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Posts tagged ‘delicious’

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A Browser Bag of Tricks

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Image by Daniel Pouliot via Flickr

While sharing my browser during a DEN webinar last night, I was surprised to see the hot topic of conversation wasn’t the public beta of the new DEN website that I was sharing…. rather it was the various bookmarklets and links that I have saved in my Bookmarks toolbar.

I guess I don’t really think about it much, but that really is a bag of tricks that I depend on daily, and there’s some fantastic tools there that I’ve gathered together over the years. SO, I thought that I’d share a brief glimpse into my ‘dashboard’, the view that surrounds my view, all the toys gadgets and gizmos that customize my browsing experience.

First of all, my browser of choice is still Firefox. I’m on the verge of switching to Chrome, as I think it’s faster and more stable, but for now I like the suite of plugins and utilities that I have set up in Firefox better. Since I often have more than 25 tabs open at a time, real estate is always at a premium. That’s why I go with the Classic Compact Firefox theme. It’s about as small as you can get while still having actual icons for the primary buttons. Clean and minimal, that’s how I like my browser themes. The only plugin I have that adds actual buttons to the browser is Delicious. And to be honest, that can probably go as I don’t use any more functionality than I would out of a bookmarklet. However… My space for bookmarklets is pretty limited as you’ll see shortly.

In the status bar (that bar along the bottom that displays what URL you’re about to click on when you hover over a link), I have five tools. The first is the MeasureIt plugin, which resides in the lower left. This is a simple tool, but I use it almost daily. Click on it and your screen goes grayish. Then, you can draw a box anywhere on your screen and it will tell you how many pixels each side is. Incredibly handy for measuring web elements, pictures, embedded objects and so on. Honestly, it’s pretty darn close to indispensable. On the right hand side I have the Delicious notifiers, and a Google Wave notifier, but to be honest I rarely look at those. They could go away and I wouldn’t notice. I also have an indicator letting me know that Greasemonkey is running, another that I don’t really even ‘see’ anymore. But then we come to the far lower right, which is reserved for something I check nearly every day: Woot Watcher. It displays what the deal of the day is for Woot, and during a Woot Off it displays roughly how many of an item is left before it switches. I’m a big fan of Woot, and yes, I do glance down at that daily.

This brings us to the heart and soul of my web based toolbox: the bookmarklets. For those that don’t know, a bookmarklet is basically a bookmark, but instead of taking you to a favorite web page, it performs a function. I actually wrote a post on bookmarklets a few years ago, but the info looks to still be valid. I have quite a few of them in my browser bar and use most of them pretty regularly. In that they appear in my browser bar, here’s my current list:

  • TinyURL - The mac daddy of URL shorteners. While there’s many that work well, this is my go-to standard. In particular, it’s reliable, simple, and I love that you can customize the shortened URL that you create.
  • URL.ie - Sometimes size matters. In particular for Twitter, you want URL’s as small as possible. They don’t come much smaller than URL.ie. So when even TinyURL is too large, I switch to this one.
  • EDIT any page - This one is interesting and to be honest, really deserves a blog post to itself. Basically it’s a Bookmarklet that makes any page…. editable. Yes, you can just double click on any text and change it to your liking. No, it doesn’t actually change the page, just your view of it. However, it’s incredible for grabbing screenshots for presentations. You can even remove images from the screen if you want! Try it, it’s fun. *disclaimer* I’m not responsible for evil or chaos that you cause with this.
  • X-Ray – This bookmarklet is invaluable for web developers. Click on it, and then click on any element on the page. It will show you detailed information about the element itself, as well as any thematic settings that may be affecting it. Very quick and incredibly powerful.
    Flickr2Facebook - Just a simple exporter that will help you move photos from Flickr to Facebook. Go to a Flickr page, click the bookmarklet, and choose what Facebook album you want it to go into. Easy!
  • Printliminator - This one helps to print nice clean versions of web pages, without the annoying adds and sidebars and such. Just click on the bookmarklet and you can then select any elements you want to remove. Poof, they’re gone. Then just send it to the printer!
  • TBuzz - This serves two purposes. 1) It allows me to tweet about something I’m looking at without leaving the page itself (it even adds in a shortened URL for you) and 2) It shows me any recent tweets that contain links to the same page. That way you can just choose to retweet someone else’s message instead of typing your own if you so choose.
  • KeepVid - This one is my YouTube downloader of choice right now. Go to a YouTube video, click on the bookmarklet, and you’ll have the option to download it. What I like tho is that it provides you the option of saving it in a variety of formats, and often in a variety of sizes. Saves a step or two.
  • Quietube - Ever need to share a YouTube video, but were nervous about what links and related videos might pop up? The Quietube bookmarklet takes that video and displays it on a plain white background. Very neat and clean. Perfect for presentations and staff meetings.

    • Since you can store folders on a Browser bar, I do actually have a couple of those as well. In side I have a slew of websites that I want easy access to. You can even put folders inside folders, to create a nice hierarchy of sites that you want to be able to access quickly. Nothing fancy, but it does work pretty well.

    So that’s my browser bag of tricks. Got any that I’m missing? Or something you think people ought to know about?

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    4/12/2010 26 Comments
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    Top 10 Web 2.0 for Educators – NICE Miniconference

    Will be presenting in about 10 minutes at the NICE mini conference here in Illinois. Doing a revamped version of my Top 10 Web 2.0 for Educators. Most radical change is that I don’t have an aggregator in there. Still kinda torn about that. Part of it is that time is limited, but another piece is that I’m not positive that it’s as relevant as it used to be. Considering people are aggregating via their inbox, via iGoogle, via My Yahoo, within the browser and more. There’s so many ways to subscribe, that I’m not positive it’s worth including an aggregator in this type of fast paced presentation.

    Regardless, the current version is embedded below, and the examples I show for each site can be found here.

    Let me know what you think! What did I get right, and what did I miss? Above all, please be sure to include WHY. Oh yeah, you can also add your thoughts to this Wall.

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    1/30/2010 32 Comments
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    Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit

    Well, today’s challenge is the first of a two-parter. The longer you have a blog, the more cluttered your sidebar winds up. New social site? New widget! And it all adds up. Pretty soon your sidebar is a veritable circus of colors, banners and links. It’s time to reign it in, but if we’re going to do it we should do it right. And that means taking a thorough look at what we have there, determining what can be eliminated, what can be consolidated, and what should be… pruned. Which leads us to your blogroll.

    The blogroll is one of the most popular sidebar items with good reason. It let’s people know who you read, where you get your information from and who you recommend to other people. There are many tools that make it easy to keep up… But therein lies the problem. For example, I use Bloglines for my blogroll. Anytime I add an EdTech blog to my aggregator, *bam* it appears in my blogroll. Delicious, Google Reader, and many others allow you to do the same thing. Trouble is, that means it’s just a little too easy to keep adding blogs to it, and after a while it sorta of loses it’s value. Looking at my blogroll as it stands right now, it’s just a series of links to a bazillion EdTech blogs. Unless it’s deliberate, it’s meaningless. So it’s time to do some trimming.

    There are several ways to do a blogroll. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and Edublogs all support blogrolls natively. Or you can use third party tools like Google Reader, Bloglines, Delicious, or any number of others. To be honest, the tool that use doesn’t matter so much. The important thing is selecting what you want to list there, and how you want to organize it. Do you want to list a few of your favorite blogs to read? Do you want to list bloggers that you admire? Perhaps you just want to share your favorites in a specific niche, like Special Ed or ESL. Really, it’s entirely up to you and there’s no wrong way to do. So long as you do it deliberately and maintain it.

    Maintain it? Absolutely. Sometimes good blogs go stale. And if the blogger hasn’t posted since 2006, does it really still deserve a spot on your blogroll? Most likely not. While your pruning, you just might find yourself feeling a little guilt. You really like ‘John’, but you haven’t read his blog in who knows how long. Should he still be in your blogroll? In my opinion, if you even have to wonder, go ahead and take it out. If you share a sprawling list of 50 blogs there, it’s overwhelming and deters people from exploring them. If you have a concise list of 10 blogs, people see that these are personal recommendations from you and will be more prone to clicking through. It’s more meaningful that way. So don’t feel guilty. It’s your blog darnit! Do what you need to do. And if you’re going to have more than 10-15 of them, consider breaking them up into multiple categories so they’re more manageable.

    If you don’t have any you want to remove any, at least do a ‘freshness’ check to make sure all of the blogs you’re linking to are still up and are active!

    Good luck! And don’t forget, if you haven’t joined the wiki yet, stop by and list yourself there. And get ready for tomorrow, when we give the rest of your sidebar the royal treatment!

    And now I’m off to do some trimming myself!

    11/12/2008 14 Comments