Tweak Up Your IRC Posts

      One of the purposes of our channel is the posting of information from the web. This can sometimes be more of a painful process than it needs to be. Today I will throw in my 2 cents in tech advice to help you in pasting more efficiently into the channel. This tutorial will be directed at users of the Firefox browser and an extension called Copy URL Plus. Firefox is available for many operating systems, but I will only focus on the one that most frequents our website, Windows XP. More detailed information for your particular OS may be found at the extension webpage.

      So what will be the final result? It will take a normal 2+ line paste and make it a single line paste that is easy to read in IRC.

      First make sure you have Firefox installed.

      Next download the extension Copy URL Plus.

      Then you are going to want to create a new .txt file and open it. Paste the following code in it.

user_pref('copyurlplus.menus.1.label', 'IRC Copy (Selection + URL)');
user_pref('copyurlplus.menus.1.copy', '"%SEL%" - %URL%');

      Save the file as user.js. Now this file may already exist on your computer. A search for user.js is your quickest way to find it. It should be located in your C:\Documents and Settings\(User)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\(Something).default. If it is not, then copy your newly created file to that location. If it does exist, you can simply append the file with the above code.

      Then reboot and you are ready to go with a custom command. To execute the command, go to a website, highlight some text, right click, select 'Copy URL+', Select 'IRC Copy'. Then paste into IRC.

      I hope this helps some of you and if you need additional help, I refer you to the extension webpage where they have detailed information on this process.