Category Archives: Firefox

Tiddle Wherever You Are

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A short while ago, I was talking with a co-worker about personal productivity (i.e. to-do) systems.  There are so many systems out there, and each with their own spin on GTD.  He showed me one that is a spin on the TiddlyWiki system:  Tiddlyspot.Tiddlyspot is a hosted version of TiddlyWiki, with a twist.  Not only can you work on your wiki online, but you can download a version of it to work on locally when you are, say, getting ready to get on a flight.  Once you are where you have an internet connection again, you can sync you local copy up to the server, and you are back in the cloud with it.Yeah, sure you can just get TiddlyWiki and put it on a thumb drive, but this gets you local and cloud workability without having to tote a thumb drive around with you.And, do top it off, there is a pretty slick Firefox extension that complements TiddlyWiki and Tiddlyspot.  TiddlySnip gives you three key context menu options:  TiddlySnip a selection, the clipboard, or the page. The clipboard option is perhaps the most creative of the three. Say you want to create a tiddler of something from Word, you copy it from Word, go into Firefox, and TiddlySnip the clipboard. Extremely handy. 

FF to Safari, pt. 2 – Import Bookmarks

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One thing that I was dreading about this Safari-for-a-week thing was having to manually copy over my bookmarks from Firefox.  There’s not much worse than wasting a bunch of time doing copy, paste, repeat.  A little Google search, and we have a winner!

If you’ve got Safari 2.0 (or higher) you’ve got import and export options in the File menu. Choose Import Bookmarks, then navigate to bookmarks.html in your Firefox profile (~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles) and click Import.  

Emphasis mine. So simple, yet almost too simple to believe. Time saved; color me happy.

Full Webpage Screen Capture

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I’ve seen some chatter about the Mac utility, Paparazzi, that captures the entire length of a webpage into an image. Great product, but limited to those of us who have chosen to “walk in the light” of Mac OS X. :-D I was looking for something similar, but for Windows.

Enter Screengrab!. Screengrab! is a Firefox extension that “will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images.” You can save the image as a PNG, JPEG, or save it to the clipboard. IMHO Screengrab! trumps Paparazzi in two ways:

  1. It is crossplatform
  2. You operate it from right in your browser, without launching an external application

Check it out.  You’ll wonder how you lived life without it.

Re-open Closed Tab

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Bren posted about this a good while ago, but I get so much use out of it that I figured I’d spread it around again.

If you accidentally close a tab you can bring it back from the netherworld by hitting Shift+Cmd+T (on a Mac) or Shift+Ctrl+T (on Windows).

This is so incredibly helpful when you get overly close-happy with your tabs, and go too far. Or, in my case, if you just aren’t thinking, this will resurrect the results of your errant clicks.

Firefox Search Box Keys

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There are two keystrokes related to the built-in Firefox search box that I love.

Ctrl-k on Windows, Cmd-k on Mac, and Ctrl-j on Linux selects the search box. Until I found this I would do Alt-D/Cmd-L to select the Location Bar, and then Tab to the search box.

Once you are in the search box you can use Ctrl-Up/Down Arrow (Cmd-Up/Down Arrow on Mac) to cycle through the search engines.

Tab In Textarea Firefox Plugin

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One thing I am regularly frustrated with is the lack of ability to enter a TAB into a web form. There are times when you want to use TAB spacing, but are relegated to hitting the spacebar a bunch of times. With Tabinta — Tab In Textarea — that problem just disappears. One obvious drawback is you will no longer be able to tab through forms with a textarea element; you’ll have to grab for that mouse.

One commenter of the plugin says, “Cntrl-Tab should insert a tab if Firefox follows the MS multi-line programming SDK.” This comment would be perfect if we hadn’t just discussed that the Ctrl-Tab keystroke cycles through tabs in Firefox and IE7. I tried a bunch of keystroke combinations, but nothing worked. I was a little excited when I found Option-Tab created a tab space in the OS X Spotlight search field, but that’s pretty much it. It kinda works in Safari text fields, but not textarea fields.

If anyone out there is game, I’d love to see a Firefox plugin similar to Tabinta, but one that used the Ctrl-Alt-Tab (and Ctrl-Cmd-Tab on Mac) keystroke — or something along those lines — to add a tab. I’d be forever indebted to you, especially if it works with the Web Developer plugin for editing CSS. Just figured I’d throw that out there.

What’s Your Homepage(s)

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For a long time — so long I can’t remember when I started — My Yahoo! has been my homepage. Back when Yahoo! was king they were the (possibly) the first to do a customizable portal page. Since I started using it the content I have on the page hasn’t really changed.

When I first started using Firefox I set it up to have multiple homepages. Did you know you can do that? In the Homepage field in the preferences, you can separate multiple addresses with a pipe (located on the SHIFT variation of the backward slash [\] key, which will produce this “|” ) and when you launch Firefox the next time it will open all of your pages in separate tabs. Great little feature. I eventually found I wasn’t using those other pages, and gradually removed them from my setup.

Back to my initial train of thought. In the left column of My Yahoo! I have stock stuff (including my portfolio) and a ski report for some resorts of my choosing. In the right column I have my sports scores and weather. Center (main) column has top news stories, business news, sports news, tech news, entertainment news, and the obligatory “Reuters Oddly Enough.”

I was talking with a coworker about homepages recently, and how I just can’t get used to the personalized Google homepage. I claimed that the Google page was just too cluttered. His comment was that my My Yahoo! screen was more cluttered than my personalized Google page. I’ve basically become accustomed to the layout of the Yahoo! screen.

What do you have as your homepage? Do you have multiple homepages? Do you have a suggestion for me to try out besides Google and Yahoo!?

Domain Name Extension Completion

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One of my favorite features of Firefox is the keystroke for completing domain names. For example:

  1. You use ctrl-D (on Windows or Linux) or cmd-L (on Mac) to select the address bar
  2. You type in the domain name sans extension e.g. techjive
  3. Depending on the extension (.com, .net, .org) you use the appropriate keystroke and it prepends a “www.” and appends the “.whatever” e.g. makes techjive = www.techjive.net

The keystrokes are:

  • ctrl-Enter (Win & Linux) or cmd-Enter (Mac) = .com
  • shift-Enter = .net
  • ctrl-shift-Enter (Win & Linux) or cmd-shift-Enter (Mac) = .org

The .com keystroke works for Internet Explorer and Opera. For Safari, if you type in the name and just hit enter — e.g. google — it puts the .com on it for you; no keystroke needed. Firefox is the only one that goes beyond the .com with this feature.