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Fashion Your Firefox into a Web-Working MachineNovember 18

My Firefox is jam-packed with add-ons. I love them, I collect them, I use them.

I probably over-indulge, in fact. Some people, however, are not using them to their full potential, or simply not using them at all. It makes sense if you just have a clean browser policy, but if you’re not aware of what’s available, then you could be missing out.

Mozilla’s new Fashion Your Firefox web application is designed to make add-ons more accessible, and easier to find and install.

The existing Firefox add-ons page can be daunting. Fashion Your Firefox takes the guesswork out of add-on browsing, grouping them thematically based on over-arching types. Yes, it may be reductionist, but it also saves you a lot of aimless wandering on the add-ons page.

The categories Mozilla puts forward are meant to apply to people in general, but web workers take note: each also represents an industry or professional field.

Finder and Seeker = Research Analyst
StumbleUpon and Interclue are great tools for finding connections and deepening your initial information gathering phase when conducting broad, open-ended search-based research.

Social Butterfly = Networker, Socia

Zapr: Remote File Transfers Without the MessNovember 17

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a client wants you to transfer a project, including your intact file structure, remotely over the internet. FTP is an easy solution, right? If you have the space, and if your client is web-savvy enough to know what an FTP client is and how to use it.

If, on the other hand, your client hasn’t used FTP before and isn’t the most tech-oriented person in the world, transferring project folders with complicated file structures can quickly become an ordeal for all parties involved.

Zapr attempts to bypass the messy stuff and make it easy for you and your client or business partner to connect and share. The application allows you to share files quickly and easily, and installation is required on the original sharer’s PC only. It allows you to generate web links that direct others to files or folders stored locally on your computer.

You can specify whether the content is public, or private (which requires a password), but in both cases users

Springpad Online Notebooks Help Get Things DoneNovember 17

Many of us who have embraced The Web as the place for our stuff have looked to applications like Backpack, Evernote, or Google Notebook as places to store all of the things that we need to get or stay organized.

While most apps of this type tend to be free form or even business focused, Springpad is a series of online notebooks designed to be a whole life organizational tool. Stay on top of not only your business or professional projects and items, but also track your personal life as well.

Much like other notebook or organizing applications, Springpad uses a familiar notebook and page metaphor. Each page can feature data in the form of notes, lists, maps, files, alarms, events, etc.

Every item can be tagged, flagged or annotated for even more filing flexibility. Items can also appear on multiple pages but remain connecte

Taglocity 2.0: A Better OutlookNovember 14

Sometimes Outlook is a necessary evil. Personally I prefer Thunderbird if I’m going to be using a desktop client, because it’s less cluttered, not to mention free. Still, when I’m at the office working as a contractor for a professional services firm, Outlook 2007 on Windows XP is the standard email client, so I have to make do.

Making do just got a lot easier thanks to Taglocity 2.0, a plugin which brings some much needed functionality to Microsoft’s Office-based desktop email program.

For freelance and personal purposes, I use MobileMe and Gmail, and I rarely have reason to complain about either (excluding the web-based iteration of MobileMe, which is about as consistent as West Coast weather). Gmail’s labels, recent conversations, and filtering options are especially useful. Taglocity brings that kind of functionality and more to your Outlook inbox, at the cost of a little added weight to an already resource-heavy program.

Speed Dial: One of the Handiest Firefox ExtensionsNovember 13

My collection of useful extensions for Firefox is always growing and being edited, and my latest favorite extension is Speed Dial. You may be familiar with what Speed Dial does from using either the Opera or the Google Chrome browser. The extension lets you collect web sites that you visit frequently in one location so that you can easily “speed dial” your way to them. It’s a one-minute installation if you use Firefox, and well worth having.

After you install Speed Dial and restart Firefox, you can put an Add to Speed Dial icon directly on your Firefox toolbar. It’s the purple icon at the far right of the toolbar shown above.

To add a web site to your Speed Dial list, just go to the site, and use the purple Speed Dial icon to add it to your list of sites you frequently visit. There is a small black arrow at the bottom right of the icon that lets you pull down a numbered list of your Speed Dial sites.

There are several ways to get to your Speed Dial sites, and you can get there much faster than typing a URL in the address bar. My favorite is to simply use the Ctrl key on my keyboard plus the number I’ve assigned to a particular site. For example, Ctrl+1 on my keyboard will instantly pop up WebWorkerDaily.com.

Once you’ve assigned you