Adding Fuel to the Fire(fox) - part 1

I use Firefox for my browser when ever humanly possible. I have installed on my Windows box at work and on my Windows based laptop. Of course it is on my Ubuntu boxes here at home. I even keep the portable version on my thumbdrive.

If you use Firefox, good for you. If you don’t… why not? You should be. And just another reason to do so is the add-ons available. I am not a power-user by any stretch, but there are some that I use that really do make my browsing life easier… and I’m going to share a couple with you now, and more over the coming days. (don’t want to overwhelm you after all.)

I am not going to get in to any real depth here, I just want to point out these things out and give you my basic impressions as to why I use it.

I’ll start out with bookmarks. Finding at page you like means squat if you can’t find it again later. Originally, I kept my bookmark lists separate. My work computer had my work related ones, home had personal ones. But sometimes I’d find something at work I wanted to follow up at home or vice-versa. So I looked for, found and started using Bookmark Sync and Sort.

Bookmark Sync and Sort is a Mozilla Firefox extension that lets you connect to an FTP/WebDAV server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Setup is easy; just write in your FTP/WebDAV server address, username, password and a name for the XML file (by default called xbel.xml).

Basically, it uploads your bookmarks online from one computer so you can download and sync it with another computer or three if you want. You can use a public service to hold them, or your own web space. I use a root-level folder on my hosting account that is not web accessible to ftp the file to. You can choose to sync both ways, so if you delete a bookmark on one, it’s removed on the other… or just do a download and merge.

Right now, I’m doing a download and merge. My work computer is set up to download and merge automatically at startup, upload automatically at shutdown because I close everything on that computer every day. At home, I only shut down when I have to or will be gone for a few days, so I have to remember to do manual uploads and downloads. When I clean house on my bookmarks, I’ll upload the file from the one I cleaned up then backup and wipe the bookmarks on the other computer before downloaded the ‘clean’ version. Yea, it is a bit more involved, but I think I would rather do that than accidentally lose something I would rather not.

I used to organize all my bookmarks in folders, which could be a pain… the unsorted list would grow in the root folder till I finally took the time to go through and sort them. That’s changed since I installed Bookmark Tags.

Bookmark Tags provides a different way of looking at your bookmarks: they’re “tagged” by the folders that contain them. Folders in different parts of the bookmarks hierarchy with the same name represent the same tag. Bookmark Tags therefore lets you manage your bookmarks in a non-hierarchical way.

When you add a bookmark, instead of choosing the one folder to put it in, you choose the tags you want to give it and Bookmark Tags files the bookmark for you. When you want to recall a bookmark, instead of hunting for it through folders and subfolders, you browse by tags, using them like a sieve to filter out unwanted bookmarks.

Bookmark Tags basically lets you add tags to your bookmarks at the time you first save it. The tags are really a folder structure of sorts, and it will even build tags based on your current folders.

I just spent some time cleaning my stuff up trying to make better use of the tags and here’s a couple notes I would recommend. First, create a folder called ‘zzzzz’, then move all your bookmarks out of all the subfolders to the root Bookmarks folder, then get rid of your existing folders. Yea, I know this can mean some work, but I think it will turn out better in the long run. Skip the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder though if you use the toolbar. Leave that stuff alone. Then when you install this, make that ‘zzzzz’ folder your root folder.

Now when you have basically a bunch of un-tagged bookmarks. Time for some house cleaning. Go through your bookmarks, click on them to open them. Is the link even still good? Is this one you want to keep? If so, right-click and choose preferences. You can rename the link if you want, then add your tags.

Keep the tags simple, and all lower-case. I had originally tried some that started with upper, some that didn’t and the auto-fill screws up a bit. (might be fixed in later versions, who knows). Tags are separated by a space, so if you really want a tag with a space in it you need to put it in quotes. I think that’s a pain, so the couple I did use multiple words I used a hyphen instead, for example: check-out, contractor-info, file-management. And don’t be afraid to mix tag words. I started out with a gift-ideas and also a content-ideas That was dumb.

Why does it matter if my gift ideas mingle with content ideas when I click the ideas tag? Using the tag cloud when I click on ideas it brings up all the links under that tag, as well as the other tags used by any of those links - so if I’m looking for that link to the Tea Stick I just click on gifts next instead of content or one of the other tags. Yes, it is three tags instead of two; gifts, content and ideas, but the two overlap and add to the clutter.

Ok, I guess that is it for now. Next time I’ll touch on some of the stuff I use for working on web sites.