“groovy mother...”

BookQueue

One of my favourite things about MovableType is its extendibility. Perlgeeks can churn out plugins which add all kinds of new and delicious groovyness to the platform.

My new favourite is the BookQueue Plugin, which I installed last night. My reading list is now proudly displayed on the right, but what’s brilliant about it is that I only had to enter the books’ ISBNs—The plugin ransacked Amazon’s database, and got all the relevant juicy details such as title and author.

And since it’s all in lovely open Perl code, I was able to hack it to do lookups against amazon.co.uk when nothing was found on the US site. Result!

I also hereby pledge that you will never see one of these book covers appear on the list.

Block the Flash

Yet another reason to love the lizard: There’s a smashing wee Mozilla plugin called Flash Click To View. It replaces Flash animations with a button, which you can click to see the animation, thereby reducing the chances of some webpage blasting loud music when you’re meant to be “researching” (and reducing the number of “Shoot the Monkey” animated banner ads). Add this one to the existing list of reasons why you should switch to Firebird.

Get your 0-Day faster

Brilliant—I just discovered that ShareReactor.com (IMO, the bestest source for, erm, “off-site backup downloads”) has an RSS feed. Fire up your donkeys!