After installing an app last weekend I've had Crawler.com hijack my browser to be my default search engine. I didn't tell Crawler.com to do that so I'm pretty pissed off with them and every attempt to uninstall the damned search engine has failed.

The hijack doesn't appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn't the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.

So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?

Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:

In the address bar enter about:config

Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:

browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1

My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk

Bugger! That didn't work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:

keyword.URL

THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.

That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.

Labels: browsers, firefox, search, tips

This isn't a design post, but more of a tip to stop you being driven insane whilst you have to use IE7.

Does anybody else find the sound that IE7 makes when it loads/reloads pages really annoying? It's that irritating "tick" sound when you open a new tab and load a page. Or when an application you're running in PHP reloads every 10 seconds and you get that constant "tick.......... tick.......... tick.........."

I was working from a Vista laptop this evening (I know, I was in a hurry to buy a cheap laptop for my SEO work and the only one that fitted the bill was a Vista machine *slap*) and the constant noise really got on my t*ts.

To fix it you need to go into CONTROL PANEL > SOUND > SOUNDS and scroll down the list of sounds until you reach WINDOWS EXPLORER. At the foot of this section is the START NAVIGATION.wav sound. Either a) completely kill the sound off by selecting (NONE) from the drop-down list or switch to another, less infuriating noise like WINDOWS BALLOON.wav (It'll sound like you're being scanned by radar but it's far less aggravating than the default irritation)

Et voila - no more annoying IE7 pageload sound.

Labels: browsers, rant, tips

As a designer I'm quite often working on text files here & there and sometimes cutting & pasting data from various sources into MS Word means that the formatting is all wrong (tip: paste into notepad first to strip formatting then paste that output into Word) or there's no formatting at all.

For instance - I want to find out how many items there were in this small business news page.

Rather than count line-by-line there's a labour-saving technique to be had with Find & Replace in Word. So I copied the main page content into Word and had a one-line output. Seeing that every item began with either '2007' or '2008' I simply executed find '2007' and replace all with '^p 2007' and find '2008' and replace all with '^p 2008'

^p 6p is basically a line break.

So I replaced all the year dates with linebreaks and ended up with 79 lines/articles

Life saver :)

Labels: copy writing, design, development, office, tips