Today's extension is from the area of - surprise surprise - security and privacy. I guess I am getting slightly paranoid from all the security related stuff I am listening to. But I promise I will switch back to "standard" TWIT, MacBreak and Windows Weekly to compensate the security heavy topics. But it certainly true that the more you are aware of what is technically possible, the more hostile Internet you will see ...
It's been almost 5 months now since I started to use Mac OS-X. During these months, I became very comfortable in the new environment and albeit I do not consider being a power user, I can do all I need with my Macbook and use it daily.
Today I found out that yet another from my friends got a Mac. Great news, Thomas - hope you will enjoy your Macbook Pro as much as myself, Gabo and many others. Welcome in the club.
Today's extension is yet another one that somehow works with URL's aka links. If you now have strange feeling that all extensions in last few days *were* about links, you are right. But realize that links are the most crucial feature of the Web, and therefore extensions dealing with links are really useful.
After you download Linky (the download is very small - only 32 kB), it adds few entries into your context menu. How many new menu entries are added can be configured in plugin option. On activation, Linky shows you number of links and image links (URL pointing to picture) on currently page displayed page and allows you to open links in new tabs or new windows or open image links in new tabs or windows. In both cases, Linky displays dialog window with all links and allows individual selection of which links will be included.
Linkification Sometimes you see a Web page whose creator was lazy and did not wrapped displayed URL into <A href="..."></A> tags. In short, you see something like http://www.thinknostic.com/ instead of http://www.thinknostic.com/ (btw, if you have installed Linkify, you will see both as links). As result, you can see the link on the page, but you cannot really click on it. In order to follow the link, you must select the link text, copy and paste it into address bar and press Enter. With Linkify installed, you will always see all textual links as real links and can just click on URL as if the page would contain the proper <A> tags.
Today's extension is about session management. Great news about Firefox is it's ability to use tabs and have opened many webpages at the same time. This impacts people's browsing habits - rather than following one path of the links and diving deep inside the Website, you explore many paths concurrently, jumping from one to another, adding more and more tabs at the virtual crossroads. As in real life, when you travel, bad things can happen - what in this case means that your browser may crash, leaving you in the middle of nowhere with no trace of how you have got there and what you have already visited. If you were using the Session Saver extension, this would be prevented - after Firefox restart you would end up with exact collection of open tabs as before the accident.
In previous FEOTD entries I have mentioned excellent tools that help you maintain the URL's of the pages you want to remember (del.icio.us) , and in case the URL is not enough, save the content of the Web page for offline access or archive. But what if the web page is not really what you are interested in, you just want download all files files attached to the page - and there is a *lot* of them.
This was is out-of order extension (I mean there are several extensions that I use on daily basis and for that reason I planned to mention them before this one) - but it helped tremendously in my BI project, so here it goes.
Live Headers does one thing only and does it well - shows you HTTP headers of a communication between your browser and any Web site. As long as the browser is Firefox - but why would you want to use anything else, right ?.
As mentioned before, thanks to del.icio.us bookmarking site and excellent Firefox plugin with the same name, I have almost perfect solution where to keep and how to organize my bookmarks. In theory, I will never loose anything interesting. Or will I ?
The good news and the bad news about bookmarks is that they are very dynamic. What you've stored in your favorites or del.icio.us may disappear without warning and never come back (actually, thank's to Google caching it is not so bad, but even Google cache will eventually expire). In situation like this, I always wish to have captured not only link but the whole copy of the page(s).
If you do not know and use on-line social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, take a break now and go there. Currently owned by Yahoo, is Del.icio.us is a one of many social bookmarking tools out. Probably not the one with most features, not the one with coolest user interface - but pretty good one and certainly winner for me.
I have been struggling with the problem of how to keep my collections of URL's under control for several years. Yes - every browser has bookmarks or favorites, but if you use multiple computers daily basis (multiple means > 5), with actively accessing Web with more than single browser on each of them (usually with some subset of IE/Firefox/Mozilla/Safari/Opera), you can pretty much forget about browser's bookmarks/favorites - you will never have your bookmarks where you need them.