The Galloping Vendors

There had just been again weeks of violent unrest in the world, but I was quite a few countries away, together in a sprawling São Paulo street market with a colleague and our big happy-but-guarded driver.  The three of us were amiably ambling amidst a big, colorful, confusing, and crowded set of not-quite-straight rows on uneven pavement and outdoor shops and inside shops and coconuts with straws and colorful scarves.  And music CDs and sunglasses and an amusing, sometimes perplexing mishmash of electronic items.  Much of this, if not most, of dubious officialness. 

The majority of these items were sitting on wood planks, next to which sat oft squat, loud, tanned, tired yet eager vendors.

By the hour next, some of these sellers looked vaguely uncomfortable, nervous.  The storm clouds were coming, rain was imminent, and there was palpably a rolling sense of unease.

UPDATE:  Vinny sent me a script that fixes it.  Much thanks!

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Right after I wrote a neato article on Chrome and Google Bookmarks, my blog stopped “working” in Chrome.  I finally figured out why.

Apparently, the script set that powers my dropdown menu—the “Accessible Website Dropdown Menu”—is written to look for the string “Apple Computer” in a browser’s useragent and serve webkit-oriented stuff to those browsers.  But Chrome now lists “Google inc.” in the user agent.

More details are in the bug report I filed (which, rightly, was marked “works as intended,” since it’s a script problem, not a Chrome bug).

If any folks more adept at JS than I am want to either help me fix this or—better yet—help the UDM folks fix it, that’d be super .

Have you tried Google’s new browser, “Chrome”?  It’s fast and it rocks.  But there’s no Google Toolbar!  How can you bookmark pages to a central location (Google Bookmarks)?  Here’s how, in just a few quick and easy steps .

1. First, download Chrome (duh!) .
2. If you don’t already see a bookmarks bar (right below the address bar or “omnibar” and above the actual web page) turn it on by hitting CTRL-B (you can hide it anytime by hitting CTRL-B again).
3. Visit this help page on Google Chrome and bookmarking.
4. Go ahead and—you guessed it—drag that little box to the bookmarks area of Chrome.

VOILA!  Now whenever you want to bookmark a page, just click on that little bookmark.

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But what happens when you want to find that page again?

Well, for one thing, Chrome’s omnibar is pretty damn smart… even smarter than you might initially expect!  Try typing just a few letters from that site’s URL or title and it may very well show up for you in the omnibar .  But if you still want to see all your bookmarks, you can do one of two things:

• Revisit Google Bookmarks  OR
• Check out the cooler experience of Google Notebook, and you’ll find all your bookmarks under the UNFILED folder (click on the left), where you can annotate, group, and optionally share your favorite bookmarks with friends.

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Hope these tips help you enjoy Chrome even more!

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EDITED on Wednesday, September 3 to add:
Thank you to Simon B for the improved link to the bookmarklet!