I should say I was a long time holdout in reading my email on a shell (unix) account. After all, all of the key features being touted on the new web based or GUI based mail readers were available twenty years ago in programs like MH (now nmh) and filters such as Procmail, both programmable and endlessly customizable. I could do back flips and front aerials with my mail while the current crop were oozing their way out of the primordial sludge.

But, I have grudgingly entered the present day world, as Gmail (and Thunderbird, but that’s another topic) have made pretty good gains and I’m not yet prepared to set up my own personal mail server on my own linux box just in order to keep using a text based set of programs which admittedly don’t handle some things such as pictures all that cleanly (although that also meant that I basically never got email viruses).

Gmail Account

For the first three years, Gmail was invite only. Now it’s open to all. Of course, all the good names have been taken

Security

First of all, for any kind of web browsing of a relatively personal nature, I recommend making sure the session stays within https connections. In grossly simple terms, the “s” on https means the connection is secured from eavesdropping. One simple way to do this is to log in on Gmail from this address: https://mail.google.com which should thereafter retain the secure connection. I like to be absolutely sure of this, though, so on Firefox, I use a simple Greasemonkey script called GmailSecure to enforce the https connection. (It’s also extensible to force secure connections on an array of google related items.) Sorry Opera, IE, or Safari users, I couldn’t find comparable extensions for this (though an Opera widget called Gmail Checker has a feature request for this.

Second of all, as tempting as it might be to aggregate all new items into a feed reader for convenience, do NOT use a public web accessible reader such as Bloglines or GoogleReader to do so! These subscriptions become generally searchable on either service and while the full message can not be displayed, there’s chances that the excerpt will contain enough private information that can be viewed. I came across this security hole last year, and on re-checking Bloglines, I can still find gmail feeds hosted there. I’m at a loss as to why a feed is even offered in Gmail (or at least why not make it an option in the settings and default it off for security?) but since neither Gmail nor Bloglines have taken concrete steps in addressing this issue, I’ll put this warning down. Just don’t do RSS feeds of private email, and if you do, don’t use a public RSS reader to access them — use a personal one on a particular computer for the purpose. Oh, you wanted to be able to access the feed anywhere on the net? Then use Gmail’s web interface already, that’s what it’s for.

Notifications

There’s several ways to have Gmail notifications setup. Gmail itself provides small applets for Windows/Mac. The open source community has created an equivalent for Linux called CheckGmail (which is now available with some distributions, such as Ubuntu, so check the package managers first).

Opera and Firefox have various different widgets and extensions that provide notification. I use the Firefox Gmail Manager which has its own notification system besides much more: see below. Opera’s Gmail Checker is a small and simple widget solely for this purpose. I did not find any for Safari or IE on cursory check.

Favorite Firefox <-> Gmail Extensions

As a Firefox user, I like to search around at Firefox Add-ons for useful extensions. The ones I use are:

• Gmail Manager This is an essential script to handle multiple Gmail accounts. A small notification in the bottom tray of Firefox can be configured to display the current number of unread messages in the mailbox as well as a way to simply log into each account, with minimal switching around.

• Gmail Skins Fun to play with; note that some of the choices result in error messages, just uninstall, reinstall and choose a different theme.

• And of course I use the Firefox extension Greasemonkey. Saved Searches gives me dynamic folders, pretty useful. Hide Gmail Ads allows me to regain valuable real estate on my laptop where every centimeter counts.

Tips and Tricks

• Use a draft message (start a message and then save it rather than send it anywhere) to do quick file transfers between computers. I save the item into a draft on one computer, and pull it out from my login on another computer. It’s more convenient than emailing it to myself, and few home computers have a permanent IP address for ftp transfer and the like.

• I also use the drafts for “Notes to self” on particular emails. Sometimes I want to remind myself of things related to an email, and drafts attached to that email serve as a form of post-it notes.

• Sort everything! Any mailing lists should be slapped with a label and archived. This way I browse mailing lists at my leisure and I’m not distracted by constant incoming email. The only thing that should be popping up in my mail account are important things that I need to attend to relatively quickly. Gmail does provide pretty good filtering and labeling and other options for incoming email.

• Use the + feature in email addresses. The definition of mailing protocol means that addresses of the form somewhere+identifier@somedomain should be delivered t somewhere@somedomain . Not all mail providers adhere to this, but gmail does, and this can be a trick to sort incoming email from different sources. For example, when I’m forced to use my email address for something that I suspect will spam me later, I can use something like myemail+nyt@gmail.com to see. Since Gmail has reasonable filters, this is perhaps not as useful as it might have been at the start.

• Google itself lists several pretty cool Gmail related Greasemonkey scripts here; they’re all well worth looking at.

• There’s plenty of creative ways to divert items to Gmail: feeds can be sent via email through Feedster or Feedburner; that way I could if I chose have a daily weather forecast or my current to-do list emailed to me.

What would I like to see?

Gmail allows multiple email addresses to be forwarded to it, and to “reply” as those emails. However, those emails are still marked in the headers as originating from that particular gmail account. I would like to see it anonymized down to at least only knowing it’s routed through Gmail. Since the extra email addresses in question are verified before being added to Gmail’s list of alternate addresses, I don’t see why that can’t be offered.

Yes, a short list. Well, if it were longer, I wouldn’t be using Gmail in the first place Most of the time if I want a feature, I can find an extension of some type for it.

Miscellaneous Issues

One of the most annoying consequences of Google having assimilated Blogger is the effect it had on Blogger accounts versus Gmail accounts. I have a different “identity” on Blogger that’s well established, but not connected to my Gmail. Now, both accounts were retained in the merger, but they do not play well together. If I am logged into my Gmail when I encounter a Blogger post I wish to respond to, and I log in my old Blogger account, it logs me out of Gmail. I have not found a good way around this, although I have discovered that logging back to the original Gmail account often leaves the Blogger login available on other Blogger entries that I might respond to.

Lifehacker put out a note about one of Google’s latest, Notebook, and one of the comments pointed out that Clipmark already offered the same functionality. I thought I’d take a look at both of them. I love Google’s stuff by and large, but there are some alternatives I prefer, plus it seems prudent not to centralize all one’s online information. So I think Bloglines is easier to work with and sort through rss subscriptions than Google Reader. I think del.icio.us blows Google Bookmarks out of the water. So when I hear about a couple of alternatives to a Google tool, I usually check them out.

Starting with Google Notebook, I installed the Firefox plugins with no trouble. After I did so, I had a small Notebook icon in the lower right Firefox frame that allowed me to open or close the notebook; when it’s opened it’s in a small summary view which can either close (back down to the icon), minimize (to a small hovering line on the body of Firefox, or open to a new/full window with all the details. It’s extremely easy to add clippings by highlighting the desired text and right clicking to choose “Note this.” I can create multiple notebooks and switch which one I’m adding to (or create new ones on the fly) through the Actions option on the summary view.

I like the interface — I right click extensively for “additional” options anyway, so putting the “Note this” in the right click menu works perfectly for me. So to clip something, it’s just like copying: I highlight the desired text, right click, and choose the new “Note this.” The three “levels” available are a little confusing at first, but I quickly sorted out how each was useful. Clipping is possible in any of these modes. It’s intuitively and quickly usable, which I appreciate.

I would like some modifications, though (of course!). I’d like to be able to copy and paste out of the full Notebook view into my articles, preserving the links and such. As it is, I have to use the Firefox’s Edit/Copy after highlighting in the full view, no right click copy is given here. And when I do Firefox’s Edit/Paste, it carries over only the text of the link and not the link as well. I’d also like to be able to right click on the links shown in the summary/full views of the notebook and be able to copy link location like I can normally in Firefox. As it is, at present right clicking on links in the summary and full views causes the link to come up (and in the same page, not a new window or tag), which I find confusing and clumsy. Particularly since opening up the full view does cause a new window/tab to open (my tabs are set to capture new windows into tabs; your mileage may vary).

As you can imagine, there have already been a number of reviews of Google Notebook published: here, here, and here .

But I think some of these folks are missing the point. I would never consider this a substitute for del.icio.us. That seems like an odd equation to me. del.icio.us is about organizing links, Google Notebook is about saving and referencing snippets out of assorted web pages. In particular, I’ve been using this to save up collections of links and comments for articles that I write, including this one! Afterwards, I discard those notebooks now that I’m done with them. It’s a great way for organizing the bits of info I come across when researching something.

That said, I do agree that this makes Google Bookmark look like even more of an orphan. That tool needs to be overhauled or quietly dropped.

I went on to check out Clipmarks, and I want to like it. It’s also a plugin and you have to sign up for a free account (the Google Notebook also requires a google account, which anyone with a gmail account (for example) already has). This utility has been around a while longer. I googled up reviews here, here, and here.

Once you install the extension you have to remember to customize your toolbar in Firefox, and drag the Clipmark icon to one of your toolbars. Their simple “setup” view on their webpage does not mention this last part, so that could be a little tricky for folks without the investigative chops to figure it out.

Once it was properly installed, I had four new icons (I rearranged things to keep my real estate at the top minimal). To clip something, I clicked on the green clip button, hovered over the text/pictures I wanted until an orange outline appeared, clicked again inside the orange outline of what I wanted. I had some trouble with this — the orange outline does not always show up, and when it did, sometimes I clicked on the inside of it with no result, and so forth. Perhaps it was just net latency time — now that I think on it, it may be reading in the entire web page in order to find the html/css blocks contained in it. If I was patient and waited until my hovering created an orange outline around texts and blocks in the web page, then I was able to click inside the orange outlines I wanted to clip.

At this point the chosen block and the save and print icons turn orange. The save dialogue box then let me tag, title, and categorize the clipping. It seemed to need me to log back into Clipmarks frequently, I’m not sure why or what was going on; I had another window logged into Clipmarks open at the time. My clippings defaulted to public until I changed it (the save clippings dialogue box contains a link to change the default, which is a nice touch).

To review the Clipmarks snippets, I had to go back to my logged in Clipmarks window and go through the “mine” button (since I made all my clippings private). So it’s more cumbersome to retrieve the saved clippings than in Notebook, but since it’s on a proper web page, I’m able to copy text and links as I’d like.

I also poked around the public clippings. If I want, I can flesh out my login with a profile and list my blogs, pictures, IM handles, emails, use an avatar or photo, list a little about myself and so on. There’s a tag cloud available of public clippings in order to choose different sets of clippings to look at.

I do like the overall look and feel of the Clipmarks site. The orange highlighting does need to speed up because its unresponsiveness is confusing: I started clicking all over to try to get something to happen, and wasn’t sure what was going on for a while. That issue about repeatedly signing in needs resolving as well. I’d also like some way of conveniently looking at thumbnails or summaries of my clippings without necessarily going back to the Clipmarks site.

I think there’s pros and cons to each. I like the general design and scope of Clipmarks and if I were more oriented to the social aspects of sharing clippings, I’d go that way. As it is, I’m a private misanthrope and I like the intuitive copy/paste interface of Google’s, so I’m going to go with that. I’d encourage you to look them both over and see what you like. If you object to plugins (as one reviewer did), you’re sort of out of luck…

First of all I’m going to note that Selenium comes with an utter lack of documentation and what documentation does exist is utterly disorganized. This has proven to be the biggest stumbling block to actually getting started with Selenium.

It seems promising enough: It’s a java based testing tool that you install in your *nix setup alongside apache (definitely root access material here) and then there’s a firefox extension (what originally caught my attention in the first place) to help construct test cases through browser usage.

And certainly the few bits of documentation were all aglow! “Just unpack here, and VROOOM!!!” I mean, come on:

Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. No other test tool covers such a wide array of platforms.

So, cross browser and multiplatform. I like this. Plus,

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

I mean, I’m just rubbing my hands, here.

But what’s this? Trouble in paradise? If you look through all the selenium documentation, there is nothing that discusses how to install it. Finally, after quite a bit of hunting around, you can find this (note that it is NOT on any of the “official” pages but a separate blog ) –

For people new to Selenium, here’s a 30-second (32.78 seconds to be precise) tutorial on how to install Selenium on a Linux box running Apache. I’ll assume the DocumentRoot of the Apache installation is /var/www/html.

1. Download Selenium from openqa.org. The latest release of Selenium as of this writing is 0.6.
2. Unzip selenium-0.6.zip and cd into the selenium-0.6 directory.
3. Move or copy the selenium sub-directory somewhere under the DocumentRoot of your Apache server.

That’s it — you have a working Selenium installation!

Whoa nelly. Not quite. First, you do have to do some basic mods to httpd.conf for Apache. I added these items:

<Directory "/Web/selenium/">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl .js
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from <i>myhost.com</i>
&lt;/Directory&gt;
Alias /selenium/ &quot;/Web/selenium/&quot;
 


Then after unpacking the zip archive into the selenium directory, I go over to the new website and get…nothing. The test cases don’t respond to anything. This is on a sun solaris; I’m reasonably sure that Java and JavaScript are running okay. And in fact, I can run their TestRunner demo which is hiding somewhere over the selenium site; I forgot to mark it and haven’t quite got the energy to hunt it down here at home. But I ruled out something not being set up on our end, otherwise it would not have run at either location (mine and theirs).

And then I discovered this little gem that recommended modifying selenium-api.js in the directory. Oh. Dear.

Well, I took a deep breath and made the modifications, commenting all over the place so I’d be able to figure out what I’d done later. Bupkus.

So there it remains at the moment until I get a chance to get back to it. Hasn’t been too much extra time at work lately, though.