Links Like This is a Firefox extension I wrote last year that allows you to automatically open multiple links from a webpage. I released the first version in May of 2007 but never really went back to update or improve it; that's about to change.

During a recent conversation about Links Like This, I realized how poorly I designed the interface. For example, after right-clicking on a link and selecting "Open Links Like This...", you used to see this confirmation dialog:

It's a modal dialog, meaning that you can't interact with the page until you've closed the dialog. The problem with this is that, oftentimes, you can't see all of the links that have been chosen as "links like this" until the dialog is closed. This problem becomes even more severe when the dialog reads "Open these 143 links?" and you can only see two or three of the highlighted links.

With the latest update, selecting "Open Links Like This..." from the context menu yields this dialog:

It's not modal, meaning that you can still scroll up and down the webpage when the dialog is visible, but it will stay on top of the webpage until you deal with it. Additionally, selected links are no longer marked with an ugly red border:

Now, they have a pleasant yellow background.

Much better, no? This small upgrade is the first of several I have planned for the next few weeks.

You can install this update at Mozilla Add-ons; if you find Links Like This useful, please consider writing a quick review on the right side of this page. Once a couple of users have given it positive reviews, I can ask Mozilla to make it a public add-on, which would make it available to all users, not just those logged in to Mozilla Add-ons.

Yammer is a service designed to help co-workers keep each other up-to-date on their work progress by answering the question "What are you working on?"

Yammer Time is a Firefox extension that reminds you to use Yammer. By default, every 4 hours between 9AM and 5PM on weekdays, it will pop up this obtrusive prompt:

Just tell it what you're working on (you are working, aren't you?), and it will go away for the next 4 hours. You can change how often it asks (and on what days) in the Preferences dialog. You can also manually update Yammer by clicking on the Yammer Time toolbar button.

You can install Yammer Time from Mozilla Add-ons.

I had been told that after upgrading to Firefox 3, it would only need 15 terabytes of RAM...

I'd like to formally announce my next big project. It is an as-of-yet unnamed collaboration between me and my wife, and it is due to be released in beta this March. Here's a screenshot of the alpha version, which is not yet feature-complete.

The first computer program I ever wrote was written in GW-BASIC. I was 8 or 9, and my dad had gotten me a book from the library that included the BASIC code for simple text-based games; after typing them into our IBM and playing around with them for a few hours, I decided to use what I had learned to write my own program, and it went something like this:

10 INPUT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?", N$
20 IF N$ = "CHRIS" THEN PRINT "YOU ARE COOL"
30 IF N$ = "AARON" THEN PRINT "YOU ARE DUMB"
40 END

I thought it was pretty cool; my brother Aaron probably disagreed. I recall having plans to use this program to not only tell me that I was cool, but to store all sorts of secret information that it would only print out if I ran the program, since no one else would think to type in my name. (I suppose this would also count as the first password I ever chose on a computer: my name. Way to go, 8-year-old self.)

Anyway, there's not much more to this story, but I was wondering:

If you're a programmer, what was the first program you wrote? What was the first thing you made a computer do that it wasn't already programmed to do?