Wednesday, December 3, 2008

P(rf)oductivity: Do More with Firefox

I was planning on doing homework in the office, but turns out I didn't bring what I needed. So instead, here's how my Firefox is set up across all the computers I use.

Add-ons:

  • Adblock Plus: does what it says. Blocks ads by filtering blacklisted sites, so it's not like it blocks ALL windows that pop up. Yes, that's a good thing.
  • Delicious Bookmarks: I use www.delicious.com to keep my bookmarks online so I can access them anywhere. This add-on allows me to bookmark just by right-clicking, as well as providing a toolbar to search/sort my bookmarks.
  • FoxyProxy: slick management of proxy connections. If you don't know what proxies are, you don't have to use this add-on.
  • Personal Menu: frees up valuable space to view pages by consolidating your menus into one button.
  • Speed Dial: every blank tab I open now has my "speed dial" sites - 9 sites I want to access the most frequently. This includes my Google homepage, Delicious bookmarks, work internal site, Facebook, and of course the Brog. These 9 are also easily made accessible by keyboard shortcuts (Alt- or Cmd-#, depending on what OS I'm in)
  • StumbleUpon: it's channel-surfing for the internet. Boredom spells are eliminated by stumbling on random websites. You can limit your stumbles by channels, basically categories of sites (like humor, online games, recipes, etc.)
Keyword Search:

I've mentioned this to many people, but here it is again: you can search sites straight from the address bar by typing a keyword, then your search item. For example:
Typing g brog about it in my address bar takes me right to Google's results for "brog about it". Very, VERY convenient.

How to set it up: right-click the search box you want to use and you'll see an option "Add a Keyword for this Search" [or "Add...in Delicious", if you want]. Name is self explanatory, keyword is what you type before what you're searching. And that's it.

What I've got:
  • g: Google
  • w: Wikipedia
  • y: Youtube
  • i: IMDB
  • d: Dictionary.com
  • r: Rotten Tomatoes
So easy. It'll change your life.


Share your special setups in the comments!

2 comments:

cvu said...

I love Stumble!

Chuck said...

I'm gonna this stuff a try since I'm all for efficiency and what not...

So far the only Firefox plugin I use is PDF Download. On OS X, it lets me open a PDF in another tab in Firefox instead of downloading it.

I still need to setup FoxyProxy :(