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I’ve been using Gmail lately. Overall it’s a great user experience, but two kinds of windows popping up annoy me.

First, why do links in the message body pop up in new windows, and why is there no way to change that?

Second, why use old-fashioned question popups for “there is no subject, are you sure?” messages? I’ve seen some cross-browser javascript for modal boxes in front of a page that seems to work fine. And unlike the standard popups, they aren’t modal across the tabs, only modal across the browser page.

I think there’s a geek consensus about the annoyingness of pop-up windows. Why is Google going with the stuffy, professional way of doing things?

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Right now I’m reading David Heinemeier Hansson’s Blog back to front, and it got me thinking:

It’s a common practice to close down blog comments after a certain amount of time, especially on popular sites. I noticed that DHH’s site still allows people to enter a comment and press submit, even on the oldest entries. I think it’s a good idea to encourage commenting on old posts, because someone who’s reading an old post might have some insight about it. But on the other hand, people just aren’t going to notice comments from an old post.

My idea is that after a month, instead of allowing someone to add to the old post, or just saying “comments are closed”, the old post should have a form for e-mailing the author. It could say something like this before the form:

The time has expired to leave comments on this page. However, you can still fill out a comment form and your comment will be sent to me via e-mail (with an automatic link to this post). It may even inspire a new blog entry!

I’m going to implement this for my blog after I change my blog engine (I’m planning to either grow my own in Ruby or move to Typo), but if you like this idea, feel free to implement it yourself.

Also, thank you elzr for giving me the idea to read DHH’s blog back to front.

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Olifante posted instructions for setting up TextMate to edit TextArea’s in Firefox using the recently updated Mozex Extension.

This is a huge improvement. I was already doing the same thing much of the time by copying and pasting. I heard about the extension and thought about what it would take to get it working well with the latest versions of Firefox and everything myself, but was glad to see that I don’t have to – the author made the necessary improvements. Great work, Vladimir Marek!

With extensions like these, Firefox beats Safari and Camino by leaps and bounds (It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid!).