RTM Sidebar in IE7 and IE8
One of my favorite plugins for Firefox is the RememberTheMilk sidebar for GMail. It helps me stay organized and get things accomplished on time. Unfortunately I can only use IE7 here at work due to “security risks” and they block www.rememberthemilk.com for some stupid reason.
Today I decided to figure out a way to get my functionality back. While playing around I found that only www.rememberthemilk.com is blocked, while I could still access the mobile version of the site (http://m.rememberthemilk.com). Now I just had to get it loaded into the sidebar.
In IE6 there was a bug which allowed you to load any page in the search bar using “_search” in the target attribute of the anchor tag. This was removed fixed in IE7 (again, because of “security reasons”), but you have to enable it by going to Tools > Internet Options, then click the Advanced tab, scroll down to Security and check “Allow active contect to run in files on My Computer“. Once enabled you must restart.
I created an html document on my desktop and deleted the IE shortcut. In the html document I put the following:
<script>
document.location.href('http://mail.google.com/');
window.open('http://m.rememberthemilk.com/','_search');
</script>This will open GMail (which was my homepage anyway) and open the mobile version of RTM in the sidebar. If you want to open additional tabs, add more window.open commands (but remove the target element).
Update: I was just over at Mark Goodwin’s blog and saw a post on putting RTM on your desktop with a Vista gadget. He recommended using the iGoogle gadget page instead of the mobile version of RTM. Great idea!
