I quickly found the Mycroft Project at Mozdev lists a bunch of custom search engines you can add to Firefox (including Firefox 3) to fill your needs, with one click.

I’m assuming people are hunting these down historically as they’re missing from the defaults. The latest Mycroft stats page from the end of March shows the popularity of Search Engine plugins as thus:

• YouTube
• Dictionary.com
• isoHunt
• The Pirate Bay
• Mininova
• Thesaurus.com
• IMDb
• Google Images
• Youtube + Google Video

Lo and behold, my friend’s need for YouTube search happens to match the top downloaded Search plugin. One click and he was happily searching YouTube from Firefox.

Didn’t find what you were looking for in the top 25? There’s a search interface to find a huge selection of search engine plugins.

It’s also interesting that those I listed conform to A9′s OpenSearch plugins specification, which is purported to work in both Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7+ (going by the legend at the bottom of the stats page.)

If any particular plugin is missing from the search plugins dropdown in Firefox 3 and is a candidate for inclusion in the default, it’s probably at or near the top of the Mycroft downloads list.

Two years in, I have 75% of my money back, but half of my loans have defaulted or are in collections. I made a decent amount of interest before a few of these defaulted, as some had APRs of 25%. Judge me as lending at loan shark rates if you wish, but these people were doing things like getting out from under 100% APR “Payday Loans” schemes or trying to establish credit after an ex-spouse trashed their combined credit.

I estimate I’ll reach mid-2009 making about $100, which is better than losing money (which can still happen). But it has been a fun learning experience, and I’m just taking the proceeds out and not re-investing. It’s pretty risky, the lack of repayment makes me angry, and it takes too much time to do research.

I learned something interesting from one of the people at Prosper who I met along the way. Affinity credit cards, like a Stanford or Berkeley credit card (powered by Visa or Mastercard etc) tend to get paid promptly at a much higher percentage of people than a comparable “generic” card. The theory is that people feel like they’re disrespecting their alma mater when they miss a payment.

I found a solution searching for [wordpress feed empty], the result being http://wordpress.org/support/topic/170629. Based on the info there, I added this code to wp-feed.php before do_feed();:

query_posts('showposts=10');

It’s a hack, but for now it works until the next update

This bug tracking page was referenced in the aforementioned support topic, and the ‘milestone’ field says 2.5.2, so I expect that when I use the Subversion method for updating the blog, fixed versions will overwrite my hack.

It also appears that this happens on blogs like mine, where I publish at the root instead of in a /blog/ subdirectory.

If you agree with Dave, and you’re new to Python, I recommend focusing on the first chapter of Python Essential Reference. It’s the best 10-page overview of a programming language I’ve ever come across, and refer back to those pages often. I’ve written numerous scripts and have grown to really like Python over the years (it’s big inside Google), and this book has been indispensable.

My Followers total has surged since I posted this update:

I dare not resume Twittering for fear of turning off potential new Followers…

Here’s one I spotted on Google Operating System:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/opengoogle.html

You’ll be able to select from a list of approximately 100 ranking signals like: the page’s self-importance, the number of original ideas, the IQs of their authors, the number of links from Wikipedia, and decide their importance.

Heh, nice…

Looking forward to more.

Update:

Waxy and Anil have (will have) this covered in spades.

I’m thinking I’m correct, as the New York Times has written up the meme. Also, some Google Trends data supports it:

Well, that’s more of a hammock than a hockey stick, but it’s growth nonetheless…

My web-based mail client pings home frequently (a couple of times a minute, perhaps) via AJAX techniques. Phone apps have the same HTTP connection available. If you’re curious, keep Gmail open with the LiveHTTPHeaders addon installed and watch the request/responses stream by. Isn’t frequent pull the same as “push?” I’m having an acid flashback of the Wired hype about Push in the mid-90s…and the PointCast screensaver, which “pushed” a bunch of information to you while you were away from your computer…

I guess I’m just annoyed that “Push Technology,” in 2008, is still being called out as something customers need…

Update: Since Third-party apps appear to be limited in that they have to terminate when the user switches apps, this probably makes a daemon harder to run on the iPhone. I’m starting to understand the announcement.

I have Markus Frind’s blog in my feed reader because he feels very comfortable talking about the raw numbers of his business. I believe that he feels that he’s so different from his competitors, and that newcomers will find it impossible to duplicate his success, that he’s comfortable talking about anything and everything to a refreshing degree of transparency. I started reading his blog when I read that he needed a second web server because he was hitting the 64k concurrent IP address limit (!).

His business, Plenty of Fish, was profiled in the New York Times and I noticed this:

A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive.

How many businesses will put forth that they purge 1/3 of their member profiles each month? That’s refreshing to read. More often, I’ll read published total user numbers and suspect the business is ruffling its chest feathers and presenting numbers that fold in inactive users. This kind of obfuscation may be advantageous to your everyday business, but Plenty of Fish is definitely not your everyday business.

I have a few articles like this bookmarked, including the great SmugMug post about Amazon S3. SmugMug talks about numbers to a surprising degree, and is worth a read (and a re-read).

Twitterer Nate Ritter is doing something similar.