Upgrade Your Surfing Sessions with Two Free Apps
Sure web workers labor online all day, but they also surf. If you’re on the web for most of each day, a couple of free Windows applications that I use constantly may help you to be better organized, and better informed. In this post, I’ll detail some of the ways I get good use out of them.
Take a Gander. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? If you, as I am, happen to be a very visually oriented person—someone who immediately understands what “a picture is worth a thousand words” means—then you may get a lot out of a free Windows software download called NetVisualize Favorites Organizer. In essence, the application sits alongside your browser and lets you browse web sites by their thumbnail images.
Instead of the long sea of text that you might be used to looking at in your browser’s Favorites menu, NetVisualize Favorites Organizer gives you a way to quickly view sites you’ve visited—where the visual prompt can often deliver much more information than just a text prompt. One of the main ways that I use the application is to surf visually through thumbnail images of the many news sites that I visit on the web each day. I can see on the fly whether I might want to visit a particular one at a particular time.
NetVisualize Favorites Organizer will import Netscape bookmarks and Internet Explorer Favorites lists. It also works with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers. However, do note that you need to have Internet Explorer 5.0 or later resident on your system (although it does not have to be your default browser) so that it can make use of Internet Explorer’s HTML rendering engine. The download and installation are fast and easy.
An Advanced Degree in History. If you want to radically improve the amount of information you get when reviewing your browsing history, and be able to command new ways to organize views of browsing history, I recommend Mandiant’s Web Historian. Get this: This Windows application was originally created for computer forensics professionals who wanted to get very detailed, flexible ways to organize browsing history reports.
You can export Web Historian’s detailed reports to Excel or HTML, and my favorite feature is that if you use more than one browser, you can view your history of sites visited in each browser in separately organized reports. These features are especially useful if you do extensive research on the web and want to be able to meticulously and granularly review what you researched. Web Historian is completely free to download and use, and works with most browsers.
Do you have any good tips on web surfing or organizational utilities?
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Interesting apps!
Good apps, but they add extra load on your system as well as on your nerves. I like my browsing to be minimalistic and hassle-free. The browsers I use let me browse the web without using any third-party apps/plugins, and I am happy with that.
For many people using the Web for research, permanently saving the content they find is very important, as sites and pages come and go. My product Surfulater makes it easy to save web content and then add value to it by adding notes, linking related articles together, editing content, attaching related files etc. It also makes it easy to find content using full text search and lets you organize and view your content in various ways.
For many people Surfulater has become an indispensable tool when surfing the web.