tail -f findings.out

Co-worker and fellow informational transmogrifer Trevor Rosen told me about a Firefox plugin called Read It Later a while back. For some reason, I didn’t really start using it for a while. After having watched the demo video for the latest version out for Firefox 3, I have to say this is one awesome plugin!

Here’s the scenario. You are on a laptop at work, and come across an article you want to read at some point, but don’t have time at that moment. You don’t want to bookmark it (it’s not that important), just somehow stuff it away for later. Emailing yourself the link is a little too much effort as well. The better solution: Read It Later. As shown in the video, you can:

• mark one page for later reading via a menu
• switch modes and click on any links on the current page you wish to mark for later reading
• save all your current tabs for later reading
• mark a page in your list as read
• sync your list to any number of machines
• search and tag your list, as well as order by name and date
• download your list for off-line reading
• send a list item to a wide range of social bookmarking services

This is simply perfect for me, as I might come across a number of things each day that I want to read at some point, whether it be on my work laptop, my home PC, my second home PC, or my home laptop.

For most of my web page reconnoitering, Firebug fits the bill quite nicely. There are occasions, however, when I simply need to view larger swaths of HTML code, without all of Firebug’s features in the way. The well-used View Source can work well:

But when the structure of a page is fairly complicated, seeking to the section of code desired can be time-consuming.

And so we can do better by selecting the part of the page that is of interest, right-clicking, and selecting “View Selection Source”:

This brings up the entire page’s source, but centered on the selected part, with that part of the code highlighted. Perfect!

Except for a small oversight: The code browser used with View Selection Source detects and corrects malformed HTML! When one is trying to correct bugs on a web page, this behavior can wreak havoc. I’ll provide a real example. I needed to scrape a table from a webpage. I then needed to pull certain rows from this table for recording, ignoring others. This was created and worked well, until one day it suddenly broke. I suspected the structure of the page holding the table had changed, causing issues for parsing. So I went to the page, selected the end of the desired part of the table, and chose View Selection Source. Strangely, there was no malformedness to be found! After a lot more debugging, I happened to do the same check again, but by using View Source and looking for the section of interest. Lo, and behold! A malformed tag. Now I knew what I needed to fix, way after I needed to.

I recently performed a fresh install of Intrepid Ibex on one of my home PCs, and restored the files I cared about from backup. I decided to use a Firefox backup created by FEBE from a machine whose Firefox setup I preferred. For a while, all seemed to have worked just fine. Then I came across an image I wanted to save. I right-clicked it, select “Save image as”… nothing. Tried it again, still nothing. I went to File, Save Page As. Nothing! Now I am a little worried. Various forum posts suggested people that had this issue had to remove their profiles and have Firefox remake them. Forget that.

As it turns out, the problem was caused by both me and Firefox being a little dumb. In the PC where I made the FEBE backup, I had all downloads set to go to /home/MYUSER/Downloads. In the new PC, however, my username was different, so that location didn’t exist. Instead of politely informing me the specified location didn’t exist, Firefox just did nothing. Changing the download directory to something that existed fixed the issue immediately. Didn’t find any matches in the tracker, so I have added a ticket to Bugzilla.

This tweak is a little more involved than most I put up, but it is totally worth it. When done, you can fire off any custom web search from Launchy!

Here are the steps (I assume you have Launchy installed and know what a keyword bookmark is):

Continue Reading “Web Productivity Winning Duo: Launchy + keyword bookmarks”

First, I just want to say, that keyword bookmarks are definitely the coolest thing since sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. If you have never used one, get ready!

Go into Organize Bookmarks, create a new one (can be hidden in a new folder, you don’t need to view and click on these, as you will see). Try out the following:

Now, you can open a tab and type “wiki all your base” to get that informative Wikipedia article. The general principle: You have some site with things you regularly want, and then are available via sensible URLs. You can copy a representative one and change your search term to “%s” which will insert in that variable whatever you type after the keyword! I like to add these for Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube, and more. It’s quicker and easier than using the specific engine in your Google Searchbar. And you can add these for all sorts of things that don’t have engines for the Searchbar, and even add things that don’t even have searches on their sites!

Here are others I like:

Continue Reading “Keyword bookmarks: Just better”