It’s like when i picked up my car from the shop a few weeks ago and they had washed it and cleaned and vacuumed the interior. It just felt good to sit in there. It felt new. It seemed faster.

Declutter your desk, tidy up your bedroom, vacuum your car, maybe organize your MP3s or clear out your email inbox. It’s worth it.

[Shout out to SessionSaver. Firefox just crashed, and the SessionSaver extension brought everything back up just how it was---tabs, text, and all.]

More discipline. That’s what it all boils down to. Oh yeah, i need to clean up the Web Clips feeds in Gmail. Better yet, maybe i’ll just turn them off. It’s interesting stuff, but truely just a time-wasting distraction. Now i just have to figure out a way to stop people from sending me those “funny” emails from work.

[Hmm. Somehow, most of this post was eaten when published, so i had to rewrite it from memory. Some errant quote encoding is likely to blame.]

“If you need it now you’ll need it in two weeks. If you don’t need it in two weeks (or don’t remember to go back and buy it) you’ve just saved yourself some money.”

Credit Review: 7 simple steps to grow your fortune [via]

1. Indent descendant and related rules. I couldn’t imagine maintaining an entire theme without structurally-indented stylesheets. They mate perfectly with the XUL hierarchy. I’ll often insert empty selectors to fill in the structure of the stylesheet so it’s easier to follow and debug later.
2. Use shorthand properties. Using shorthand properties may cut down on file size, but i sometimes find it easier to test and debug with full rules written out so i can change, remove, or comment out individual properties line by line. I’ll also sometimes use a shorthand group and then follow it with a specific longhand property which overrides the previous rule. File size is less of an issue with XUL themes since the stylesheets are used locally and don’t have to be downloaded, so i’m less concerned about being “efficient” in this way.
3. Divide your stylesheet into sections. Firefox’s defualt theme stylesheets are often terribly convoluted from years of patching. Grouping things together logically keeps you organized and helps prevent redundant or conflicting style rules. Using commented “headers” (or flags) to break up a sheet into logical sections goes hand-in-hand with the first tip. You can have the cleverest code in the land, but what good is it if you can’t read it when it’s time to update? When scanning thousand-line sheets you need these visual speed bumps to quickly get your bearings. I even have multiple levels of headers for sections, subsections, etc. Doesn’t matter how you format it as long as you’re consistent. Just be careful with all these comments—one little slash can drive you crazy.
4. Let the cascade flow. This tip about the cascade is doubly important with XUL themes. Writing efficient top-down CSS makes it easier to effect changes throughout the stylesheet and the entire theme. Keep the lowest common denominators in the top-level base elements, then style variants using more and more specific selectors and properties down the line. On the large scale, having well-defined global element styles goes a long way towards building a strong theme. You’ll spend less time defining styles for browser and other features if they’re properly inheriting styles from the global set. For example, toolbarbuttons are used everywhere and you can inject styles that they’ll all inherit in global/toolbarbutton.css, instead of styling each instance scattered throughout the UI. That makes for efficient CSS and consistent theme design.
5. Organization strategies. The fifth tip wasn’t exactly a tip—more of a summary with some suggestions for how to use the preceding tips.

While i’m at it, i’ll go ahead and add a few theme-specific tips of my own.

• Comment, comment, comment. The inner-workings of Mozilla are mysterious. Your style rules could be even more mysterious. Write comments. Do it now. You won’t know remember later.
• Optimize your stylesheets. The quality of your CSS rules can have a real affect on how fast your theme is rendered. Optimize your stylesheets using the guidelines in the Writing Efficient CSS document at the Mozilla Developer Center.
• @import. Break out large sections to external stylesheets with @import. I moved all my bookmark styles from browser/browser.css to browser/bookmarks.css which i @import back into browser.css. Functionally exactly the same, but easier to manage as separate files.
• The underscore hack. This is probably my favorite. The quickest way to disable a property is to tag an underscore (_) to the front of it. Gecko sees the underscored properties and doesn’t recognize them so they are ignored. Saves so much time when testing code or trying to isolate bugs—you can leave the properties in place and simply “turn them off” without deleting or changing them. And it’s way quicker than trying to wrap stuff in comments. Plus, they visually stand out in the stylesheets, so you can easily identify which properties are disabled. Use this with longhand properties for very flexible style testing. Beware—last time i checked, this trick doesn’t work in Internet Explorer because it incorrectly parses the underscored properties as normal.
• Identify with big bold color. Use big, off-colored borders or backgrounds to help identify or find the selectors for elements you want to target.

An example snippet showing some of the ideas mentioned above:

/* =====| about.css |===== ===== */
 /* styles for extension/theme About dialogs */

#genericAbout {
  width: 30em;
  }

#clientBox {
  }

	#extensionName {
	  font-size: 1.25em;
	  font-weight: bold;
	  }

	#extensionVersion {
	  margin-left: 4ex;
	  }
		#extensionHomepage {
		 /* Visit Home Page links */
		  margin-right: 0;
		  padding-left: 1px; /* so outline doesn't overlap text */
		  _background-color: magenta;
		  cursor: pointer;
		  }

technorati tags: CSS, Mozilla, Firefox theme, theme, tips, XUL

Tip: Many supermarkets and drugstores (like Safeway) sell gift cards to stores like Starbucks, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Old Navy, Circuit City, you name it. Buy a gift card at a grocery store with this card, and boom! 5% cash back.

MyMoneyBlog: What’s in MY wallet? My daily-use credit cards (Part 1 of 3)

Good stuff. Used to use my Dividend card for everything, but the balance got away from me, so now i stick to fuel and larger easy-to-track purchases. I’m mad i didn’t see this a few days sooner—i just bought a Starbucks gift card from a Starbucks store. Never crossed my mind to swing by Safeway.

The big boss needed a DVD for a presentation the next day. I had previously ripped a program from that DVD to play during a service, but only that program, and not the whole disc (yes, legitimately—it was our own content). The original disc could not be found. Luckily after some searching i found the files in an unexpected folder on my workstation, but all DVD Decrypter left me was VTS_01_1.VOB and VTS_01_0.IFO. Those two are not a complete DVD folder which can be made into a playable DVD Video disc on their own. I knew i could do some reencoding or demux/mux hokey pokey to get something into a playable format, but since i already had a direct .VOB rip, i thought i should be able to simply go direct to DVD, and i didn’t want to wait around for all that processing—it was late. Of course.

So i turn to Google, but get discouraged quickly. Sounds complicated, and i don’t know how to do it. So i go the known route and try to burn the VOB using Sonic DVDit! LE, but it only encoded the video. I couldn’t figure out how to get anything else i already had to get the job done. I started searching for demuxing software and how-tos, but they all seemed overly-complicated too. Reluctantly, i turn back to the unknown IfoEdit. The Doom9.net guide didn’t quite apply to my situation. It assumed you had ripped a complete disc and were reediting it. It seemed to be the tool i needed, but i couldn’t quite figure out how to use it. Finally, i stumbled on the Create IFOs function, which generates the proper DVD information files for an existing VOB file—exactly what i needed.

From there, it was only a matter of using Folder2Iso v1.1 to build an ISO disc image that could be burned into a DVD Video-compliant disc with DVD Decrypter.

The process works. But it took me a few iterations to get it right.

First mistake: i chose the folder containing the DVD files in Folder2iso, which created an image with those files in the root of the disc. DVD players will not recognize Video discs unless the content is in a folder named VIDEO_TS.

Second mistake: i changed the PGC options in IfoEdit from their default (Create 1 PGC only) to Create a PGC for each new VobID, which made the disc play through 45 second chunks, instead of the entire 4+minute program. It played the whole clip fine, but the timer kept flipping through each 45 second segment, which wasn’t correct.

Third mistake: i see now that i should have changed the Chapter options in IfoEdit to Create Chapter for 1st cell only instead of the default Chapter for each cell. Not sure how it was on the original disc, but now there are six seemingly arbitrary chapter points in this 4:21 program. But i’m not worried about that enough to waste another disc.