Lazarus Saves Your Bacon
The next entry in my series of Top Firefox Addons has saved my bacon on a number of occasions.
Imagine the following situation. You’ve spent half an hour in your favourite webmail client, meticulously writing an email, making sure that it is completely word-perfect. After reading it over for the third time, you decide it’s ready and you anxiously press the send button. Just as you breath a sigh of relief, “Error: Cannot connect to the server!” What?! Quick click back! The form is EMPTY! Aaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhhhh! This is where Lazarus comes to the rescue.
Lazarus: Form Recovery continuously encrypts and stores everything you write as you type it. A simple user interface allows you to quickly bring back any content you lost due to a server error, browser crash, or inadvertently hitting the back button. All it takes is a single click. The current version includes 2048-bit RSA and 256-bit AES hybrid encryption, so you can be sure your data stays secure.
Lazarus works on ordinary web forms, WYSIWYG editors, and even AJAXified comment boxes, and will save you from pretty much any given server, browser, or connection problems that might otherwise cause you to lose your work, or that really pithy blog comment you struggled on for over an hour.
It’s not the kind of addon that you use (or even think about) every day, but when you need it, Lazarus will be there. Just don’t forget you installed it, because it won’t be as helpful once you throw your laptop out of the window. Check out the info page, or simply:
Top Firefox Addons
Back in the good old days, Opera was my browser of choice. It wasn’t long before someone knocked me on the head, and I woke up to the world of Firefox. The browser war has been heating up over the last 18 months, and Google’s Chrome has the potential to win in my books. Whilst I love the speed and simplicity of it, the one thing that keeps me planted well and truly in the Firefox kingdom is the vast array of addons.
Yes, shh, I can hear you. No need to yell at the internets. I will tell you which addons make up the amazing collection that keeps me firmly rooted. Rather than one giant post though, I’ll focus on a single addon per post over the next few weeks. Keep this page bookmarked as I’ll update it as more posts appear.
My Top Firefox Addons
Every time I install Firefox on a new machine, I go through and add every one of the above addons. Until Chrome can provide alternatives for most of them, I can’t see myself switching. Of course as always, I could be wrong? Is Chrome already the next best thing, or have I missed some addons which would transform my world?
I Want My Photos Please
As bandwidth and download limits sky rocket, rich media is taking over the world. Media and entertainment companies are (mostly) embracing this trend, but there are ever increasing opportunities for users to contribute. Flickr is arguably the most ideal way to host and share photos and videos, with the site’s tour making this claim:
Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.
As I followed the “Magical Feature Tour”, I continuously asked myself, “Why on Earth are all my photos in Facebook?!”
Ok, so that really is a rhetorical question. The power of social networking is huge, and to get anyone to check out another site it would have to be a pretty amazing photo of me exposing Hannah Montana’s real identity. (Sorry folks, I’m not that lucky!) So we have to live with Facebook’s flaws, including the lack of automatic tagging and low resolution images. The real problem though isn’t the photos I upload, but other people’s photos of me.
Back in the olden days, when someone took a photo of me on their Sony Mavica camera, they’d just whip out the floppy and I’d take a copy. As technology advanced and you could take more than 10 photos a night, we progressed to sharing the weekend’s snaps on a compact disk. It worked great, and means I still have those photos of me dressed up as Elvis from when I was 16. (Yes, this is full resolution!)
So what are my options today? I could email all of my friends and ask them to email the photos back to me one by one. That’d take waaaayyy too long, and I don’t necessarily want to have that level of contact with some of my Facebook friends. I could go through every photo, right click, Save Image As…, etc, but that doesn’t sound like my idea of a fun evening!
Well I’ve discovered FacePAD, a Firefox Add-on which is a Facebook album downloader. Once you install it (making sure you have default download location configured for Firefox), you just right click on a link to an album and choose “Download Album with FacePAD”.
The extension will whiz into action, and download each of the photos in the album. UPDATE: So it turns out it only downloads the photos on the first page of the album, and you have to repeat the right click action for each subsequent page. The files will be in your preconfigured download directory, helpfully named with random numbers, and placed in the middle of the rest of your files.
Mmm yeah, it’s pretty rough. Instead of asking for donations, perhaps the developer could spend some of his time cleaning things up a bit. However it does what I need, and I now have a simpler way of getting a copy of my embarrassing memories. I’m not sure that it’s going to be enough to motivate me to do it regularly, but is there anything else I can do?
Bookmarks Are Back With Xmarks
Since the first popular web browser was released in 1993, bookmarks have been a fact of the internet that keep us organised and cause us frustration at the same time. Originally when the web was a tangled mess, and the world was still using AltaVista, bookmarks were necessary for you to find your GeoCities site or your favourite web comic. These days we have RSS readers to find the latest updates, GeoCities has closed its doors, and it’s usually faster to Google something than to type the address in the bar. (I do this all the time, including Googling for Google!)
The main problem with bookmarks that has existed since they were born, is the issue of keeping them organised. These days I use multiple computers, with a number of different browsers, and my bookmarks get out of control. Why would anyone want to use bookmarks anymore? In his post titled “Do We Still Need Bookmarks?“, Jono answers this question with these insightful use cases:
- The Todo List. “I want to look at this, but not right now.” Someone gave me a link to a cool video about robots, but I don’t want to watch it right now, because I’m in the middle of something. Or, there’s a web form I need to fill out, but I don’t have the information I need yet. I bookmark the page because there’s an action I want to take later.
- Sharing. “Oh man, this is funny!” This time, I found the cool robot video, and I want to show it to someone. I found a hilarious picture, or a news article that proves I was right in that argument we had a week ago. Either way, the value is in the sharing. I bookmark it so that later on I can give the link to others.
- Frequently Used. “I want to get back here fast.” The page where I view my bank account status, the central documentation page for the project I’m working on, or a hub from which I often start surfing. I bookmark it because I expect to return often and I want to get there fast.
- The Research Collection. “This fits right in to something I’m working on.” I’m a history teacher, preparing a lesson plan, and I’m collecting resources about World War 1. Or, I’m a political blogger, and I’m collecting links about all the ways my Least Favorite Politician has screwed things up. I bookmark pages because I want to add them to my growing collection of data on a certain topic.
This is exactly how I use my bookmarks, as well as everyone I know. We’re all just stuck copying our bookmarks from one computer to another and importing into the various browsers we use. What else can we do? Call Captain Planet and the Planeteers? No, they’re too busy fighting Dr. Blight and Looten Plunder. What we need is Xmarks!
Formally known as Foxmarks, this service lives in the cloud and performs automatic synchronization of bookmarks between all of your computers and browsers. What evolved as a Firefox Add-on, Xmarks now supports the top 4 leading browsers today with a range of plugins and native applications. As it’s in the cloud you have the benefit of your bookmarks being backed up and available wherever you have internet access.
“It sounds ok, but I’m not convinced,” a random reader might say. Well that’s just the start, look at this impressive list of features:
- A simple web interface to access and organise your bookmarks.
- The ability to define different profiles for home, work, etc., to filter which bookmarks are available where.
- Secure sync of stored passwords between when you use Xmarks with Firefox.
- Mobile bookmarks are supported with a special mobile interface directly in your browser.
- The website has a cool blue colour scheme (I like blue).
Now to be honest, the mobile interface isn’t very strong. It’s not a genuine replacement for native bookmarks, but apparently there’s an iPhone application in the works.
Xmarks is my number 1 favourite browser plugin ever. The first thing I do when I use a new computer or browser is download the appropriate plugin, and pull down my bookmarks and passwords. The process usually takes less than a minute, and I have an exact copy of my toolbar links and all of my saved login information. Any changes I make will be synchronized immediately, which makes it perfect for the “Todo List” style of links. For the most important things I’ll place them on the toolbar so that I see them right away when I get home. Best of all, it works over HTTP so you can use Xmarks behind a proxy.
A year ago I would have agreed that bookmarks were dying off. With the power of the cloud, Xmarks brings back bookmarks, big time!
Quick Tip: Secure Firefox with a Master Password
When I first found this out, I was shocked. By default, Firefox gives users the ability to view a list of all your saved usernames and passwords, as well as the sites they’re associated with. Check it out for yourself by going to Tools > Options… > Security > Saved Passwords.
Not a good thing. What if someone jumped onto my computer when I forget to lock it? They’ll find out that my passwords are cooldude, password, and ilikepink, which will be really embarrassing. Luckily, there’s an easy fix. Go to Tools > Options… > Security, check the “Use a master password” box and set a (strong) password. Periodically, and whenever you startup the browser, you’ll be asked for this password. Without it, prying eyes won’t be able to see your password list or automatically login to Facebook and pretend to be you.
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