Hey! Just Blog It Already!

Comments (3) · April 10, 2008 at 9:10 am · Firefox Usability

Want to just blog it?  There is a neat new Firefox addon that you might be interested in.  The addon, rightfully named JustBlogIt lets you blog from Firefox using a plethora of different blogging methods.  The promise here is to blog anything from Firefox’s right-click context menu.

Which blogging scripts and services are supported?

Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Radio Userland, TextPattern, TypePad, WordPress, journalspace, b2evolution and BLOG:CMS and more!

If you want the latest and greatest version, pick it up from the add-on’s official web site.  You can also find the latest “Mozilla tested, mother approved” version on Mozilla’s own add-on site.

Quicker Downloads in Firefox

Comments (8) · January 21, 2008 at 7:30 am · Firefox Usability

Here is an easy trick to speed up your Firefox downloading. First thing you must do is add the “Downloads” icon to your Firefox toolbar somewhere. From there you can do this to download quicker.

Drag and Drop onto the Downloads Toolbar Icon

Instead of right-clicking on a download link, choosing “save to target” and pressing enter, just drag the download link to the “downloads icon” in the toolbar. The download will start automatically.

Very nice quick trick to get around the “Save as..” box when downloading.

tip courtesy of makeuseof.com

Have any other tips you’ve written about or found via the Web? Share them with me and I’ll be sure to give them their day in the sun.

Bookmarklets and Link Helpers

Comments (3) · December 31, 2007 at 8:09 am · Firefox Usability, Resources

Thanks to some of the best bookmarklets out there on the Web, I feel like I have become a more organized and productive person. With the new year heading in, I figured this might be a good time to remind you to clean out the junk in your Firefox links bar and add some new things that might also help you become a better browser via your browser.

Toolbar-less StumbleUpon
I love StumbleUpon as much as the next guy, but the toolbar they provide is quickly becoming cluttered with stuff I don’t really care about viewing.

Gmail This!
If you find yourself as a user of Gmail sending a lot of stuff back and forth to friends, this is a bookmarklet that is as handy as any extension out there. Get a pop up window with an e-mail ready to go with the link of the web site you are on. You could use it right now to send this article over to Bob down the street. Go ahead and do it, I promise he won’t mind.

ShareThis
This service makes it super easy to get to sharing just about anything at just about all the biggest bookmarking and social link sharing web sites out there. Digg, delicious, and more. Read the rest of this entry »

Putting Links on Speed Dial

Comments off · May 8, 2007 at 7:12 am · Bookmark Help

Now we all use speed dial on our phones to quickly dial up those numbers we often use but never remember. It looks like Firefox is getting into the speed dial game with the extension with the same name. The Speed Dial extension for Firefox gives you a neat thumbnailed preview of nine links you can quickly switch between.

With Speed Dial, you can easily access your most used websites. To show the Speed Dial tab, use the Speed Dial button (which can be added to the toolbar), or enter “chrome://speeddial/content” in your location bar.

One more cool thing about this tools is it will automatically load in blank new windows or my favorite selection in blank new tabs. To configure this, and other options, use the extension settings panel.

+ Download and Install the Speed Dial Extension for Firefox!

Quicker Searching in Firefox

Comments off · February 26, 2007 at 8:20 am · Most Wanted

This week, Roman writes in and wants to know of a way to do quicker searching via Firefox and not have to start at the beginning of the document to do it.

In IE, because it doesn’t search as you type, you can highlight a piece of text, and then press ctrl-F and have it search below your selection first, then it gets to the bottom of the page and searches the part of the page before your selection. in firefox, i find that the search as you type feature always starts at the top of the page. Is there a workaround?

For the quick searching that you need, I have found that using Firefox’s quick search would be the best way to go. It isn’t the same as the search that you get with Ctrl+F though. For this one all you need to hit is the / key.

This one will give you the search you need to start where you are on the page. Also after you are done with it, it disappears out of sight. Hope that helps!

Have another feature request or suggestion you’d like to see built into Firefox by default or added by an extension? Let me know about it and I’ll feature it on Firefox Facts and maybe even find you a solution to your problem (if you have one).

Dictionary Tooltip

Comments off · February 21, 2007 at 5:06 am · Firefox Usability

Need quick and easy access to a dictionary? Now I might not be the world’s best smeller speller, but with a tool like this I can at least pretend I am. The Dictionary Tooltip extension gives you right-click access to your own personal dictionary. Here are a few more details about how it works.

Press ctrl+shift+D (or) double-click (or) right-click after selecting a word to see its meaning. This extension is ideal for those who doesn’t like to switch their window to see the meaning of a word.

Want to look up what a word means? Dictionaries are really good tools to do just that. I tried asking a chicken once… but it never gave me an answer. The real question here is, does this extension lay eggs?

+ Download and Install the Dictionary Tooltip Extension for Firefox!

Change Tabs With Number Keys

Comments (3) · February 19, 2007 at 5:10 am · Tabbed Browsing

Now we all knew that you can open a new tab by hitting the Ctrl key plus “T”, but did you know you can change the tab you are looking at by hitting the Ctrl key plus one of the number keys?

For an example, lets say you have four tabs open. If you click Ctrl and “1″ you will go to the first tab. If you hit Ctrl and “2″ you will go to the second tab. As you can guess - this goes on and on till you go all the way to 9.

Now switching tabs back and forth is what I do a lot during the day in my day job (working sales support). Hopefully this newly found tip will be helpful for you as well.