I’ve become so sick of Flash-based websites that I’ve installed a Firefox extension that blocks all Flash by default, giving me the chance to voluntarily decide to play it or not. I’d used this extension, Flashblock a few years ago, but removed it after only a few days. I guess back then my temper for shitty Flash menus, complete with streaming and screaming soundtracks was a bit softer. No more. I can’t deal with Flash-based sites. I won’t deal with them. They’re retarded.

For example, being a paid member of Crunch Gyms, occasionally, I need to look up some information concerning the particular gym I frequent in Brooklyn. In sane circumstances, I’d have no problem, but the idiots that designed Crunch’s site, aside from being semi-defective in non-mainstream browsers, use Flash to find and display specific gym information, turning what should be 5 seconds of searching into an annoying ordeal of dealing with an inefficient, bullshit site, filled with whiz-bang eye candy that I could give two shits about. It’s a waste of my time. I get better results just calling the gym on my phone.

I can admit that only four years ago, this very website was 90% flash-based. I’ve since learned the errors of my ways, along with most everyone else with half a brain. Why people still pay for second-rate Flash sites that actively annoy and retard the dissemination of whatever information they built the site for in the first place is beyond my ability to understand.

There’s a time and place for Flash when used properly. Youtube is a great example of it being integrated into a site in a sane and constructive way. Building a website using Flash menus is wrong. Delivering text content via Flash is wrong. Automatically streaming sound or video with no warning, especially for a non-music or video oriented site is brain-damaged. I hate it and now, I’m blocking it.

This evening, I made a switch to a new plug-in to handle my Technorati Tags. Since the move to WordPress 2.0, I’d been having problems with my old tag manager, Bunny’s Technorati Tags and Ultimate Tag Warrior came highly recommended, so I decided to give it a try and see. Immediately I noticed that it was in a much bigger league and even though Bunny’s has just recently been fixed with 2.0, I made the call and switched.

So I’m liking this new plug-in and everything looks sunny and joyful, except for the fact that all my tags that were assigned in the past via Bunny’s are no longer around. That sincerely blows, but whatever. There’s a way to rescue them, but as of this moment a bit to A.D.D. to manage it slogging through help files and forums. When I do get it down, I’ll note how I did it here. For now, I just wanted to post something, just to see UTW in action. Sweet.

Update:

Now I am seriously impressed. Within ten minutes of posting this entry, the creator of UTW popped on by and clued me in on how to rescue all my old tags. That is way cool. Thank you Christine D. UTW is a great plug-in and it’s developer made my day!

A reader who for one reason or another is not able to use RSS feeds wrote to me asking if there was another way to be notified when a new post is made to this site. Ever the intrepid do-gooder, I enabled readers to sign up for email notifications using this fine plugin. You’ll notice that in the lower part of the right-hand sidebar, under Syndicate, along with the RSS feed links, you now have a form to input your email address. If you are able to use RSS, I recommend you stick with it, but if not, you now have another option. Rest assured, daveb will not share your email for any reason and you may unsubscribe at any time. If you do sign up, yet are not receiving the notifications, let me know.

Since I’m already on a roll with the whole making lists of favorite things, I thought I’d post my most favorite of the plugins I use with WordPress. I made the switch to WordPress from Movable Type about a month ago and since then I’ve been using quite a few of the hundreds of plugins out there. While I’m sure there are a whole bunch of great ones I’m missing and there might be better versions of plugins that I’m using, in my limited experience, so far, I’m loving these plugins. Try them out or let me know if you’ve found better.

1. Spam Karma 2: I hate spam. I hate the spammers that send spam. I have been blasted by comment spam for years and have employed various methods and tools to stop them. Spam Karma seems to be the mother of all comment moderators. It works on a scoring system, running each comment through a battery of tests dependent on several factors such as inclusion in RBLs, number of links, IP address and much more. Honestly, since installing WordPress, the spammers that were giving me headaches have gone, but I’m not stupid enough to think they’re not going to come back after their spider finds the new comment system. So the big tests lie in the future, but so far, it’s worked very well and people I know that are using it vouch for it. I’m impressed.
2. Bad Behavior: Prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.
3. Google URL Redirector: This plugin strips URLs from your comments and uses the Google “nofollow” redirector to prevent comment spammers from taking advantage of your pagerank. A basic, necessary plugin.
4. Referrer Bouncer: The other half of the blog/spam nightmare is referral spamming. I get slammed by these assholes around the clock. My referral stats are not public, but to check them routinely shows that my top referrers are gambling and loan portals. Fucking scumfucks. It’s tricky stopping this too. Referrer Bouncer is a plugin that helps you edit your .htaccess file to block the bad guys and bounce referrer spammers back to their own sites. . Like I said, it’s a tricky business and nothing works perfectly, but it’s better than nothing.
5. WP-ContactForm: Allows you to ad a customizable contact form to any page or post. It works perfectly and I use it on this site.
6. Backup Restore: Makes backing up your theme and SQL database a simple, one-click procedure.
7. XFish Meta: Allows you to enter per-post meta keywords and descriptions.
8. WP Email Notification: Some people are just resistant to RSS. For those who prefer the old fashioned way to be notified of updates, this plugin manages a mailing list that will email users the site updates automatically.
9. RunPHP: Allows you to put PHP code into a post and have it eval()’d.
10. Google Sitemaps: Google has a new service called Sitemaps. Basically, by creating an XML file that functions as an RSS update notification to let Google know when your site has been changed and helps the bot crawling your site to do a better job. This plugin took care of all the work for me.
11. Simple Search and Replace: This lets you search for and replace text sitewide, throughout all of your posts. This came in REALLY handy when I switched to WordPress and was tackling the project of making all the posts on this site valid XHTML.
12. WP-CC: Not like you couldn’t just manually put the Creative Commons license info into the footer yourself, but this plugin does the job for you. Hey, why not? More importantly, it also adds CC info to the headers and to your RSS feeds.

There’s a few other plugins I’m currently using, but have not decided whether they are truly necessary. All the above plugins I feel I have an actual use for. If anyone knows of better versions or a good plugin that I’m missing, let me know and I’ll check it out.

The thing that I like the most about Firefox is the customization you can have through extensions and themes. There’s a lot of really great stuff out there that can really change the way you can interact with web pages. I try not to run too many plugins, although I have no real reason for feeling like I need to be conservative about it. Since listing your favorite plugins seems to be the thing to do and honestly, reading other people’s posts about their preferred plugins is the main way I find out about new ones I can’t live without, I figured I’d make a list of my own.

1. Spellbound: A simple and easy to use spell check plugin. I’ve played with other spell check plugins for WordPress and also back when I was using Movable Type and while all three work well, Spellbound took 3 minutes to install, runs locally and is usable with any text input form on any website. It rocks my world and is the sole reason this post is not full of misspellings.
2. Sage: A lightweight RSS aggregator. I’ve used RSS aggregators infrequently for a few years now and it’s only until recently, using Sage, that I’ve actually begun to rely on them. Sage operates out of the sidebar and uses a customizable style sheet to display the feeds. It works well.
3. Adblock: Perhaps the most awesome, shockingly powerful plugin to end all plugins. Adblock stops advertisements, both image and Flash. It works better than any of the closed source proprietary programs I’ve used in the past and had to pay for. Plus, since you can actively manage and train it, you can enjoy a certain giddy pleasure at discovering a new URL string or keyword to add to the blacklist. Adblock is the one plugin above all others that I consider essential to civilized browsing
4. Bookmarks Synchronizer: I use Firefox both at home as well as at work and I find it handy to be able to have access to my bookmarks wherever I go. This plugin will export your bookmarks to an encrypted xml file and upload to a web directory of your designation as well as download this file and synchronize it with your bookmarks, enabling to be able to maintain one organized list of links instead of having them spread out amongst more than one machine. While it’s true that other systems exist for manging links such as del.icio.us, which I use I use as well, but I still find this plugin very useful and considering the fact that del.icio.us is often down, it doesn’t hurt to be making your own backups.
5. SwitchProxy: If you occasionally need to use a proxy because you’re a student, connect to several different networks or are a bit on the paranoid side like I am, SwitchProxy manages any amount of proxy profiles for you and makes switching between them as simple a pushing a button on the bottom of the browser window.
6. Gmail Notifier: Simply a small icon, residing in the bottom right of your browser window that reports when you have received mail to the specified Gmail account. Handy.
7. PasswordMaker: A small, lightweight, free, open-source extension for Firefox and Mozilla which creates unique, secure passwords that are very easy to retrieve. Nothing is stored anywhere, anytime, so there’s nothing to be hacked, lost, or stolen. You designate a “master password”, one, single password you like and the URL of the website requiring a password. Through the magic of one-way hash algorithms, passwordmaker calculates a message digest, also known as a digital fingerprint, which can be used as your password for the website. The resulting fingerprint (password) does “not reveal anything about the input that was used to generate it.” In other words, if someone has one or more of your passwordmaker-generated passwords, it is computationally infeasible for him to derive your master password or to calculate your other passwords. It makes you feel a lot better about the fact that you are too brain damaged to remember more than one dumb-ass password.
8. X Paranoia: Puts a little icon that gives you one-click browser cookie/cache/history clearing convenience.
9. Go Up: Enables a keyboard shortcut as well as a button to enable you to navigate up a directory of any website, for those moments you might be feeling sneaky.
10. Image Zoom: Not like the really annoying default resize thing with Explorer, this plugin lets you manually resize and zoom images as you need. I use it daily for a for a variety of scenarios.
11. Web Developer Toolbar: This is one seriously handy toolbar. Edit CSS. Validate. Outline elements and display all kinds of information about the page you are working on.

While I use several other plugins on a regular basis, this list is what I would term as the most essential and the first things I add after a fresh Firefox install. Alone or as a team, they improve my web browsing experience immensely. Fuck Internet Explorer.