How-To Automate UT-Dallas Proxy Server

UPDATE: This does not work in Chrome, my current browser of choice. There is a great plugin, though, called Library EZProxy that is even easier. As far as I know, the below is still one of the easiest methods for Firefox.


So, among many of the things that is difficult to navigate about the library at the University of Texas at Dallas is the library proxy. They provide no way of configuring a proxy for your browser or any kind of PAC script, nor is there any all-purpose link on their website, or even a VPN, so far as I can determine. You have to go through the library website to get the link to the journal. As a result, if, say, someone links to a journal on their webpage, or a friend links to a Chronicle article on facebook, it's basically not worth your time to actually try and get there through the obvious channels. Hacking around it even proved fairly difficult, due to the fact that UTD uses a suffix proxy system. Here's how I finally figured out my way around the problem for Firefox.

First, I looked at some links from the library website to outside journals and databases. I noticed that they tend to look like this:

http://chronicle.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/article/Wanted-Female-Philosophers/48729/
http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.utdallas.edu

Noting the similarity, I decided to navigated on over to http://libproxy.utdallas.edu . This gives a big old list of electronic journals and databases, with several links that are out of date. But I noticed a common pattern here. All the links were to:

http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=http://www.jstor.org/
http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=http://www.ipap.jp/index_journals.html

This was the key to my problem. I finally found this MozillaZine article on creating keyword searches.

What you need to do is go to Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks. Add a bookmark with the location as

http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=%S [the capital S is crucial]

And add the keyword as "utd" (or whatever you like). Then, when you have a webpage that you need the library proxy for, click in front of the URL and add "utd " in front, like so:

Then hit return, and you'll be taken to the login for the UTD library proxy, and then you'll be taken to:

http://chronicle.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/article/Wanted-Female-Philosophers/48729/

Ta-da! Full access, much less hassle.

Anyone else found an easier way?

web presence

I need to figure out what to do with my web presence. I'm not necessarily opposed to having a bunch of different faces updated a bunch of different ways, but I think mediocre user interfaces and ho-hum appearances are cramping my style and decreasing the frequency of updates significantly. So far I've got:

• Homepage: thehangedman.com - made with iWeb, which produces okay-looking output but is no fun to use, and loses points for being WYSIWYG. Also, iWeb's directory and file structure is a dog's breakfast.


• Blog 1: The Sequential Philosopher - That's this. Handles line breaks fairly poorly, such that I can't compose entries in Markdown without either (A) ending up with tons of extra line-breaks in the posts or (B) deleting all the line-breaks in all prior posts. Pages look okay, but configuring appearance is a bear.


• Blog 2: Livejournal - Ugh. Acceptable for keeping track of livejournal friends, posting semi-private entries and junk I don't want to post on my more "serious" blog.


• Twitter - Pro: Super easy to update. Brevity is the soul of wit. Con: few users of Twitter (though twitter facebook app helps).


• Facebook - Insert old man grumblings about interface updates and applications. I actually kind of like facebook for lots of things, except that it isn't good for professional stuff. Something about navigating facebook makes me unlikely to update it if I haven't recently been updating it a lot.


• Academia.edu - Pretty cool academic social networking site. Tuned for making professional-looking pages and posting papers and such.


• Flickr - Last updated July 2008. (Probably as much for my lack of picture-taking as anything.) Irritating restrictions on service if you're not willing to pay.

Is that it? I hope so.

Anyhow. I'm not afraid of PHP, CSS, or hand-coding HTML, and in fact I far prefer it to using programs like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and I kind prefer it to using iWeb. Except, I'm not so confident in my ability to make pages that don't look like crap, and I'm not sure I've ever had one that didn't. Besides, who has time to design webpages? Also, I've been burned by things like Movable Type and Wordpress in the past, and I'm overall not sure that having big hulking blog software on my own server makes any sense. Here's what I really want, in order of importance.

1. An attractive personal home page containing easily accessible information like publications, course info, CV, and such which is also easy to update and not beholden to finicky and irritating WYSIWYG editors.


2. A blog that is easy to update, preferably in Markdown, easy to read.


3. Somewhere to post pictures that is easy to use and will let me access all my pictures.


4. Reasonable integration of all these things (which a possible exception of my Facebook-Livejournal un-professional space).

(1) is really my major concern right now. Help?

My big problem is

that, for a person who spends a heck of a lot of time online, I'm not very efficient at it. I do a lot of research using Google Books and Google Scholar. I blog, LiveJournal, twitter, facebook, and so on. I read webpages, webcomics, blogs, I keep in touch with friends via email, gTalk, AIM, facebook, blogs. It's a complicated set of things.

Complicating the matter somewhat, I don't have a main computer. At my house, I have my battery-impaired PowerBook, chained to my desk. At work, I can use the PC or the fairly nice PowerMac in my office, and there is a MacBook that I can use and check out to bring home if no faculty or other staff need it. At Sabrina's house, I have a kind of old PowerMac G4, plus I can sometimes borrow her MacBook Pro. None of these can really do the job of my "main computer." Its too inconvenient to cart my broken PowerBook about, the MacBook isn't mine, and I work and play on the computer in all of these places. As a result, I've gotten used to storing my current work on a USB flash drive, I use a lot of Google products like Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calender instead of using Apps on my computer.

On all of these computers, I've been using mostly Safari, and sometimes Firefox, but I've become quit aware of how inefficient these things are. Firefox is often better than Safari, because it seems to work better with some Google apps and such. Plus, it is far more extensible than other browsers, even though there are plenty of plug-ins and customizations for Safari and Camino. Unlike both Safari and Camino, though, Firefox doesn't feel very Mac-like, which breaks up the experience a bit, and it seems (just from my experience using it on slower computers) to be creeping to the behemoth size of some of the more traditional Mozilla projects.

One possible answer is cross-platform Portable Firefox. But this means plugging in my stick every time I want to browse, not just when I need to get some work done. I guess I could put a package of my favorite plug-ins, bookmarks, etc. together and install it on all the computers I use, but then there is the consistency problem, i.e., what if I find a great new Greasemonkey script and get used to it on one computer, and then I don't have it on the others... Anyhow, bears some thinking about. Time to get more professional and efficient with my online work and play!