The Little Things
Posted on December 12, 2005 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
For everyone who remembers or cares, yes, I did finally get Firefox 1.5 to work swimmingly on both my computers; it involved uninstalling Adblock and installing the most updated version. 1.5 doesn’t want to work with my WYSIWYG interface for Moveable Type, but I can live without that for a while. What I did miss were two extensions that hadn’t been formally updated on the Firefox Extensions site: Copy Plain Text and Super DragAndGo. The former lets you copy text from Web sites without the annoying html coding it wants to drag along (this is useful for me when I’m doing community stuff for By The Way), and the latter lets you highlight a URL (say, in one’s log file), and then click it and drag it a little to the side; when you stop clicking, it pops up the url in a new tab. In both cases it was a case of not missing what you had until it was gone.
So, small happiness today: I found versions of both this morning that work with Firefox 1.5. Now I feel like all is right with my world, speaking purely in the context of my Web browser. The little things really do mean a lot.
The instructions for fixing Super DragAndGo for Firefox 1.5 are in the comments at their website here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=137
I’d be happy to send you the updated .xpi file if you’d like. I think the Super DragAndGo extension is the single most productivity enhancing extension there is.
Thanks — as the entry said, I’ve got it now. But yeah, it’s amazing how useful it is.
Where did you find copy plain text? I’ve been looking for it since 1.0.7!
I found it, John! Never mind. ;-)
Super DragAndGo makes my computer feel like the future. I’ve got it at home and work and have for months – I’m awfully glad it seems to be popular.
“The former lets you copy text from Web sites without the annoying html coding it wants to drag along”
You mean like what I’m doing using WordPerfect 6.1, the “paste special” command.
Yeah, I’m old school, although I’m using FF 1.5 now, so I gonna head over and get SD&G and see what else they got.
While the tone of the instructions is annoying, there’s a good tutorial on creating a Word macro for “paste as unformatted” and then mapping it to alt + shift + v here:
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=128
DSC_0747 (the front line of trees, again) absolutely has the makings for the Christmas card of all Christmas cards. Man, you oughta be selling some of these photos of yours to greeting card folks and what have you. You know, just in case that little wordplay hobby of yours doesn’t pan out.
Since I do a lot of editing, the simplest trick I’ve found is just copying the text and pasting it in Notepad (for small files) or Wordpad (for bigger files) and it comes up without the Word or HTML formatting crap. This is where I miss Xywrite where you can actually have control over formatting and tags and it does not matter how long or how big the text file is.
Yes, I do that too, when I’m on my PC. On the Mac, it presents an issue. Fortunately, “copy plain text” works on both, which is good for me, because I’m lazy.
Gah – That post of mine was supposed to go in the pretty ice storm pictures post, not here. Sorry.
Did you say you found a version of Super DragAndGo that works with FireFox 1.5? May I ask where I can get this?
Thanks