March 22, 2006

Glitter Presentation 06

‘Glitter’ is at Earlham this year and this is my presentation. It’s entitled ‘Firefox Tools for “Jazzing Up” Your Web Research’ in the schedule but I like my title better.

[Does anyone know what the G.L.I.T.T.E.R acronym stands for?]

Stop Faffing, use Firefox :

the Tools you Need for the Research you Do

We’ll cover a host of useful Firefox tools for doing research on the web.

  • Web Research Tools: such as
    • del.icio.us — social bookmarking
    • Scrapbook — capture and annotate web pages
    • Sage — RSS reader
    • mention Quicknote
  • Blogging tools :
    • JustBlogIt! — brings up Movable Type interface with link to site. Easy to add comments and save to blog.
    • Spellbound — excellent spell checker for any web form.
    • Performancing — a sophisticated interface to any blog which supports XMLrpc.
  • Management tools :
    • Adblock — filters ads from within web pages
    • SessionSaver (saves tabbed browsing sessions)
  • Web Development :
    • Web Developer (all you ever need for web work)
    • Colorzilla (get colors from any web page)
    • FireFTP

Also :

  • configuring with Tools ->Options
    • block popup windows — allow Moodle to pop up windows
  • Downloading extensions & configuring
    • Select Tools -> Extensions.
    • Click Get more extensions
    • Search for the extension you want and click install (you may have to enable FF to install from this site)
    • Click install
    • restart ForeFox
  • customizing FireFox toolbars
  • tabbed browsing — ctrl-click to start in new tab.
  • Profiles. All local FF data saved in profile folder:
    • default location : C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.vop
    • can copy this to a more tractable location (eg My Documents\Firefox) and select profile at startup with firefox.exe -P
    • why do this? Easy to copy office desktop configuration to external drive.
    • Public Lab configuration runs FF from local m/c and profile hoicked in from user’s home drive — H:\firefox
  • Can run FF off a USB memory stick.

Writing for the Web

I find Dreamweaver just too cumbersome. I use jedit which is a Java based editor so it’s totally platform independent. But you’ll need the Java client running on your machine: windows java 1.5 , Mac OS X has Java built in. I use the very excellent Xilize version 2.0 which allows you to create xhtml pages without all the associated markup ( download here ). Tables are a cinch, the markup is a superset of Textile2 so I can just paste it straight into a MovableType blog entry and viola valid xhtml is produced. Or you can produce whole pages and web sites.

We all want to avoid death by powerpoint so what better way than to display a slideshow in the browser. Eric Meyer’s S5 is a great way to do this. Here’s an example of an S5 based slideshow.

Web Research

Firefox tools which help you organise your web research:

  • for bookmarking, think del.ico.us — central repository, tagging makes grouping bookmarks easy, social tagging makes finding other associated bookmarks easy
  • for commenting on a number of web sites, think blogging with Performancing or JustBlogIt!
  • for commenting within a web page and marking up, think Scrapbook

How the Firefox browser functions as an almost complete research platform:

new_diagram_500.jpg

Del.icio.us

In a nutshell :

  • Social bookmarking service — save all your bookmarks on the web,
  • tag them for easy retrieval,
  • access or create from any internet connected machine,
  • explore other’s tags to find relevant material

the FF extension makes the whole process a lot more straightforward.

Scrapbook

You want to do more than just bookmark an interesting site. You want to make comments inside the page to reuse.
In a nutshell:

  • capture whole content of important page.
  • mark important passages
  • insert inline comments
  • insert block comments
  • save in folders (in profile)

Blogging

JustBlogIt!

Enables easy commentary on other blog or web sites. Trackbacks are a cinch.

  • open up sage . choose Social Software : E-literate.
  • select a page from right hand pane
  • RT-click and JustBlogIt. Note trackback ping. This will ping the e-Literate site that I have made a blog entry.

Performancing

The Performancing extension Is a powerful blog editor masquerading as a built-in Firefox application. You can set it up to make entries to almost any blog, both commercial ones such as Typepad or Blogger and locally hosted blog systems such as Movable Type, WordPress and Textpattern.

Consult the handbook for how to set it up. The only tricky part is setting up your server ‘API URL’. This is the means by which the editor communicates with the blog s/w to authenticate, bring up a list of categories and posts and allow you to add & delete entries remotely.

  • For Movable Type the default setting looks like : http://myserver.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
  • Earlham’s MT blog server is at http://www.earlham.edu/moveabletype and so the API URL (for both Performacing and JustBlogIt!) becomes http://www.earlham.edu/moveabletype/mt-xmlrpc.cgi.
  • This will obviously vary with you installation and the blog s/w you use.

If you’re not wedded to Textile or trackbacks like what I am, this is probably the best blog editor you could ask for.

Spell checker

Spellbound is still in development and is not on the Firefox extensions site. There is a discussion about it in the MozillaZine Forums and here’s the Install Spellbound Dev

This is only compatible with FF version 1.5 so make sure you have the latest issue.

Management Tools

Adblock

While Firefox handles popup windows Adblock blocks ads from within the browser. You can block any graphic ad, an “iFrame” and flash ad. You can also ‘whitelist’ a page or site to make sure it’s not blocked.

Session Saver

Have you ever had to zoom home to cook the evening meal and so closed off Firefox and lost all the tabs you had open? Session saver to the rescue. It automatically saves all open tabs and reopens them on startup. Not only that, you can sync your saved sessions to a FTP or Webdav host and share them with another machine (I have not tried this)

Web Development

Web Developer

Is simply a must for anyone who creates web sites. Very often you want to figure how a cool web site is constructed or try to suss out glitches on your own site. Dreamweaver is no help here — you need Web Developer. There are so many features that you might want to display it as a toolbar or you can use it via rt-click context menu. Features include :

  • Disable things like javascript on the viewed page
  • CSS — you can load the CSS used by the page and edit it live to change the appearance of the page you’re looking at. You can then save the changes into a local file.
  • Images — find broken images and do all sorts of useful things with images on the page
  • Outline — will outline block level elements on the page. Very useful.
  • Resize — how does my page look at 800×600? 1024 × 768?
  • a multitude of others — Information, Miscellaneous, Tools, View Source etc

Download latest version 1.0.2

Colorzilla

This fills the only remaining niche unoccupied by web developer, that of color sensing. What colours work well together? What background colour did the latest design in css Zen Garden(The Beauty in CSS Design)”http://www.csszengarden.com/ use?

Colorzilla not only gives you the color you’re looking at but can also show the CSS element name and size in pixels. Of course, you can copy the color pointed at.

FireFTP

Is a very useful FTP client application which can operate as a tab or separate window.

RSS editor

Do you have a web site that you maintain and you want to create an RSS feed for it, rather like a blog or CMS site? RSS editor is the best (the only) RSS file generator I have come across. You need to understand something about RSS but the creation of the xml file is wonderfully straightforward.

Posted by markp at March 22, 2006 01:31 PM