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Taking the Firefox 4 Plunge

April 5, 2011 · 5 comments

I’ve upgraded to Firefox 4 and I miss Delicious, who’s plugin will probably never be updated for Firefox for since it’s being “sunset-ed”, but I guess now is as good a time to move on as any.

Firefox 4 does have a wonderful Firefox Sync tool integrated with it which may in the long run be even better than Delicious. Not only does it sync my bookmarks between my computers but it also syncs my tabs, my history, and my saved passwords.

I hit the Apple (or Control for you PC users) B command and a lovely bookmarks sidebar a la Delicious comes up. That sidebar also has a handy search function like I often used with Delicious. The only thing it’s missing and I hope a new add on will bring functionality for is a way to sort those search results by how often I’ve visited those pages.

Getting your old Delicious bookmarks into Firefox so they can be used with Firefox Sync is pretty straight forward.

  • Log in to Delicious.com
  • Click the Settings link in the upper right hand corner of the Delicious website
  • Use the Export/Backup Bookmarks option and save a copy of your bookmarks to your computer
  • In Firefox, click the Bookmarks menu and use the Show All Bookmarks option
  • Click the Star icon at the right of the Library toolbar and choose Import HTML
  • Wait a while because if you have thousands of bookmarks like me it’s a lot of data to process

Then you’ll need to set up Firefox Sync in the Firefox Tools menu

To do this you’ll need to create a username and password and copy down the key it generates for you. You’ll paste that key in to any other computers you want to sync with and that’s about all you’ll need to do.

Is Firefox your favorite browser? Have you upgrade to Firefox 4? Why or why not?

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Handy Uses of Private Browsing

February 18, 2011 · 1 comment

private browsingWhen most people think of the private browsing option in the web browser, sneakiness and having the computer not remember your usernames and passwords comes to mind.

But a much more handy application of private browsing is to use it so that your computer does remember your passwords.

Here are a few examples of how I use the private browsing function:

  1. Say someone is over at my house for a visit and they want to check their email from my computer. I used to groan because that meant I had to log out of my email account so that they could log into theirs. Now we use private browsing for my convenience. I can pop the computer into private browsing mode and the computer still remembers my log in session. When my visitor is done, I can pop the browser back out of private browsing and I’m still logged in and ready to go.
  2. Say I want to see what my blog or Facebook page might look like to someone other than me. Again, rather than hassling with having to log out and maybe even clear my cookies and other saved browser data or switch to another browser entirely, I can just quickly pop into private browsing mode, check what I wanted to check, and then pop back out of private browsing and go on like I never had to mess with anything.

What do you use private browsing for?

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How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed for Just Part of a Blog

May 25, 2010 · 2 comments

Say you found a blog and you like some of their content but you don’t care for all of it. You only want to subscribe to what you’re most interested in.

In this example, we’ll use my Beauty & Fashion category but this trick also works for tags or search results.

First, navigate to the page that shows just the type of posts you want to subscribe to.

Then, in Firefox, click the little RSS icon in the address bar.

RSS for Just One Category

Select the option to subscribe to the category feed (third option down in the drop down menu shown here).

That option will give you the feed address for just that category and you can pop it into your feed reader. (Or maybe you have your Firefox preferences set up so that the button automatically links up to the feed reader of your choice. Go to Preferences > Applications and then the Web Feed option to set that.)

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What’s in your Dock? Essential Software for Mac

September 5, 2009 · 6 comments

While discussing our computer uses the other day, my brother said, “You can learn a lot about somebody by looking at what’s in their dock.”

Let’s take a look at mine:

dock

My interests span media, the internet, graphic design, and gaming (strictly when those games are well designed with the Mac in mind) and that is clearly reflected in my dock.

I’m currently running Snow Leopard and I make good use of several of the programs that come on all Macs:

  • iTunes
  • iCal
  • Address Book
  • iChat
  • Text Edit
  • iPhoto

I also frequently use some free software including:

  • Firefox
  • TweetDeck
  • Amazon MP3 Downloader

My software picks in terms of what I needed to buy to are:

  • Microsoft Office
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe Illustrator (I’m still using Adobe CS2 since that’s what I bought with the educational discount while in college and haven’t needed to upgrade badly enough to pay full price yet)
  • World of Warcraft (geeky as it is, this is the best designed game for Mac)
  • Spore
  • The Sims 3
  • Turbo Tax (this doesn’t actually make it into the dock since I only need it for a few days each tax season but I buy it every year)

So tell me, what’s in your dock?

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Using Delicious

September 1, 2009 · 2 comments

From the Delcious website:

What is Delicious?

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Delicious is the bookmarking tool I’ve been seeking for years now. (It’s been around for years too but I tend to be a late adopter to social networking services.) I regularly access the internet from my computer at home or from one of two different computers at work. I’ve been in search of a way to effectively synchronize my bookmarks between all three of those machines.

A typical situation for me is this: late afternoon, all my work is done but the receptionist left early so I need to man the phones. Between calls I tend to surf the net a bit. I get off at 5pm and typically about 4:50pm I’ll come across an awesome site that I want to continue exploring when I get home. Recently I’ve been using StumbleUpon to help me find those pages again when I get home but often enough they aren’t really the right type of site to be sharing on StumbleUpon.

That’s where Delicious kicks in. Delicious is perfect for bookmarking any type of site that you’d typically bookmark in your browser, including items that you don’t want to share in the social bookmarking environment via private bookmarks.

I’ve found that to use any sort of social bookmarking or social networking site effectively, you need the Firefox add-on to go with it so I downloaded the Delicious add-on. This adds several items to your Firefox window: a menu, a toolbar, a few buttons in your navigation bar, and a sidebar.

I turned off the toolbar since it took up too much screen real estate and I also turned off my standard Firefox bookmarks toolbar since I’ll be using Delicious to access my bookmarks from now on. (View > Toolbars to turn them on and off.)

Delicious Navigation Bar Icons

Delicious Navigation Bar Icons

The navigation bar icons serve the following functions from left to right:

  • access your Delicious homepage
  • open and shut the sidebar
  • add new items to your bookmarks or update your notes or tags on existing bookmarks
Delicious Sidebar

Delicious Sidebar

The sidebar is the other essential feature you need to be using.

At the top of the sidebar you see a search box. That search box lets you search your bookmarks by title or by any tags you’ve added to it.

Below the search box you have a section of tags. Tags are like the folders you would have organized your bookmarks in if you were still using browser based bookmarking but have the advantage that you can add multiple tags per item (similar to labels in Gmail if you’re familiar with those). The more tags you add the better but you don’t need to have everything tagged right away to be able to take advantage of Delicious. Just tag as you go.

The bottom section of the sidebar is your bookmarks. I have mine sorted by Most Visited so that it’s easy to pop over to my favorite sites. If you choose a tag from the section above, only the bookmarks that have that tag will show in this bottom section. If you type something in the search box (even a few letters) it will narrow your list of bookmarks down to only the items that fit that search.

The contents of your sidebar will update even as you make changes to it from different computers although so far it appears to me that your Most Visited items are not cumulative between machines.

It’s easy to get started on Delicious because you can import all of your existing browser based bookmarks and it will tag them based on the names of all the folders those items are nested in. Everything you import this way starts out as a private bookmark but you can change items to public as you like.

I’m loving Delicious so far, I’ve barely started using it and already I can’t imagine how I lived without it.

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