Saturday, November 27, 2004

One for the Nerds

Having only recently installed Firefox, I have found the following extensions extremely useful:

  1. ScrapBook: This is a superb tool for saving web pages, or parts of web pages, in a searchable hierarchy that you define, like the Bookmarks tree in Firefox. This is extremely helpful for hanging onto things that you discover while surfing, but want to keep for later use, eg in a blog.
  2. Sage: This is a extension for reading RSS and Atom feeds from websites. For example, if you are keen to monitor a whole list of blogs, and they have feeds, Sage can scan them and alert you of new posts.
  3. All-in-One Gestures: This extension allows you to navigate using your mouse, including opening new tabs and new windows. Once you've start using it you'll wonder how you managed without it!
  4. Super DragAndGo: This helpful little tool is another boon for the lazy web surfer. If you point to a link and then move the pointer to a blank bit of page the link opens in a new tab. If you do the same thing with an image you automatically download the image. If you do the same thing with a piece of text it is automatically entered into whatever search you have set up on the right of the Firefox window, be it Google, Dictionary.com or whatever. How neat is that?
All these extensions installed without a hitch, and have worked perfectly. I can highly recommend them all.