Got it to work with KNode (took around 60 seconds to be honest). Now I have a nice  X-Face on usenet which looks a bit like .

Now I am all happy.

Very quick one. I love linux and think the “power” it gives an ordinary user on the desktop is great. Most, if not all the applications available are brilliant and actually easy to use.

So why, oh why is getting Knode to show an X-Face so bl**dy hard!!!!!

I knew it wouldn’t last long before the first rant hit home 🙂

There is a worthwhile starter tutorial available – number 1 on the Google list – called Rasmus’ 30 Second AJAX tutorial. It is good. It is straight forward and easy to grasp.

However – 30 seconds…. Never.

And, critically for my point of view, it has given me NO inspiration as to coming up with a worthwhile web project which can be enhanced by AJAX.

(side notes – that site looks awful in FF on a linuxbox….)

If you have been reading the old articles here (especially this one) you will be more than aware of the current situation regarding my opinion of AJAX and all the modern buzz words zinging their way around the net

Despite this, there is no escape from the fact that if you want to maintain any ability to earn an income online – even just pin money from Google Adsense – then you need to keep up with the latest trends. As “industries” go, the web industry is by far the worst for destroying existing skill sets for no apparent reason.

Anyway, enough ranting. This is a normal technology post not a sixteen thousand word rant.

The current situation, is that despite my misgivings and opinion on the transitory nature of the current “buzzword tech” I have been put in the position where I have little choice but to catch up with AJAX and rapidly get to grips with what it can offer. The problem this created is that I truly have NO idea what applications are best suited to AJAX or how to actually add value to a website by using it. I honestly cant find a decent project to use as a learning curve.

Well, this is the internet so off to Google I go. A quick search on AJAX tutorials produces a LOT of hits (as you can see, there were over five and half million when I did it). It seems that there are lots of people not only well ahead of me in the understanding stakes but they also have a lot of spare time to make tutorials….

The good thing about this is that not only does it give me some starting points to learn about AJAX but hopefully it will give me at least a running chance of working out something useful to do with it… Sadly, based on the AJAX implementations I have seen to date, I am not holding my breath about this.

One, very good, thing I feel I need to mention on the subject of AJAX is the wonderfull script.aculo.us site. (Screenshot on the side here). This site provides some basic tutorials (not brilliant to be honest) but the real strong point is the excellent framework they have available for download. Although it is much to early in the days of my learning curve to be completely sure, I still think it is well worth getting to this site and downloading everything they have to offer.

Hopefully, in the very near future I will be able to update you on my learning curves and eventually be able to point to a fully working AJAX site.

Following on from Admin’s post on hammering firefox, I have been installing a mountain of extensions for Firefox. Unlike the guy who the original post was about, it wasnt the “top 100” I installed. I have spent most of the day trying out extensions to find good, useful ones which seem to have a decent purpose.

Now, needless to say, there has been a MASSIVE performance hit. At this time I only have 41 extensions installed but it is already taking a noticable amount of time for FF to actually start up. I have been ruthless with removing the toolbar’s some extensions like to install, but it has cost me about 1/5th of the screen real estate – and to be honest, for some extensions why would you have them if you turned the tool bar off…..

Anyway, on the positive side, it is pretty amazing that FF lets you bolt on so many different packages to generate the functionality you want. This really is a “good thing” from the open source movement. As it stands I cant see this level of customization being available for IE for quite some time.

For the terminally curious, the extensions I have are:

• DOM Inspector
• Talkback
• PDF Download
• HTML Validator
• ShowIP
• Gmail Notifier
• OpenNewWindowFromHere
• ColorZilla
• MeasureIT
• All-in-one Gestures
• BBCode
• Athens Toolbar
• Web Developer
• RSS Editor
• InfoRSS
• SEOpen
• Answers
• Image Zoom
• EditCSS
• GDirections
• Greasmonkey
• del.icio.us
• Periodic Table II
• rel Links
• wmlbrowser
• ForecastFox
• Live IP Address
• Digg This!
• SessionSaver
• TinyUrl Creatro
• hbar
• Colorful Tabs
• CuteMenus – Crystal SVG
• Gish It!
• Kaboodle
• Performancing
• FireFTP
• Long Titles
• Deepest Sender

If you can think of any others worth getting, please let me know.

Sorry for the absence of pretty much every one last week but life is often too hectic to ever predict.

This post is just really a check out of a FireFox extension I have just installed – Deepest Sender. So far, I can say it is pretty good. For those of you enlightened enough to already use Firefox, visit http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/ and grab a copy for yourself.

It really is worth it.