kitchenmage

Talk to me about Facebook...

Now that I have thrashed twitter into shape just a bit, Facebook is next on my radar. I am not, however, a huge Facebook user and we've already determined I don't know what everyone hates so I am turning to you...

What bits of content do you hate?

What would you hate to lose?

Look at the right sidebar - what is you had the labels like "Events" and an All button but no content? Then you could expand the headings but it would be a tight list otherwise.

Or do you just want the right sidebar gone entirely and have a wider content column in the center?

What else?

Twitter Hovercards: Die.die.die

Figuring out how to disable Twitter's recommended users to follow feature was so much fun, I thought I'd do it again. From my quick poll, hovercards seem to top the list of next most hated twitter feature. IN case you don't now, hovercards are those little popups that come up when you mouse over an avatar on a twitter page. I wouldn't have thought they were next on the list, but what the hell do I know?

There are a few more tweaks in the wings -- Facebook and I have been tussling -- so I decided that rather than go through all the add-ons and such, I am going to do most of this with stylesheets. This will make the inevitable updates a bit easier to manage for all of us.

Except for AdBlock Plus  which I use and will probably continue to add instructions for - just because if I am going to do it for me, I can share. (and Chrome/AdBlock for this one time because it was there and simple...)

If I might be allowed a moment of self-indulgence, I'd also like to thank everyone for the response to the post on Removing twitter's recommended users to follow feature. I am totally blown away by all the love and sweet things you are saying. Seriously. (I'd also like to thank dunny for being the first to suggest and test the hypercards tweak; he also sat on the fix for 24 hours waiting patiently for me to post it. Thanks, dunny!)

Here goes, Ad Blockers first, stylesheets after... All of it after the jump.

Removing Twitter's Recommended User to Follow "Feature"

#newtwitter fixes here: New Twitter Fixes: Remove Who to Follow and More!

waves at all the shiny new people

Hi, Internet! I must admit, I am sort of stunned at the response to this post. I thought if the lists annoyed me, there must be a few others out there who agreed. A few. That's my understatement for the decade. Thanks to all of you for the tweets, retweets, kind words - being called 'awesome sauce' isn't bad for the ego - and general sharing of this tweak. I'm doubly pleased because I love whipping stupid applications into line, it's sort of a hobby of mine.

For those of you who are new, here are a few highlights: simple, flaky biscuit recipe (#1 on Google!), a no-cook ice cream recipe (yes, with eggs)), and one of my favorites, Dear PETA, women are animals too... I also have a brand new site, Not Like Normal People, that you might want to check out. Oh yeah, see that ad on the top of the sidebars? Apparently I wrote a cookbook, too. (Much as I love sharing the tweaks, this self-promotional stuff is killing me but a friend sent mail and threatened to hack my site and do this if I didn't do it myself.)

Thanks again for coming by to snag the browser tweaks, I'm really, really happy to share!

Do you hate those recommendations from twitter as much as I do? Rhetorical question, I know. It seems to be the new thing to hate - and with good reason this time. It just recommended I follow someone who blocked me when I wrote Cook's Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knife Roll. Last straw, much?

I decided there must be a way to kill the suckers. You know what? There is a reason they call me Application Goddess. Done in 12 minutes. Take that, twitter.

Want to know how? Here you go, in all my technical author, bullet listed, click-on-sh*t glory. Scroll down for Internet Explorer, Chromium, Chrome, Safari (yes on Macs, too) and Opera! Oddly, the div ma,es didn't always work exactly the same in the different browsers, so if you find something that isn't quite right, please let me know.

Edited to add these links:

Twitter Hovercards: Die.die.die - How to get rid of the popups on twitter avatars.

Twitter, twitter, twitter...I do not care who else follows them... - Remove this list.

Twitter, twitter, twitter...I also do not care who we both follow...... - this is down temporarily because they are changing it around...back shortly...

Talk to me about Facebook... - What bits do you love, hate, use, not? Let's chat...

Lots of steps for lots of browsers after the jump...

PSA: Do You Have Backups of Your Recipes?

Losing your business in a fire is a tragedy but Archie Marlin, owner of Alps Candy Store in picturesque Leavenworth, WA has a much larger loss to contend with: 600 recipes. The original recipes, which represent 35 years of Marlin's work at the store, went up in flames along with the building. Fortunately, the building was insured. But there is no insurance for the years of work that those recipes represent.

Marlin has a great attitude about this. (Better than mine would be, I think.) Asked if he can recreate the formulas, he says, ""Sure, I can do it. They might not taste the same but they will have the same names — if I can remember the names." (Fire badly damages Alps candy store)

Having spent much of the last two decades as an IT consultant, I'd like to pass along the first question I ask clients who are having computer problems - it applies here as well.