Expecting Rain

Every time I set up a new Firefox installation for someone, or myself, I spend the next 15-20 minutes trying to figure out how to change the tab focus settings to allow tab focusing for elements besides form input fields. For some reason, I never can get the correct Google search terms entered to find this. Anyway, if anyone wonders, here is what you do.

1. type in the address about:config in the URL bar of Firefox. This isn't a valid url, but it resolves to the configuration settings for you browser.


2. if your installation doesn't have a setting called accessibility.tabfocus, create one by right clicking and selecting "New" -> "Integer".


3. set the value to the selection that fits your needs.

Possible settings
1 : Text field form controls only
2 : All form controls except text fields
3 : All form controls
4 : Hyperlinks and hyperlinked images
7 : All form controls and hyperlinks

Well, I'm on vacation, and I'm still tied to the computer. I've been working on a small project for a few members of my family. For those interested, the project is a del.icio.us Firefox extension. The purpose of this extension is to provide quick access to your del.icio.us bookmarks seemingly through Firefox natively.

The extension is actually quite easy to develop. del.icio.us gives a very comprehensively documented api to speed up the process. I am using two different methods to access bookmarks from their site.

• del.icio.us api


• del.icio.us json feeds

I'm using a combination of these to prevent my extension of being throttled. Their direct api has an access limit of one request per second or they will begin sending you 503 errors meaning you have been throttled. So, I use their api to gather bundles, and their feeds to request bookmarks for certain tags. The benefits of using their feeds is that I've not had any throttling issues and it is available as raw JSON, the drawbacks are that there is a delay from the time you add a bookmark until it shows up in your feed and it limits you to 100 results.

There are still a lot of features that I need to implement, but overall it is working out nicely and I find quite a bit of use for it.