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GButts: Fast, Easy Access to Google Services Through a Firefox Button

Simon Mackie — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:00:16 +0000

If you’re like me, you’re probably skipping between various Google services all the time. If you use Firefox, and are looking for a simple, customizable and, above all, fast way to access Google web sites from either a drop-down menu or a toolbar, you should check out GButts, a nifty add-on with a silly name.

To get started with GButts, install the add-on from the Mozilla Add-ons site and restart Firefox (it’s compatible with Firefox 2 and later). You won’t see any changes yet, because you need to configure GButts and add the drop-down menu or toolbar to your browser. First, go to Tools -> Add-ons and open GButts’ Preferences page. You’ll be presented with a huge list of Google services, as well as a few configuration options:

Select the services you’d like to be able to access, then select whether you’d like a toolbar or drop-down menu. You can then decide where to place the menu or toolbar by going to View -> Toolbars -> Customize. Then drag the GButts toolbar icon to wherever you’d like it to appear on your browser window (scroll down if you can’t see the icon). I put mine to the left of my bookmarks toolbar, but you could also put it next to your address bar or anywhere else on the browser window you fancy. Here it is as a horizontal toolbar:

The toolbar takes up a little too much space for my liking, particularly as I use quite a few Google services. So I have configured mine as a drop-down menu, accessible through a little Google icon:

Now I have easy access to all of my Google services, all from one handy drop-down menu in my browser. I have two suggestions for improvements to this extension. First, it would be really great if it had a built-in way to manage multiple Google accounts, and second, I’d like to be able to customize the drop-down button icon. Overall, though, GButts is really useful and saves a lot of time when jumping between the various Google sites, so I’ve added it to the WebWorkerDaily Firefox Add-ons Collection.

Found a useful Firefox add-on recently?

(via Demogirl, which also has a nice screencast showing how to install and use GButts)

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The WebWorkerDaily Firefox Add-Ons Collection

Simon Mackie — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:00:59 +0000

To celebrate this week’s launch of the superb Firefox 3.5, we’ve put together a collection of the WebWorkerDaily team’s favorite Firefox extensions. You can subscribe to our collection here; as we discover useful new add-ons, we’ll add to it over time. The great thing about add-on collections is that you can pick and choose which add-ons to install, so if you don’t agree with all of our choices, you can just pick the ones that you like.

Here are the add-ons that made our collection (they’re all compatible with Firefox 3.5):

These are our favorites, but if we’re missing any, please let us know in the comments.

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Identify Enables Easy Social Snooping

Simon Mackie — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:00:32 +0000

As the number of sites we all use grows, our personal profile information is increasingly scattered across the web. If you make a connection with people on one site, it’s often hard to quickly find out if they use any of the other sites you use, too. Fortunately, a nifty Firefox add-on called Identify makes it easy to access all of a person’s available profiles just by hitting Alt-I on any of his or her publicly accessible profile pages (a Twitter profile page, blog, Flickr stream, Friendfeed page, Digg bio, etc).

This add-on tackles the same problem addressed by web app GizaPage (covered by Scott last week), but goes about it in a different way. GizaPage only works when the person you’re looking for has set up a GizaPages account, while Identify should, in theory, work for anyone.

As an example, here’s Identify on my Twitter homepage:

Identify’s not perfect; it’s only as good as Google’s Social Graph API, which is where Identify gets its data from. For a few people I tested, the Social Graph API hadn’t linked up all of their profiles so the results were incomplete, and sometimes it mistakenly links the profiles from closely connected people. (For example, James Kendrick’s Technorati profile gets linked to Kevin C. Tofel.) It tends to work best with people who diligently fill out their profiles. However, for viewing a quick snapshot of anyone’s online existence that’s much faster than using Google, it’s a useful extension.

One possible complaint about Identify is that it raises privacy concerns. However, all of the information is publicly accessible, and it returns no more data than could be found via a few well-crafted Google searches: It just reduces the amount of time it takes to do so.

Identify is an experimental add-on — which means it hasn’t been tested by Mozilla — that requires Firefox 1.5 – 3.0. (Unfortunately, it hasn’t yet been updated for Firefox 3.5 beta 4.)

Share you favorite lesser-known Firefox add-ons in the comments.

(via Lifehacker)

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Surf Canyon: Targeted Search Extension for Firefox Gets an Update

Samuel Dean — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:00:37 +0000

As Simon noted in his review of the Search Site Firefox extension, some browser extensions can really help streamline online searching. One of the best extensions for this is Surf Canyon, which has just come out in a new version, 2.0.4. It’s only a tiny 33K extension, but it can be a great help in steering you quickly to the most relevant information on any search topic. Here’s how it works.

Surf Canyon is available as both a Firefox and Internet Explorer extension. You can use it to get more relevant results when searching on Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Lexis Web and MSN Live Search.

In the screenshot above, note that there are small bullseyes to the right of the Google search results shown. With Surf Canyon, you click on these bullseyes to get recommendations for more relevant search results for you. Surf Canyon have written a good post that describes the process for drilling down its relevancy recommendations. The example focuses on a classic search engine context problem, which is, in this case, whether a searcher looking for “dolphins” means actual dolphins or the football team.

If you are searching on “dolphins” in Surf Canyon, and you subsequently click on a bullseye for the Dolphins football team, the extension then knows what your original intent was. The Surf Canyon client-side application communicates with a centralized server where relevancy algorithms are hosted and maintained, so as you continue to click on bullseyes for dolphin-related results, it gets better and better at knowing what types of results you want. The best way to understand how good the extension is at this is to try it.

The new version of Surf Canyon includes several useful features that I’ve been trying out today. The most useful of these is a new top-of-page collection of search refinement suggestions, as seen below for a search on “dolphins.” The extension is smart enough to know that dolphins are intelligent, and that I may be interested in this aspect of them, and it also draws a relationship between dolphins and whales, in addition to other connections it makes. Across a whole lot of searches, I think I’ll find this useful, especially if I’m searching for something that I don’t know a lot about.

In addition to the suggestions, the new version adds the features summarized here. One handy addition (for Firefox users only) is that a bullseye status bar icon in the browser allows you to instantly turn Surf Canyon’s recommendations on and off.

Most of us spend a lot of time searching online. If you do, I recommend this extension.

What browser extensions do you use?

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Streamline Site Search in Firefox

Simon Mackie — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:00:25 +0000

One of the great things about Firefox is the huge number of useful add-ons available to customize and streamline your browsing experience. One such extension is the brand-new Search Site extension, which lets you easily search the site you’re on for a word or phrase.

The normal method to search a site is to use the “site:” parameter in a search engine query. Searching for “Twitter site:webworkerdaily.com” in Google will return all of the pages on WebWorkerDaily that discuss Twitter, for example. I use this type of search all the time, but it does require a little typing.

Search Site gives you a couple of ways to simplify the process. Firstly, it adds a green magnifying glass button to your regular Firefox search bar, which searched the site you’re currently on when you click it.

Search Site button added to Firefox search bar

Search Site also adds a “Search Site for selection” option to your context menu. You can highlight a word on a page, right-click and search the site you’re currently on.

Search Site context menu option

Both options return results from whichever search engine is currently selected in your search bar.

Although Search Site is an experimental add-on (meaning it hasn’t been tested by Mozilla yet), it’s working well on my machine and is compatible with Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5 beta 4.

What Firefox extensions do you use to streamline your browsing experience?

(via Ghacks)

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I Need to Read This: The Instant Version of Read It Later

Samuel Dean — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:00:51 +0000

Last year, I covered the very useful Firefox extension Read It Later. It’s the recipient of an award from Mozilla for the easy way it lets you make a note of web pages of interest that you don’t have time to read now, but want to read later. It’s still a Firefox extension, though, and even though you can install it quickly, the installation alone might keep some busy web workers from using it. So I noted with interest Josh Lowensohn’s post on a new service called I Need to Read This, where the service lets you save pages for reading later, but uses bookmarklets that you can get going with immediately.

I tried the I Need to Read This bookmarklets in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. (You do need to provide a username, email and password to get going.) In Internet Explorer, you simply right-click on the bookmarklet buttons that I Need to Read This provides, and then click “Add to Favorites.” In Firefox, just drag the bookmarklets directly into your bookmarks toolbar.

The primary bookmarklet for I Need to Read This adds the current page you’re on to your “to-read” list. A second bookmarklet, “Read an Article,” brings up the oldest article on your “to-read” list that you haven’t yet read.

It takes seconds to get going with these bookmarklets and they’re extremely useful as they can help you avoid letting interesting web-based content fall through the cracks when you don’t have time to stop and read.

There is a Firefox extension for I Need to Read This, which gives you more features, but it’s brand new, so if you’re going to install and learn a full extension, I would recommend Read It Later instead. If you want similar features that you can use instantly, see if I Need to Read This works for you. If not, the bookmarklets are polite and you can immediately jettison them.

How do you keep track of interesting content that you don’t have time to read?

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