Monday 20 December 2010

Automatically Expand To Current Folder [Windows7 Tip]



Forgive me if you already know this but I just discovered it by accident and think its pretty neat.

Open a windows explorer window (windows & e) then click on Organise > Folder and Search Options:



Inside here is a nifty little option called "Automatically Expand To Current Folder":



Now you can easily get a view where you are in a folder structure and jump to the sub-folder of your choice!

Sunday 19 December 2010

Chrome Crawler v0.4 - Background Crawling & More!



I have been asked by several peeps now to add the ability to persist crawls when the pop-up window closes so I rolled out this update.

Now when you close the Chrome Crawler popup your crawl is saved so that when you open it up again you can resume.

Not only that but thanks to the awesomeness of the background page API in chrome I have now added the ability to crawl even when the popup isnt open.

To enable this head over to the option and untick the "Pause crawling when popup closes" option.

While I was at it I made a few other changes and improvements. The main one being that the "src" attribute on tags is also searched for when you crawl. What this means is that "interesting" images should show up in the files tab if you have images as interesting file types.

You should automatically get the update next time you restart chrome, or if you dont have the extension yet head over to the gallery to get it!

Thursday 16 December 2010

Particles, Yey!



Just thought I would share this little thing I was introduced to by a friend.

http://grantkot.com/MPM/Liquid.html

Its a liquid physics simulator written in Java.

Apparently its creator, Grant Kot has been playing around with particles for some time. Theres more of his work on youtube, here is one:



Pretty!

Edit: Didnt realise but this is the same guy that did Polluted Planet that I covered almost 3 years ago -> http://mikecann.co.uk/fun-videos/polluted-planet/ thats some awesome particle based dedication right there, I think I need to buy him a beer ;)

Monday 6 December 2010

Chrome Crawler - A web-crawler written in Javascript



EDIT: I now have a newer, better version of this called "Recursive"

Depending on your level of geekness you may or may not enjoy this one.

I proudly present Chrome Crawler, my latest Google Chrome extension:



The idea is simple really. You just give it a URL, it then goes off and finds all the links on that page then follows them to more pages then gets all the links and follows them and so on and so on.

Along the way it checks each page to see if there are any 'interesting' files linked there, if it finds an interesting link it will flag it for you so you can check it out.

Theres an options page that lets you customise the way it all works:



If you are still confused check out the video below:



So why did I make this? Well to be frank, I made it mostly "just 'cause I can"!

Also having learned from my last Chrome Extension project PostToTumblr I realised the Chrome API allowed you to do some things that you wouldn't normally be allowed to do on a website (nameley the Cross-Origin XHR) and I wanted to do something to take advantage of it.

It didnt take me long to knock out this project, one lazy Saturday for the majority of the code and today for a quick fix or two and to write this post and make the video. As such I expect there to be many bugs and problems so if you encounter one drop me an email (my address is found in the options page).

Oh finally, I wouldnt try using this on a google page as you will likely end up seeing this quite often:



Anyways you can grab it over on the Chrome extensions gallery here. If you enjoy it please leave me a review / comment, much love!

Wednesday 1 December 2010

PostToTumblr v0.6



Just a quick update to my chrome extension tonight. I recently had an email asking if there was a way I could make it so that you could send a Tweet at the same time as posting to Tumblr.

After a quick check on the Tumblr API to confirm that yes Tumblr supports the "post-to-twitter" option I spun out this little option.

So now you have three options for tweeting when posting: "no", "auto" and "prompt".

Chrome should auto-update the extension for you soon. If you dont have it hope over to the gallery page here.