Google Reader and Firefox's maximum popup limit

If you browse using Firefox and use the Google Reader keyboard v shortcut that I wrote in an earlier post, you may find that Firefox will eventually generate this message, Firefox prevented this site from opening a pop-up window, although you have added www.google.com to the Allowed Sites - Pop-ups dialog. This behaviour occurs because Firefox prevents any site from automatically opening too many popups.

According to Lifehacker's Increase Firefox's Maximum Pop-up Count, the number of pop-up windows a site is allowed to show is controlled by the dom.popup_maximum variable. By default, it is set to 20, so to avoid hitting the limit, I increased this value. Of course, now my browser is more vulnerable to a pop-up window attack or runaway script from all sites listed in the Allowed Sites.

Perhaps a better solution is to have a per-site limit?

Keyboard shortcuts for navigating Google Reader and Gmail

After using any application for a while, I start using some keyboard shortcuts to speed up common operations. Desktop applications usually have keyboard shortcuts while web applications don't; luckily for me, two of my most used Google applications, Reader and Gmail, have keyboard shortcuts. You can find the list of shortcuts easily so rather than going them, I'll just highlight useful keystroke sequences for navigation and suggest mnemonics to remember them.

?

Both applications support ? to show and hide their keyboard shortcut help page.

Reader shortcut sequences

gF and gt

(g)o to items in people you (F)ollow or a (t)ag. Note: an (undocumented) alternative to gt is gl, (g)o to a (l)abel, like Gmail.

nov and pov

browse (n)ext or (p)revious item in a list, (o)pen it and (v)iew the original. Note: if you're using Firefox, you may be prompted to allow the www.google.com domain to open a window or tab.

NOA and POA

browse (N)ext or (P)revious subscription, (O)pen it and mark (A)ll items read. Good for quickly scanning whole subscription (or tag) items. Just remember that operations on subscriptions use capital letters.

Gmail shortcut sequences

gi and gl

(g)o to (i)nbox or a (l)abel

j and k

browse next or previous conversation (or thread) in a label. These are Vi-style keystrokes (Ah, that brings back memories!).

n and p

browse (n)ext or (p)revious message in a conversation (or thread).

u

go (u)p to thread (or conversation) list from reading a message.

Note that Google uses the terms conversation or thread interchangeably in their online help. Unlike Reader, Gmail doesn't have shortcuts for browsing labels (or tags).

So, there's a very short list of keyboard shortcuts for that I've found useful for navigating Google Reader and Gmail; I hope it'd be useful for you too.

Filtering busy mailing lists in Gmail

I subscribe to a busy mailing list and find that I only keep some of the messages and delete the rest. Then I realised it would be less work to automatically delete all messages from this list first and only keep the ones that interested me.

Here's how I set up my mailing list filter in Gmail:

1. Specify the criteria (e.g. the mailing list name).
2. Mark Skip the inbox (Archive it).
3. Pick a label from the Apply the label field.
4. Mark Delete it.

Using this filter, messages that match the criteria are automatically labelled and moved into the Bin (or Trash). I read messages from the mailing list in the Bin and if I want to keep one, I just uncheck the Bin label in the message's tool bar.

Rename Folder in Google Reader

Oh, erm … you can't rename folders in Google Reader. The workaround is to move all your subscriptions from one folder to another folder, then delete the original one. Here's the steps:

1. In the Subscriptions panel, select Manage Subscriptions. The Settings page should be displayed.
2. In the Settings page, filter your subscriptions by the name of folder you want to remove using the Filter by name, folder, or URL text box.
3. Using the Change Folders… drop down list for each subscription, select the new folder and unselect the old folder. Note that for the first subscription, you have to create the new folder.
4. After reassigning all the required subscriptions to the new folder, select the Folders and Tags tab.
5. In the Folders and Tags, check the folder you want to delete, then press the Delete selected button.

See Also

• This posting is based on these instructions How To Rename And Delete Folders (Tags) In Google Reader.

Firefox Greasemonkey Kills Google Groups Spam

If you read Usenet newsgroups, no doubt you'd be familiar with spam messages spruiking credit, fake jewellery, external organ enlargements and free graduate degrees. On a PC, you can use killfiles in newsreading software to ignore spam messages. If you're reading newsgroups using the Google Groups web-based reader with Firefox, you can ignore annoying spam messages using a Greasemonkey script called Google Groups Killfile (GGK).

You can add entries to your killfile list using GGK's context menu but the list becomes hard to view and manage once you have a lot of entries. It is easier to edit GGK's kill list variable:

• Enter "about:config" in Firefox's location bar.
• Enter "kill" in the Filter field.
• Click on greasemonkey.scriptvals.www.penney.org/Google Groups Killfile.GoogleKillFile and edit the configuration string.

2008-04-14: If you use regular expressions (RE), you can reduce the number of entries in the killfile list by using wildcards and the "alternate" operator (vertical bar symbol ("|")). You can further reduce the number of patterns to define by specifying case-insensitive comparison in GGK. Just search for the REs' "compile()" function in the GGK script and add a second "i" argument.

Workaround Gmail Continuously Loading Problem

A note on how to work around the problem when Google's Gmail continuously loads in Firefox but never completes, and reloading the page or restarting Firefox does not fix the problem. There's three URLs for your Gmail account, so use the second or third alternative listed below:

• HTTP: http://mail.google.com/mail/
• HTTPS: https://mail.google.com/mail/
• Plain HTML interface: https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=a

Failing that, try:

• Clearing your Firefox cache in Tools / Options / Advanced / Network / Cache.
• Older Gmail interface: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1.

Some days later, either Firefox or Gmail seems to recover. It's only happened to me twice and I haven't had time to investigate too deeply.

2008-05-01: Added couple more work-arounds for older version of Gmail and clearing Firefox cache.

Google Mail Fetcher

Google mail can now retrieve mail from up to five different accounts and merge them into one mail box. Very handy feature, since I dislike using the Webmail interface provided by my ISP.

Google Map Melbourne Placemarks

After playing with Google Earth, I found that I could export my placemarks as KML files which can then be viewed using Google Maps. Here's a list of places we've visited. I'll see if I can annotate them with pictures later.

Google Earth For Kids

Installed Google Earth for the kids and showed them how to make placemarks and paths. They're pretty excited marking their friends' houses and are having a walk to make sure they got the placemarks and paths right. Prior to this, the kids have been rather reluctant to do any physical activity outside or explore their neighbourhood. 'Ray! Another activity for the kids!

New Blogger Interface

I migrated my blog to the new Blogger interface. Since I had a Google account, now I have one less username-password combination to remember. One nice new feature: labels. Now I don't have to put keywords in the title of each blog entry just for categorising blog entries. It's a Google-ish feature and works like labels in Google Mail.

Software: Google Desktop 2

I don't how long Google Desktop 2 has been available, but I found it today and installed it. From my quick test, it worked as well as the previous version and now supports the "filetype:" keyword. That keyword is useful for restricting the search results to files with specific extensions. For example, adding "filetype:pdf" would restrict the results to just .pdf files.