Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
Firefox extensions for heavy surfers
March 4th, 2009 • 2 comments
Tags: adblock plus, addons, extensions, firefox, Internet, stumbleupon, surfing, web
This could easily be mistaken for hyperbole, but that would in fact be a mistake: Firefox completely changed the experience I have on the world wide web. It is easily extensible and allows a level of customization that few other applications in general (let alone web browsers) can touch. This enables users to craft a web experience that is highly customized to the interests and habits of that user. The browser can, by the way of extensions, become a powerful tool for web developers, a home-base for social media addicts, or an incredible environment for heavy surfers. This post highlights some of the best extensions for web addicts.
Adblock Plus- The web is a much different place than it was in the ’90s. At some point, companies realized they could advertise on the web. Now, web sites will sell their entire site design off to an advertiser and convert the whole site to an ad for a week or more. You’re going to see ads that try to get your attention by being disgusting. You’ll have animated flashing ads and ads that come up on top of content forcing you to watch before you read the site. It’s the one thing about the old web I really miss. I would almost be willing to go back to the days of the solid-grey backgrounds to dispense with the plethora of annoying ads I must put up with today. Luckily, thanks to a wonderful Firefox extension called Adblock Plus that will block 99% of all that crap, you can lose the ads and still keep your pretty backgrounds. The plugin automatically updates from a list of block rules that will cover most every ad you might see. You are also free to add your own custom rules to block ads the filters might have missed. Adblock Plus is the first extension covered for a reason: it is the biggest part of reclaiming your web surfing experience.
StumbleUpon- You’ve already loaded all your favorite sites into a feed reader like Google Reader, right? In that case, you may be looking for something to do when your feed reader is empty. StumbleUpon takes your interests and delivers a cool page related to one of them with every click of the Stumble button. My favorite metaphor to explain Stumble is that it is channel surfing for the web. Of course, it is far more intelligent than channel surfing. The StumbleUpon toolbar has a thumbs up and a thumbs down button. As you Stumble, you can rate pages using the buttons. This along with the interests you have selected determine which pages you will receive. It also includes a social networking aspect. You can add friends and recommend pages to them. Those pages will come up when they are stumbling. You can add any interesting page to StumbleUpon by clicking the thumbs up button. If a page has never been stumbled before, you will be prompted to provide some information in addition to a review. It’s a really fun way to discover more of the web.
Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks)- Foxmarks has been a great way to keep bookmarks in sync across multiple computers. Link as many machines as you like to your account, and your bookmarks are always in sync on all the machines. Now, the name has changed to Xmarks and features have been added to allow users to discover new sites that may be of interest. The new features are intriguing, but the bookmark syncing alone is enough to recommend this extension to anyone who uses more than one computer. The bookmarks are available online through the web interface in case you can’t or don’t want to install the extension. You’ll never be able to get away from your bookmarks!
Delicious/Diigo- I’m covering these together because you probably only need one or the other. Both are social bookmarking sites that, like Xmarks, store links to your favorite web sites online but unlike Xmarks these services have focused on the social aspects from the beginning. Before the massive improvements made in Firefox bookmarks with the 3.0 update, I used Delicious (and it’s extension) exclusively for bookmark storage. Now, I use both. In fact, I’m currently using Firefox bookmarks, Delicious, and Diigo. Diigo is a more full-featured service but is sorely lacking in the most important part of social experiences: users. Delicious has plenty of users to make the service seem worthwhile. The extensions for the services are similar. Both let you view bookmarks stored at the site without having to navigate to the page. Both allow users to easily add sites from the browser. They also work well with Firefox’s built-in bookmarks with a setting that allows bookmarks to be duplicated in both places. Both are indispensable for users who want to share their bookmarks and find cool new sites.
Edit Middle 2 and Cybersearch- Now, the most obscure extensions covered here. These are not flashy but are very useful. Firefox 3 gave us the “Awesome Bar”—a toolbar that is significantly less stupid than its predecessors in every browser released up to that point including Firefox 2+. Now, anything you type in the location bar is searched against URLs and titles of pages in your bookmarks and history. You may notice that searches are halted if you edit letters in the middle of whatever you have typed. Edit Middle 2 fixes this strange behavior and allows search to persist even if you correct a mistake in the middle of your typing. Cybersearch allows the “Awesome Bar” to search one more source: Google. Fantastic additions to an already stellar feature.
Read It Later- You may often find yourself with stories in your feed that are going to require more time and attention than you have at the moment. Read It Later allows you to organize pages and stories such as these. It uses Firefox’s bookmarking but tags the bookmarks you create with it so that it can include them in your reading list—a list of pages you would like to read at some point. Once you have read the page, you can add it to the permanent bookmarks, add it to a number of social news and bookmarking service, or simply mark it as read removing it from your list and bookmarks. This extension also offers syncing of its bookmarks, but you won’t need that if you’re also running Xmarks. The coolest feature of Read It Later is that, upon installing it, your Google Reader will incorporate a Read It Later button next to each of your stories making it easy to mark stories from the RSS reader for later review.
Tab Mix Plus- Firefox tabs are an amazing feature the browser thrust into popularity years ago. The browser’s native implementation improves with each release, but there are still some missing features. That can all be remedied with the Tab Mix Plus extension. You will now have a range of tab options you probably never before considered but soon will be unable to live without. My favorite option is the ability to choose which tab receives focus after you close one. I prefer the opening tab since I usually want to continue surfing that page after diverging to one of the links on it.
Stop-or-Reload Button- Here’s another small and simple extension that is really worth quite a lot. You may soon find that toolbar real estate is a premium in your newly tricked-out browser. This extension reclaims the space of one button which can be devoted to something more useful. How often do you need simultaneous access to both the stop and reload buttons? (That was a rhetorical question. You never need that, of course.) You only need to stop while a page is actively loading. Otherwise, you will instead have access to the reload button.
Download Statusbar- If your travels on the ‘net end up netting you any new files on your computer, you are probably somewhat frustrated with the fact that Firefox wants to pop up a new window when you start a download. It’s annoying. More annoying still is the fact that I have to switch between two windows to track my downloads while continuing to surf. The Download Statusbar puts your downloads at the bottom of the current window in a clean little bar above the status bar. When you aren’t downloading, it goes away. It’s much more elegant than Firefox’s default download manager.
Customization tips
You may find your interface a bit bloated if you install all of these and keep their default settings. You may customize the interface by right-clicking on an empty spot on the Firefox toolbar (try between the location bar and the search bar).
From this menu, you may disable toolbars or click Customize to start rearranging toolbar buttons. I usually end up with all bars hidden except the navigation bar and the bookmark bar. If there are buttons from another bar I want to use, I click the customize option and drag those from their current bar to either the navigation bar or the bookmark bar. Then I hide the other bar to save space. If you’re a Windows user, you can drag your bookmark toolbar to the top of the window next to the menu bar (You know the one. File, Edit, etcetera.) then hide the dedicated bookmark toolbar. Of course, if you’re a Mac user and don’t use the bookmark toolbar, you can just hide it without losing anything. This will save even more space. The key here is to get as much functionality into the smallest space possible to leave the most room for the actual browsing!
I hope you enjoy these tips. These extensions have really made the significant time I spend in my browser much more enjoyable and productive. If you’d like to recommend an extension or a tip for other web junkies like yourself, just drop us a comment!
Read Digg’s top stories? Subscribe to Feeddit
February 11th, 2009 • 2 comments
Tags: digg, Feeddit, feeds, Internet, News, rss, social news, Tech
Lost In Technology has written a post on a feed I have been using for a while now called Feeddit. I like to track the top stories on Digg. However, Digg’s RSS feed is really a mess if you ask me. The biggest problem: each story’s link tag goes to the Digg page rather than that story. So, here’s the scenario. I’m surfing along through my feeds with Google Reader (check out my video tutorial). I see a Digg post I want to read. I press the ‘v’ key to open the story. This opens a new tab with the Digg page for the story. I click the title of the story, and only now do I get yet another tab to read the actual story. This may not really sound like a big deal, but when you’re staring at an unread count of 1000+ (the highest count that registers on Google Reader) knowing that a good chunk of those are Digg stories, you want to burn through them pretty quickly so that you can filter out the good stuff from the crap. Those extra clicks, page loads, and tab closings really slow the process to a crawl.
Feeddit provides a remedy to this problem and them some. The feed item’s link is now directed to the actual story. Hurray! In addition, the poster’s name is included underneath the title of the story. The Digg count is included under the summary along with the comment count. Both of these link to the Digg page for the story making it easy to participate on Digg without shoving it down your throat every single story. I always want to view the article before I comment or digg it. Feeddit gives me a feed that makes sense for that workflow.
Now, where is the reddit analog to this?
Caps return us to the days of limited Internet access
February 11th, 2009 •
Tags: bandwidth capping, cap, Internet, ISP
ISPs everywhere are making it known that they do not intend for Internet access to be unlimited. It was a popular marketing term in the days of time-limited Internet access. Everyone has seen the old AOL disks and CDs that offer 500 hours for the first month. Users hated having to count hours (and even minutes prior to that). Some ISPs realized this and started offering unlimited Internet access plans as a way to lure users away from the ISPs that limited the amount of time a user could access the service. That was fine in the days of dial-up. You could max out your 28.8kbps connection for the entire month and still transfer very little data. However, broadband brought speeds that, when used to capacity for an entire month, cost the ISPs a little more to deliver the copius amounts of data that could be transmitted. Enter bandwidth caps.
In other countries, bandwidth caps are old news, but the major US broadband providers have only begun to cap users’ monthly bandwidth allotment. Comcast instituted a cap of 250GB on its residential Internet service which began in October of last year after several years of an invisible “bandwidth ceiling.” Before the cap was instituted, there was, in fact, a cap, but no one knew exactly what it was. Even users who hit the cap would never be told exactly what line they had crossed to cause their service to be halted. It seems Comcast wanted these users to, rather than knowing the limit which they would undoubtedly reach every single month, drastically reduce their usage unaware of their actual allotment. They then decided that the Bittorrent protocol was most likely the root of their problems at which time they began throttling data transferred over the protocol. This garnered a good amount of bad publicity and drew the ire of the FCC who ruled that throttling of a particular protocol was illegal.
No one wants to try to sell a service that has previously been unlimited as “limited.” Comcast had tried every way it could to covertly reduce its bandwidth costs, but it essentially had no remaining options but to be forthright with consumers. In September, Comcast informed them their services would, as of October, be limited to 250GB monthly. This move seemed to open Pandora’s box for US terrestrial ISPs to begin instituting their own bandwidth caps. Time Warner had begun testing a 40GB monthly cap in Beaumont, Texas back in June of ’08 but only on Wednesday of last week announced expansion of the program to new cities. AT&T announced in November of last year tiered caps ranging from 20GB to 150GB. Charter just last week announced a cap of 100GB on speeds of 15mbps and slower and 250GB up to their 25mbps offering. Cellular data providers have been capping service for a while now with most currently at 5GB per month.
No one likes caps, but the consensus seems to be that Comcast’s cap is fair. I can attest that I would really have to try hard to exceed it in a typical month, and I am a pretty heavy Internet user. Time Warner’s cap is ridiculously low at 40GB. I could see even average users exceeding this cap on a regular basis, and, at $1 per GB over, they aren’t going to be very happy about it. Charter’s caps are low considering the speed. Even Comcast’s cap will become less and less reasonable as speeds increase and online video gains ubiquity. I venture a guess that, in two years time, 250GB will not serve the needs of even the average Internet user. We have to assess the probability of Comcast increasing the cap to keep up with the times. Barring some competition from a new national broadband ISP offering net-neutral and unmetered access, it seems unlikely they would increase the cap.
Another issue to consider is that, when bandwidth is capped, increased speeds are no longer really a selling point. An increase in speed effectively reduces the portion of the month for which you will have access if you fully utilize that speed. ISPs will undoubtedly continue to market new speed increases as a selling point never pointing out this fact. Deceptive? Sure. Illegal? Doubtful.
As consumers become more aware of the limitations, content providers who depend on this bandwidth to connect with customers (like Hulu or Netflix‘s Instant Watch) will have to scale back offerings to fit within consumer limitations. We won’t ever be streaming Blu-ray movies from Netflix on a 250GB cap whether or not speeds will support it. This will stifle growth, innovation, and creativity among Internet content providers.
We have essentially returned to the days of being ever-mindful of our Internet usage patterns. Now, instead of counting hours, we count bits. The days of carefree Internet usage are most likely over. Here’s hoping for an ISP in shining armor to deliver us great speed unfettered at a reasonable price. It’s our only hope.
chi.mp invites for the best 5 comments
January 26th, 2009 • 10 comments
Tags: chi.mp, identity, Internet, openid, Social Web, web
Chi.mp is a service that aggregates your online identity merging your activity from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and others. They are also an OpenID provider which means, upon registration, you will automatically have a single login for the multitude of sites that support OpenID. I will give away a chi.mp invite to each of the 5 readers who leave the best suggestions of geeky things you’d like to learn how to do. This could be something like installing a Linux distro or configuring port forwarding on a router, or it could be a little more hardcore like tweaking the CSS in a WordPress theme or something geekier still. Make sure it’s related to gaming, the Internet, or tech in some way. I’m not going to post any cross-stitch patterns. (Sorry!) Please leave your e-mail address intact (I have a plugin that will obscure it from harvesters). While you’re here, check out some of my other posts and subscribe if you like what you see. Thanks!
Update: One of the invites has already been claimed. Four still remain!