My how-to for restyling Google Cal­en­dar is by far this blog’s most pop­u­lar post so far. Right from the start, peo­ple had requested that I adjust the code to accom­mo­date Google Calendar’s mini-mode. It cer­tainly was pos­si­ble using the tech­nique I used, but it did break the agenda which was flaky to begin with given the fact the fea­ture was exper­i­men­tal. Every once in a while, I’d check on the sta­bil­ity of mini-mode to deter­mine if it was ripe for some hack­ing. Then one day the mode sim­ply didn’t work any­more. It was weird, but after fur­ther research I found out why. Mini-mode was super­seded by the Google Cal­en­dar Gad­get. The con­fig­u­ra­tion form does pro­vide some cus­tomiza­tion of the style, but it is cer­tainly lim­ited. So just like before, I poked and prod­ded the code until I was able to find the means to restyle the gadget.

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Inspired by a cou­ple of arti­cles and even a screen­cast, I wrote a short batch file that cre­ates a Rails appli­ca­tion and auto­mat­i­cally loads it into a sub­ver­sion repos­i­tory. It works by first cre­at­ing a temp folder, gen­er­at­ing the rails app there, renam­ing the app folder to trunk, cre­at­ing the accom­pa­ny­ing branches and tags folder, and then deleting/renaming a bunch of non-essential files. Once that’s done it imports the three fold­ers into a spec­i­fied sub­ver­sion repos­i­tory. Once the import is com­plete, the temp folder is deleted and then the trunk is checked out. Finally it cleans-up by copy­ing the database.yml file and ignor­ing the tmp and log fold­ers. That’s it.

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I decided to try my hand at hack­ing Fire­fox. I’m a big fan of the Way­back Machine and after check­ing out the list of Fire­fox search plu­g­ins, I noticed one for the WM was miss­ing. See­ing how they give you instruc­tions on how to cre­ate one of your own, I fig­ured I’d give it a go.

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