Monday, December 06, 2004

Playing with Firefox 1.0 As mentioned yesterday, I've been installing a bunch of Firefox extensions over the weekend and giving them a spin. Here are some quick reviews: JustBlogIt!: This tool makes posting interesting things here much easier. Just a right-click on a page lets you post to any of several blogging systems, and is configurable so you can add your own. To post to Radio Userland, you must have the RadioExpress plugin installed in your www folder. Get it here (this links directly to the text file, so right-click on the link and Save it to your Radio Userland www folder. It'll be there in the time it takes to navigate to the folder.) Then start Radio and open this page to configure. You can add a JavaScript to your Firefox toolbar to use RadioExpress, or use JustBlogIt! from the context menu to open the Radio editor in a mini-window and post. If you have several blogs located in different places, you'll be happy to know JustBlogIt! uses a drop-down menu to let you select the system you're posting to each time. Minor downside is it doesn't remember your last selection, so it can be moderately cumbersome if you do this several times a day. Otherwise, it's a wonderful thing! GoogleBar 0.9.0.30: This is the newest version, compatible with Firefox 1.0. If you used earlier versions, you need to uninstall that first (the Firefox extension updater will not work with this tool). You probably know already what a handy tool the GoogleBar is if you already visit there several times a day. But you may wonder if you need it, since Firefox already has a Google edit box right next to the address line. Let me tell you my favorite thing on the bar: the Up-Arrow. This has probably happened to you; someone links to an inner page of some site and either mistypes the link and/or the page moves in the interim, so you get a 404. The best way to find the real page is to move up the hierarchy until you get the home page or a search site page. With IE, you have to delete each reference directly in the address line, which can be a pain if you're working your way back from radio.weblogs.com/0124049/2004/11/29.html. With the GoogleBar in place, just click the Up-Arrow and you're in the November archives, two more and you're home! GoogleBar also makes specialty searches easier, and if you're Feelin' Lucky, you can do that quickly too. Gets heavy use in this house. StumbleUpon: One of the great pastimes in the early days of the Web was randomly searching around for interesting sites. OK, maybe not just the early days, but anyone's early days. There were search engines that just allowed you to pull up a random page, and you'd spend hours following links. Later, there was at least one dot-com that tried to match random pages to your interests, so you'd see things that they thought might be interesting to you. The one I used (and I can't think of its name) gave you points for every page you looked at, which got you discounts from advertisers. You can guess how that wound up. StumbleUpon is a version of that, with a side of community. StumbleUpon adds another toolbar, which allows you to rate (thumbs up or down) any site you visit, whether you found it via SU or not (though thankfully they don't recommend voting on every page, just sites other Stumblers might find broad enough to be worthwhile. On first login, you specify your broad interests, and they throw things at you. Some are obvious places to start (Yahoo, Slashdot), others more obscure (I found a college paper on John Coltrane recordings of "My Favorite Things"). It seems to do its job well. As for privacy, its policy seems logical and OK. They don't track your every move, only share your ratings with other members and will notify you of changes in the policy. These and more than 150 other extensions to your Firefox experience are waiting for your perusal at update.mozilla.org/extensions. We'll do more of these reviews as time permits. Meanwhile, Thunderbird 1.0 is out too! 3:17:42 PM    comment []