So says Donnie Garvich
Web Development
Articles related to the web monkey in me
Spoofing your browser’s user agent
24 years ago
If you are a web developer (or anyone doing any programming which involves web browsers, which is just about everyone nowadays) you really are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t include Firefox in your toolbox for diagnosing issues and testing sites. The community provided Addons for Firefox are just invaluable in day to day tasks. A great example is the ability to spoof your browser’s user agent, pretending to be any browser you want, all from one browser.
My quest to do this started as a curiosity when I found a blog post titled “Search Engine Marketeers are the new script kiddies” discussing a WordPress blog which was hacked in such a way that it invisibly provided more traffic to the hacker’s site whenever a search engine bot crawled the site. The hack was pretty impressive, actually but more impressive was the ability for the blogger to diagnose what had happened and track down the culprit.
Having a few WordPress blogs of my own, I decided to look into checking mine for the same issues. It took me an hour or so of toying and poking around to get everything I needed, so I figured I would take a shot at documenting the steps that went into my adventure in the hopes that someone else would be able to get this done more quickly if they ever needed it. Plus… it will provide a reference for me when I inevitably do this on more computers in the future.
First, you’re going to need to get the User Agent Switcher Addon for Firefox (written by Chris Pederick). Installation should be fairly straight forward, so just click the button while in Firefox and let it do its thing.
Now for the part which took some searching…
The default installation of the Addon doesn’t provide a lot in the way of user agents to switch to. A couple of examples are all that are there, so in order to be really useful you’ll need to add agents of your own or find them somewhere. I found a very complete set of agents conveniently compiled into an XML file which can be imported into the Addon (Options > Options > User Agents > Import) over on Tech Patterns.
Once you have installed the Addon and loaded a complete set of user agents, you can test them out with the QuirksMode Browser Detect page.
There are a lot of uses for this ability, from security to verifying code which reacts to a specific browser. Whatever you use it for, hopefully this short guide made it easier to get your results.
Ajax Rain: A collection of JS / DHTML / AJAX code
14 years ago
by Donnie
in Web Development
I remember a time… waaaaaay back in, oh… say… 1997 when the internet was really just starting to get “cool.” We would drink the latest caffeine laden beverage, take the latest “keep you wide-eyed” herbal supplement and write code until we were all convinced our hair was moving all over our skulls of its own volition. Back then, we would eagerly watch for the latest release notes for Netscape Navigator and relish any additions they made to JavaScript (bonus points for anyone who can remind me what the name of the scripting language was originally). As soon as a new change was in place we would attack it and put it somewhere… anywhere… on our sites. The code was raw, usually poorly formatted and documented and almost always protected by the author like it was going to be the next billion dollar idea.
That was then. In the ten years since that time we, as web developers, have evolved. Not quite far enough to exist only on a temporal plane but far enough to consider when writing code that other people may find it useful. No longer is the “cool” stuff of a proprietary variety. Now, developers more commonly take a little extra time to make their code understandable and customizable… then they do what was unthinkable ten years ago and (gasp) distribute it for free!
In steps Ajax Rain. A new resource style site that provides the coolest in JavaScript, DHTML and AJAX code for discerning veteran and budding rookie web developers alike. All of these snippets are downloadable for free and anyone can add their latest creation to the database.
So saddle up and ride some else’s code horse for a change. Quit reinventing the wheel (never mind that Good Year and Michelin continue to make millions doing exactly that) and get with the times. Go download and implement someone else’s code and take full credit for it yourself when praise is dished out at your next company picnic! After all… all the kids are doing it and they’re making you look lame in the process.