and hit ENTER. Behind the scenes, Firefox takes my bookmark assigned to that keyword and replaces the string “%s” with whatever is typed after the keyword.

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After seeing the LiquidBlaze Desktop featured on LifeHacker, I was intrigued. I had been looking for a good way to have my wife’s calendar visible for me at work. As if reading my mind, LifeHacker had another featured desktop using Active Desktop. This was was by awhite and shows a calendar downloaded from the web. Unfortunately, I didn’t already use Yahoo! Calendar and I really wasn’t keen on making my calendar public. Besides, my wife already uses iCal on her iMac and I had it set up to synchronize via WebDAV to my web host. I had already been able to get PHP iCalendar (site seems to be down sometimes) to show her uploaded calendars. Thus I figured I should try to combine awhite’s idea with PHP iCalendar. The web host can have password protected directories so the whole world wouldn’t be aware of our appointments.
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Like just about every other Firefox user, I have a set of extensions installed to customize my browsing experience. Not all of these extensions are useful for everyone, so I’ll try to detail what each one is good for.

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