If you’re like me, you’re probably skipping between various Google services all the time. If you use Firefox, and are looking for a simple, customizable and, above all, fast way to access Google web sites from either a drop-down menu or a toolbar, you should check out GButts, a nifty add-on with a silly name.
To get started with GButts, install the add-on from the Mozilla Add-ons site and restart Firefox (it’s compatible with Firefox 2 and later). You won’t see any changes yet, because you need to configure GButts and add the drop-down menu or toolbar to your browser. First, go to Tools -> Add-ons and open GButts’ Preferences page. You’ll be presented with a huge list of Google services, as well as a few configuration options:
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To celebrate this week’s launch of the superb Firefox 3.5, we’ve put together a collection of the WebWorkerDaily team’s favorite Firefox extensions. You can subscribe to our collection here; as we discover useful new add-ons, we’ll add to it over time. The great thing about add-on collections is that you can pick and choose which add-ons to install, so if you don’t agree with all of our choices, you can just pick the ones that you like.
Here are the add-ons that made our collection (they’re all compatible with Firefox 3.5):
These are our favorites, but if we’re missing any, please let us know in the comments.
As the number of sites we all use grows, our personal profile information is increasingly scattered across the web. If you make a connection with people on one site, it’s often hard to quickly find out if they use any of the other sites you use, too. Fortunately, a nifty Firefox add-on called Identify makes it easy to access all of a person’s available profiles just by hitting Alt-I on any of his or her publicly accessible profile pages (a Twitter profile page, blog, Flickr stream, Friendfeed page, Digg bio, etc).
This add-on tackles the same problem addressed by web app GizaPage (covered by Scott last week), but goes about it in a different way. GizaPage only works when the person you’re looking for has set up a GizaPages account, while Identify should, in theory, work for anyone.
As an example, here’s Identify on my Twitter homepage: Read the rest of this entry »
One of the great things about Firefox is the huge number of useful add-ons available to customize and streamline your browsing experience. One such extension is the brand-new Search Site extension, which lets you easily search the site you’re on for a word or phrase.
The normal method to search a site is to use the “site:” parameter in a search engine query. Searching for “Twitter site:webworkerdaily.com” in Google will return all of the pages on WebWorkerDaily that discuss Twitter, for example. I use this type of search all the time, but it does require a little typing.
Search Site gives you a couple of ways to simplify the process. Firstly, it adds a green magnifying glass button to your regular Firefox search bar, which searched the site you’re currently on when you click it.
Search Site button added to Firefox search bar
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Last year, I covered the very useful Firefox extension Read It Later. It’s the recipient of an award from Mozilla for the easy way it lets you make a note of web pages of interest that you don’t have time to read now, but want to read later. It’s still a Firefox extension, though, and even though you can install it quickly, the installation alone might keep some busy web workers from using it. So I noted with interest Josh Lowensohn’s post on a new service called I Need to Read This, where the service lets you save pages for reading later, but uses bookmarklets that you can get going with immediately.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
