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Transmute – Migrate Bookmarks Between Your Browsers

Saikat Basu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:01:30 +0000

Call Transmute a bookmark ‘synchronization’ tool. Transmute calls itself the ultimate bookmarks converter. Both claims need to hold true for filling in a job that’s a result of prolific web browsing and using more than one browser to do it.

It’s safe to assume that you have more than one browser installed on your system. I have five. Though we may not use more than two, all of us suffer from a bit of browser fancy. As soon as developers announce a launch of a browser that promises to speed up the web for us, we click on the download link. That’s not a problem, but keeping the same set of bookmarks across the browsers is.

Xmarks is a nifty solution to migrate bookmarks across the world. But for now, it supports Firefox and IE (with Safari in Mac OS). The one for Google Chrome is in the works. The browser that’s missing is Opera. That leaves us with a job half done. Bookmark syncing using Delicious and its bookmarklet tool is one roundabout. But it’s public by default and you have to log-in to change it to private. So, it’s still not as easy a click.

Transmute attempts to fill the gap by letting us migrate bookmarks across all the browsers.

Why Is it Such a Headache to Migrate Bookmarks?

Not very much so, but every browser has its own way of storing its bookmarks. Most bookmarks are stored as HTML files. Opera uses an .adr format. Firefox 3.5+ too differs in that respect as it stores its bookmarks in a Places.sqlite file which is a database file. The bookmarks.html files that used to hold all the links in the earlier versions had been discontinued from Firefox 3 onwards.

Does this create problems in migration of your bookmarks to other browsers still using the HTML formats? No, because Firefox, just like all the others has an import export utility under the Bookmarks Library that allows you to convert the database format to the HTML one for it to be picked up by the other browsers.

The imported bookmarks also get added to the existing bookmarks usually in a separate folder with the name of the browser that was the source. For instance, imported Firefox bookmarks get located in a folder that’s marked Netscape. Imported bookmarks in Chrome get added under Other Bookmarks. You can then manually shift the bookmarks around into any other root folder.

Next, you have to manually weed out the duplicates by going through each and every link. This is where the headache can start.

Transmute Offers Better (& Quicker) Control Over Bookmarks

Why such a name? Is it because it does the job of bookmark transfer ‘silently’ and without fuss? Perhaps, because the Transmute interface is hassle free.

You have two dropdowns – Source and Target. You can use the path field to select the location of the bookmarks file for the individual browsers in case you ever changed the default location.
Use the dropdowns to select the respective source and target browsers. There are 12 supported browsers and I am guessing that should cover most of what the world uses. The 13th placed XBEL format (XML Bookmark Exchange Language) covers a few other browsers like Galeon, Arora and Midori which use this one to store their bookmarks.

Transmute gives you two more options to migrate bookmarks – Overwrite Collections and Backup Collections.
- Duplication can be handled if you select the overwrite option as it will plant a fresh copy of the bookmark links (but will also remove the older but unique bookmarks in the target).
- Backup collections are a safety net in case something goes wrong with the conversion process and you want your old bookmark collection back. By default Transmute timestamps and backs up your bookmark collections before changes are made, providing extra safety.
- To restore the old order, just browse to the bookmark folder location and rename the time stamped backup file to the default file name.
Close the source and target browsers and press Start. An alert box pops up and with your agreement the transfer begins. A preview window is the last stop before the conversion starts.

And finishes! That’s it; you can migrate bookmarks across multiple browsers without the hassle of import and export.

Transmute also comes in a PRO flavor giving some extra bookmark selection controls and co-ordination with services like Google Bookmarks and Delicious. But for the simple task of keeping all my browsers with the same bookmarks, the free version more than stands up. If you hate installing things, then there’s a portable option too.

Having the same bookmarks across all your browsers is such a basic need and keeping them all updated with each other is where Transmute steps in with a speedy click.

Transmute v1.63 is Windows only and requires Microsoft .NET Framework. It may also run on Linux and Mac OS X with Mono Framework 2.0 or higher installed.

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Quiet Read Saves Weblinks For Later Reading [Mac]

Jackson Chung — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:01:06 +0000

I’m a huge web geek and I spend hours, literally, crawling the Internet for cool apps and ideas for my next article. Sometimes I’ll stumble upon a really great application, then another one and another. Before I know it, my browser is filled with opened tabs and Safari is hogging up all the memory.

I would use a social bookmarking website but honestly, I don’t find them very useful since I’m almost always on my MacBook and I hardly use another computer. In this case, the perfect solution would be a desktop app to store all my links of interest so that I can go through them slowly after I’ve settled down.

In a previous article, I’ve detailed the steps needed to use Stacks to store URL’s so that I can browse them later. This minimizes bookmarking clutter since it provides an alternative location to temporarily store bookmarks. The problem is, I tend to forget about the URLs after a while. The Stack doesn’t exactly yell out, “Hey, look at me! You have 20+ sites yet to read here!” I needed a more centralized solution that would display the number of sites I have saved but haven’t yet read.

That’s exactly what I found with Quiet Read.

This app sits quietly (no pun intended) in the menu bar awaiting links. Whenever I’m in the middle of a power search (you know, those frantic searches where you open lots and lots of webpages in the hopes of finding the thing you’re looking for but hardly ever do) and I think that I’ve found a seriously awesome app, I’ll drag the link and drop it over Quiet Read.

The indicator refreshes automatically to display the number of items it currently holds. That’s one of my favorite features; I don’t get that when using Stacks. In fact, nothing else happens whenever I add a link into Quiet Read, proving it to be really very unobtrusive, thus permitting me to carry on with my power search or whatever it is I was doing.

Now, allow me to elaborate. What exactly can you store in Quiet Read? Basically, any web link in almost any form can be saved. I can click and drag a link from any browser; in this case, I’m using Safari, and drop it in the menu bar icon. Links are listed chronologically, not alphabetically — which again, is really great because I can determine the order in which they were saved. I can also click and drag the favicon from the address bar and drop it into Quiet Read. Additionally, any highlighted (selected) URL can also be dragged into the app.

Now, maybe I feel that some of the URL titles don’t really work for me. Some of them aren’t very descriptive. Well, Quiet Read allows me to edit them by Option-clicking on a title. When I’m done reading a saved site, I simply click on the menu bar icon, select the title and press Command-Delete to remove it from the list. Easy peasy.

I like Quiet Read because of its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t do much more than it’s supposed to. No frills — just the way I like it.

Quiet Read is completely free and runs on Snow Leopard.

What do you use to put aside websites to read later? Bookmarks? Read It Later Firefox extension? Tell us in the comments.

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AM-Deadlink: Clean Up Your Bookmarks by Removing Dead Links And Duplicates

Saikat Basu — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:00:22 +0000

Do you remember the last time you ventured into the deep dark depths of your bookmarks folder and took along your broom? Tell someone that you regularly check the health of your bookmarks, and you will be labeled as a freak with a compulsive disorder. But here’s where you need to look them in the eye and call it a good organizational habit. Which it actually is.

Bookmarks gather by the dozen each day and they gather dust just as quickly. Today, a browser like Firefox offers tagging as a means to clean up bookmarks. Subject specific folders have always existed to bunch similar bookmarks together.

But bad habits reign supreme and usually bookmarks end up in a haphazard array. A lot of sites have their fifteen minutes of fame and then disappear. But the bookmark is left behind like a gravestone marker. A lot many sites update their favicons or change over to a new URL. But the bookmark remains stuck as a misdirected pointer on the web highway.

The broom to clean up bookmarks and bring them up to date by eliminating the dead ones is called AM-Deadlink. The four browser bookmarks it helps sweep are of Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla and Firefox (FF ver. 3+ with an alternate method).

AM-Deadlink detects the dead links and duplicates, and marks them for removal. It can also clean up duplicates in comma-separated and tab-limited text files and saved URL files. Also, AM-Deadlink downloads the current favicons for all your Favorites and Bookmarks for the four browsers.

AM-Deadlink is a 1.3MB free download. Its operation is fairly straightforward. Let’s see it in action.

Sweeping away the dead bookmarks

On install, AM-Deadlink provides an option to install itself as a normal Windows program or as a portable program on your thumb drive. The second option is for those who want to carry the freeware around on their flash drives and use it to clean up multiple computers. In other words, it’s a portable app!
The interface is simple with a dropdown to select the browser of choice. Selection of the browser triggers the program to list out the bookmarks for the specific browser.
Proceed to check the bookmarks with a single click. The time required for complete checking will of course depend on the number of bookmarks you have piled up. The software went through the 360 odd IE bookmarks in approximately 8 minutes and alerted the completion with a sound.The Status column shows the state, whether the link is lost, it’s healthy or there is some other error with the page. You can sort the errors to the top the list and individually re-check them by opening them in an internal preview or in a browser.
After validating the links, you can choose to delete the faulty links. Sorting the errors on top also enables to delete them all together.
Favicons can also be similarly checked, updated or deleted.
AM-Deadlink searches for duplicate bookmarks which is a common affair for most of us.
It’s always good to have a backup copy in case you delete the wrong bookmarks. AM-Deadlink makes safe your browser bookmarks from your itchy-delete-happy fingers by providing a backup option in a zip file.

Alternate Method for Firefox 3+

AM-Deadlink does a good job with IE and Opera but falters slightly when it comes to the latest version of Firefox. You have to go around a bit because the latest version of Firefox uses a database rather than a single URL file to store all the bookmarks.

The alternate method involves using the Export HTML feature in Firefox’s Bookmark Organizer and processing this HTML file through AM-Deadlink. The cleaned up HTML file can then be imported into a fresh bookmarks folder (importing it into the older bookmarks will create duplicates).

The bit of manual labor with the latest edition of Firefox is the only slight flaw in an otherwise impressive free program. Also, apart from the Help file, AM-Deadlink does not really make it clear how to go about the Firefox cleanup job.

But the end, AM-Deadlink does a dandy job of cleaning up the waste that lies in our bookmarks folder. Now, it’s only left to us to pay those links an occasional visit.

AM-Deadlink (ver.3.3) is supported on Win9x/Me/NT4/2000/2003/XP/Vista.

Image Credit: P/\UL

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iCyte: Capture Web Pages And Highlight Text In A Flash

Dean Sherwin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:00:11 +0000

At some point, many of us will have to do some research, trawl through dozens of websites or like me; write an article. Have you ever found yourself with about fifteen tabs opened in your browser; all of which containing snippets of information that you hope to compile into something useful? Just keeping track of all those tabs is difficult enough – and printing them all off? Forget about that.

iCyte is a browser add-on that allows you to capture web pages, highlight text and save it to your account.

First, go to iCyte.com and click the big ‘Create an Account button’. Then, ignoring the option to create an account, select your browser from the left side of the screen. It is supported by Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 & 8. Sadly, there is no Chrome option available.

When the download begins, you’ll be asked to close all browser windows. You have to do this in order for the installation to complete.

When it has done so, re-open the browser. It should automatically take you to the iCyte website where you’ll be asked to create an account. If it doesn’t automatically bring you their, go to the ‘Create an Account’ page where you first downloaded the add-on and create an account there. As you can see from the screenshot, it only needs a few pieces of information to capture web pages and there is no confirmation e-mail that needs to be retrieved. Once you have done this, you can begin using iCyte.

Go to the web page you would like to save. If there is text on the page of particular relevant to you then highlight it using the mouse as you would if your were going to Copy & Paste. While the text is highlighted, click the iCyte button along the top of the browser in the iCyte toolbar. A window will open.

Using this window, enter in the name of the project. So for example, if you’re researching flight prices enter in ‘Holiday Planning’ or if you’re researching an essay, enter in the title of said essay. If you already have an existing project you want to add to, click the arrow to the side of the text entry bar and select the appropriate project. After that, you can enter in tags and notes about the web page you are saving. When you’re happy with everything, click ‘Save’ and you’ve captured the web page.

To view the web pages and highlighted text you have saved, click on the ’View Cytes’ button in the iCyte toolbar. This will open up a sidebar in the browser with a list of all your different projects and ‘Cytes’. They’re easily recognisable because of the screenshots but you can use the search bar to find one quickly. In the screenshot, you can see that I have saved a Cyte of the MakeUseOf.com homepage and a couple of my personal blog.

By clicking on one of these ‘Cytes’, the browser will load the Cyte in its full form. The quality is amazing and it looks just as it does when you viewing the actual web page. All of the links and buttons in the Cyte are fully clickable and will load their respective pages in a new tab. Along the top of the Cyte, there is an option to ‘View Live’. This will bring you to the original page of the Cyte.

All in all, iCyte is a great tool for those who research a lot and need somewhere to store all their information without printing off reams of pages. Do you know a similar tool? Cyte it in the comments!

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NetRocket Beta – Mission Control For Your Bookmarks

Saikat Basu — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:00:40 +0000

Have you visited your bookmarks folder recently? Are you feeling flabbergasted that you collected so many bookmark-worthy ‘riches’ with the expressed intention of using them? But of course, now they are gathering dust as you never got around to it.

When the web gives us a great site or a web service to enjoy at every corner, bookmarking is habit-forming. What is not is the follow-up. The site I bookmarked just last week is lost in the maze after enjoying its 15 seconds of fame.

Recognizing this human failing and for the sake of information management, web services offering bookmark-management solutions have sprung up. The other trend is towards sharing bookmarks i.e. social bookmarking. Believe me, these are serious apps for what might look like a trivial side product of browsing.

NetRocket is all about bookmarks (and a bit of social bookmarking). That’s pretty obvious if you check the name of the website. But unlike other bookmark managers, NetRocket goes further by also being a bookmark scheduling service.

How does NetRocket go beyond the bookmark and tag?

NetRocket’s ambit includes three features that cover up for our bookmark hoarding follies. Yes, we can continue to store our bookmarks but we can now schedule reminder alerts to message us that something needs to be read. A Scheduled Items list come with forcing features like recurring reminders and expiration dates. We can also postpone our website visits for a less busy day by putting the bookmarks in a queue that can be found in a To View list.

NetRocket operates via two browser toolbar buttons. But the engine of the service lies in the options that can be found in each users NetRocket account.

The parts that make up NetRocket?

Register to create an account with the NetRocket bookmark manager. That’s a simple username, password combo without any email verification.
Install browser toolbar buttons for your preferred browser. The browser support includes Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari, or Opera. Chrome is missing from the list. Individual instructions and links are given for each. In each case, two buttons get added to the browser toolbar – add to NetRocket and my netRocket. Let’s do it with Opera.

Log in to NetRocket. The first time user will be greeted with an option to fill up his account with some NetRocket supplied bookmarks covering categories like technology, sports, news, media, and shopping. Select and launch your rocket!

NetRocket’s Mission Control is the nerve center for all your bookmark managing activities. Filter views by opting to display all bookmarks or just the personal or business ones. The Search My Bookmarks isto pinpoint any one from the mass. There’s also an alert on the side letting you know what’s left to view and what’s scheduled.

The Scheduled Items panel and To View panel are the focus of NetRocket’s utility. NetRocket allows you to set scheduling reminders which prod you gently through either email alerts or recurring/one-off labels on your account page. New bookmarks can be added to the list, details added, edited or deleted. Multiple items can be selected for removal using checkbox selection.

The To View panel is for archiving bookmarks for catching them later. Bookmarks can be added by clicking the Add Item button located on top of the panels.

The Add a New Item box is for entering the URL and tagging the new bookmark. All bookmarks can be kept private for your eyes only. The bookmarks in this panel remain active for three months unless extended from the panel itself. The expiration date gets extended by 3 days.

You can save the bookmark permanently in the system by pressing an Approve button.
For every new item, Recurring Options can be arranged around a lot of time settings.
Every bookmark enters the Full List. Here it can be searched for or retrieved at any time. Status indicators show whether the bookmark is a part of the Scheduled Items or the To View list.

The Tag Cloud is created from the user specified tags for the bookmarked URLs. To locate a bookmark, click on a tag to bring up a list of all bookmarks tagged with that word. Bookmarks imported from another browser take on the generic imported tag.

This is a brief overview of NetRocket’s bookmarking utility. What’s great about is the scheduling service which literally never lets us forget a bookmark. And if we care to turn off the alerts, the expiration limits stops the bookmark population from exploding. As a social bookmark manager, its success will depend on the herd. But even for private all-location use, it has the potential to get itself a bookmark of its own.

Will you? Let us know about the features you liked in NetRocket (Beta) and some features you wish it had.

Image Credit: The Shopping Sherpa

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Manage Your Bookmarks & Reading List with Instapaper

David Pierce — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:00:47 +0000

Instapaper is an application we’ve covered before here on MakeUseOf – Abhijeet even featured it as one of “4 Awesome Tools to Save Pages For Reading Later.” Instapaper is a great tool for saving pages and reading them later, but it’s also got the potential to be so much more.

Instapaper has, over the last several months, become my only source of bookmarks – I’ve ditched Diigo, which I loved; I’ve ditched Evernote, which I still use for everything else. Everything I find on the Web that I want for later now goes into Instapaper, which was made possible by some fantastic updates to the site, and more importantly, to the companion iPhone application.

Instapaper is a winner right from the sign-up. It can take all of two seconds to sign up – you don’t need to specify a password, or verify anything. Just pick a username, a password (only if you want one), and you’re set!

Then, drag a bookmarklet called “Read Later” from the Instapaper site to your bookmarks bar in any (did you hear me say any?) Web browser. From then on, any time you click the “Read Later” bookmarklet, the page you’re currently on gets saved by Instapaper. A little window pops up to tell you “Saved!” and then goes away – it’s simple, unobtrusive, and darned fast.

Once you’ve saved a few pages (or a few hundred, like me), go to the Instapaper website. From there, you can launch any of the pages you saved, read them in a text-only version, or send them to the Archive (better than deleting them, because they’re still available if you want them later – and with no storage limit, who cares?).

You can sort your pages into as many folders as you want (another new feature that makes having tons of bookmarks a whole lot easier), and then read through them one by one. For instance, I have three folders: one called “Multimedia,” for things like videos to watch and songs to download, one called “Mobile Reading” for text-only pages I can read anywhere, and “for Computer” for things like apps to try and sites to check out. Your folders can be anything you want, and sorting your pages into them is easy – just click the folder icon next to any given bookmark.

Instapaper allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of websites, if you want to pull them directly into your reading list – it skips a step for you, if you tend to read everything a particular site has to say. You can also subscribe to the reading list of another Instapaper user, and anything they star (the universal symbol for “I like this,” which pulls it into a new menu within Instapaper) will be automatically synced to your account.

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch owner, you can read directly from your iDevice. By downloading the free Instapaper app for iPhone (there’s also a $10 version that does cool things like remember your position in every page, preserve your folders, and let you tilt to scroll), you can sync your pages, and read them either online or off. Pages are downloaded text-only by default, but whole pages can be downloaded and read.

In short, Instapaper makes saving, syncing, and reading your bookmarks easier than any app I’ve ever seen. Having the ability to read on the go is crucial for me, and I couldn’t live without the iPhone app. Even without it, though, Instapaper’s features new and old make it the perfect, low-maintenance, way to make all your bookmarks online.

What do you use for all your bookmarks?

Photo: takomabibelot

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5 Tools to Harvest the Potential of Your Firefox Bookmarks

Tina — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:00:12 +0000

Firefox is an incredibly versatile and flexible tool that offers a lot of possibilities for individual customization.

An integral part of browsing the internet is collecting URLs or favorites, better known as bookmarks within the Mozilla browser family.

The integrated Firefox bookmarks however are rarely used to their full potential.

Here is a selection of tools that will help you get quick and easy access to your most important bookmarks.

Bookmarks Toolbar

The Bookmarks Toolbar provides instant access to a small collection of your most favorite and most visited websites. You can even add folders with bookmarks to this toolbar.

However, with just text, the Bookmarks Toolbar is rather bleak. You can easily spruce it up and save a ton of space by installing the Smart Bookmarks Bar extension, which replaces the text with the site’s favicon. Further settings are up to you.

I love the Bookmarks Toolbar, but I notoriously run out of space and have to pool URLs into folders or move them to the main bookmarks section. If that is not an option for you, maybe Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar extension can help. It does what it says and extends the toolbar to multiple rows.

Bookmarks in Tabs

A pretty cool option seen in Google’s Chrome browser is when thumbnails of your favorite pages appear once the browser is loaded as well as in every new tab. There are extensions for Firefox that provide you with similar features

Fast Dial integrates this feature, which was originally introduced by the Opera browser, into Firefox. You can choose whether you launch a tab with your favorite websites manually using [CTRL] + [T] or make it your homepage by defining “about:blank” as such. Per default it will appear in every blank tab.

Mark has reviewed Fast Dial in detail in his post Access Your Websites Quickly With Firefox’s Fast Dial.

Auto Dial is similar but different. Rather than listing your favorite sites, something that you can influence by manually adding pages in Fast Dial, Auto Dial displays only your most frequently visited pages in a blank tab. Furthermore, it does not display thumbnails, which makes room for many more bookmarks.

Bookmarks Tab has a slightly different approach. It displays all of your bookmarks in the center of every new tab you open. This may serve both as a reminder of all the links you have collected as well has a HUB from where you can dive into the net.

With these extensions you will always have your favorite bookmarks right at your fingertips. Which bookmark tools do you love to make use of?

Don’t forget to check out other popular MakeUseOf posts on Firefox addons:

10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons
4 Cool Firefox Extensions To Capture Screens
4 Firefox Extensions to Search & Record Browsing History
3 Firefox Add-Ons To Help You Blog More Easily
5 Speedy Tips For Faster Browsing In Firefox

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3 Ways to See Most Favorited Google Search Result

Ann Smarty — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:01:29 +0000

Since the emergence of social web, developers have been trying to make the search more social. Really, having people to suggest you results based on your search query is a great idea because the machine can’t understand many objective aspects of the great content like style and usefulness.

By integrating social websites within Google search results, we thus achieve two aims: we combine Google search which we love most of the times with social media users’ recommendations who rate each page. If we also combine data from several social media sources, we are most likely to find the best result quickly and efficiently.

Browser Bookmarks (XMarks)

Xmarks FireFox addon (formerly knows as FoxMarks): I’ve been using it for a while as that’s a cool way to synchronize your bookmarks among a few computers and also access them from anywhere in the world online. It has introduced quite a few cool features recently – and one of them is Google search results page enhancer. It places a little blue icon next to the result which was bookmarked most of the times.

If you click on the icon, you’ll be invited to find more info on the result which includes the page ratings, reviews and similar sites:

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon toolbar inserts StumbleUpon users’ ratings within Google SERPs results. Besides, it shows:

the name of your friend who recently stumbled it (meaning that this information is provided by the most reliable source, i.e. your friends);
the category it was discovered at.

Delicious and Digg

SEOquake is a feature-rich FireFox addon that can be configured to show how many times each page was saved at Delicious.com and how many times the domain was dugg on Digg:

Any other ways to see people’s recommendations within Google search results? Please share them!

Post image from netsimage.com

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Securely Organize Your Notes Online With 3tags

Jim Henderson — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:01:12 +0000

You remember a few weeks ago I was talking about Clipperz, and how you could securely store your passwords online? Let’s take that a little further with 3tags.

The concept here is similar, although the focus is different. 3tags is designed as a way to store and organize notes online securely. Bear in mind that it’s new, and has a fair way to go. Nonetheless, it’s both interesting and useful.

If you’re familiar with delicious (and who isn’t?) then it’s easy to think of 3tags as the opposite. We don’t want to share this information. Instead we want to ensure that it cannot be shared.

The basis of the platform is that your browser, and especially the javascript that runs inside it, are capable of high grade encryption and decryption. So you write notes locally, and then they, along with your credentials, are saved and encrypted on your PC, and then stored on the web. Even the developers at 3tags are unable to dig around inside your stored information.

Before we get into the details, just remember. It’s encryption, and it’s the web. Keep your wits about you, and don’t gamble your home, job, or children on this working properly. The risk and the decisions are both yours.

The initial screen in 3tags is somewhat sparse, but it soon fills up once you add some notes.

In order to do that, click in the obvious spot… the Add button.

Fill in the boxes to suit. This is a famous New Zealand biscuit (cookie) recipe. I’m reliably told by Google that the name has to do with the colour of the cookies, and not the folk from Afghanistan. Who knew? By the way, Google can do the metric to imperial conversions if you’d like to try the recipe.

Obviously this recipe is not exactly a secret, but you can see how the interface works. Note that you should separate the tags with semi-colons, despite the lack of instruction around that. The rich text editor works just as you might expect otherwise.

Click Save.

Your note is added to the (empty) list, along with some metadata, and the tags are all listed down the left hand side for easy location later on. Search is something that is missing currently and might be useful if you have stored a lot of notes in 3tags.

Once you have more notes in the system, the preview pane on the lower part of the screen is handy for quickly checking out the content of each note with a single click.

For more serious changes you can click the Edit button, and you can remove individual notes using Delete.

Notice that the note I added also has a link in it. That link becomes clickable and underlined for easy use.

That’s basically it. It’s worth noting that making use of the site requires your computer to process javascript at a reasonable speed, and that language wasn’t really designed for this. 3tags recommends the use of Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, purely due to the speed at which it can process the javascript encryption and decryption routines.

As I said, it’s all pretty new. I found a few unexpected wrinkles. For instance, it didn’t seem to like me coming back and adding more tags to a note after I had created it. Your mileage may vary.

You may also want to check out T.J’s article about TaggedFrog which is also about online tagging.

Let me know how you get on with both 3tags and the Afghans. Do you use any other websites that store your data with encryption? Are you familiar with an easier/safer way to organize notes online.

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Sync Your Bookmarks with Google Search Results Using Qitera

James Withers — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:01:43 +0000

Qitera, a novel bookmarking platform, has just introduced a new tool called Qitera Assist, which gives users the power to search their bookmarks as easily as they can search Google.

In fact, as long as you sign into your Qitera account, this tool will function behind the scenes whenever you perform a search on Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. As quickly as you can receive your search results, you’ll also receive a listing from Qitera of relevant bookmarks that you or your friends have added to Qitera’s database.

There’s no longer any need to go on a scavenger hunt to find a webpage you saved 6 months ago. Just think of a keyword contained in the page, and you can draw it up with a Google search.

Are Your Bookmarks Getting Buried in Bookmarks?

Bookmarks are meant to be simple. They are entrusted with the chore of reflecting a user’s personality. However, as humans, we are complicated creatures. Soon, our personalities rub off on our bookmarks, and they can swiftly become complicated as well.

As they breed and multiply, bookmarks become difficult to search through. However, Qitera offers a remedy for this. Rather than lock bookmarks into cages, Qitera sets them free and links them directly to Google search results.

You Can Be the Ghost in the Machine!

By synching your bookmarks with Google, you can inject your own personality into Google’s search results. To do so, you will first need to log into Qitera. Once you’ve done so, Qitera will respond to any Google search you submit by simultaneously searching your bookmarks. It will serve up its results a few fractions of a second later, just above Google’s results.

That’s right. Your own homemade search results will trump Google’s findings. This is helpful if, for example, you’re performing a search on “colleges”, and you’d rather browse through your own bookmarks on the subject than to wade through Google’s voluminous (often irrelevant) discoveries.

Listen to Your Friends & Family

In a roundabout way, Google’s search results are organized on the basis of their popularity. However, popularity has its pitfalls. Popular results are of no use if what you’re searching for is not important to anyone outside of your inner circle.

With a Qitera-powered Google search, you can let friends and family chime in with their search results.

Top results will be shown inside of your search page, yet you can still access other related bookmarks by clicking a nearby link stating “Show Results on Qitera”. Doing so will let you browse through screenshots of your bookmarks.

Surveying Your Bookmarks

Personally, I’m a fan of both Firefox & Stumbleupon. Firefox is efficient, giving me the ability to save windows & tabs, so that I can draw up 40 or 50 essential webpages in seconds. Stumbleupon, on the other hand, provides hours of sheer entertainment while at the same time reducing clutter. Plus, it is searchable by subject, such as “Interior Design”.

Do you have a favorite bookmarking application? Do you tend to use multiple apps, as I do? Take a moment to survey your bookmarks, and share with our readers which tools are your favorites.

Photo Credits: James Withers, ycc2106, striatic, and deryckh.

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Delicious Toolbox : Organize Your Web with Delicious

Ann Smarty — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:01:00 +0000

Delicious was the first site that introduced me to the social bookmarking phenomenon. There have been many clones since then but social bookmarking has always been Delicious to me.

The concept is simple and genius: you can bookmark any page for further reference, quickly find it when you need it using the combination of tags you associated the story with; moreover, you can access your bookmarks from any computer because they are stored online and share your favorite web pages with anyone.

It sounds so simple and yet so convenient that it is hard to imagine someone not using it! Of course, like any service, it needs some tricks so that anyone can customize it to match his or her specific needs and personality.

Today I am going to share the set of tools that help me make the most of Delicious bookmarks.

Organize and access your bookmarks

1. The improved official Delicious FireFox extension offers the comprehensive collection of tools for easier access and better management of your bookmarks. With it you can:

Bookmark to your browser and to your Delicious account simultaneously;
Access your recent bookmarks from the toolbar;
Bookmark any page with one click on an icon (either in the toolbar or in the status bar);
Search, organize, sort, access your bookmarks from the sidebar;
Sort your saved URLs by site, by date, by popularity (most visited), by last visited and alphabetically.

2. Add sorting capabilities to your online bookmarks – use Sort Visible Links script (you should have Greasemonkey Firefox addon to install it).

3. Delicer is a Delicious browser. Basically, it’s a desktop application that shows you the list of your tags in the sidebar, the list of your bookmarks for each tag (plus the date when it was saved) and the actual page if you click on a bookmark. The tool also allows you to :

search through your tags;
search for the selected tag on Technorati and Youtube;
read Delicious Filetype (mp3, pdf, etc) and Media (video, audio) feeds.
synchronize Internet Explorer favorites vs. Delicious.com

4. FavThumbs (no need to login – just give it any Delicious username) visualizes the bookmarks by showing you page thumbshots in a grid or carousel. It will also display the member’s tags in the sidebar for you to narrow the search:

Analyze your Delicious bookmarks

5. Revealicious is a web based tool that helps you better understand your own web preferences by organizing and visualizing your tags. One of its tools – Grouper – organizes your tags into 3 sections based on how often you use them.

Another tool by the same service called SpaceNav visualizes the relations between your tags: by clicking on a tag, you’ll see it represented in a circle and its related tags – in neighboring circles. By hovering over a circle, you’ll be able to see related tags highlighted in the sidebar.

6. Delicioussoup (this one is rather for fun than for enhanced usability) lets you analyze your bookmarks by visualizing tag relations in the form of soup blobs. Once you click on a blob, it will show you related tags / blobs and display its stats. For example, for ’shopping’ I got: “Shopping: Used 15 times, for 16 posts, has 12 related”

Search Delicious bookmarks

7. Built-in search is the best way to search Delicious by tags. If you need to search for several tags at a time, just type them all in a row without commas. You can also access Delicious search instantly with the search plugin that comes together with the official extension mentioned above.

8. You can also use this handy bookmarklet to access Delicious search from any page: Search Multiple Tags – prompts for you to enter multiple tag names to search for pages bookmarked by everyone.

To make this Delicious toolbox even bigger, why don’t you tell us in the comments what Delicious tools you use?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Send A List Of Links As A Single URL With 1Link.In

Karl L. Gechlik — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:01:49 +0000

Have you ever had to email someone a list of websites? A set of links for research or a project? How about a bunch of torrent files you want to get to your girlfriend?

Sure you can send them the old fashioned way and hope you don’t get your email bounced or you can check out a little web site called 1link.in.

They allow you to create a single link TinyUrl style and when your recipient clicks on your simple 1 link URL, all your included websites will open up in their browser. Let’s take a look at how it works and how it can help you out!

I started by going to their website here and you can see by the screenshot below how easy it is to actually use. There is no registration or login required (but one can get you some other features). I did not sign up and jumped right in:

You simply type your fully formed URL’s into the box. One URL on each line and remember they need to be properly formatted. The same way you would type them into your browser is the same way you should type them here.

I grabbed a few links and pasted them into the 1link box as you can see below:

There we go a link from my website, a link to my articles on MakeUseOf and a link to a lesser know tech site, Bauer-Power, that i find very interesting. You see they are each on their own lines. As simple as can be!

I then clicked the 1link button (you can also check the Link Password Box to add a Password) and that submits your request for the 1link url.

After the site thought for a second it spit this page back at me:

You see the 1link link is displayed as a hyperlink that you can copy and paste, as well as a list of the URL’s in the 1link link and if you choose a password it will be displayed here as well.

Check out my 1link url here: http://1link.in/xznci. That will bring up the following page:

Click Open and you will be prompted with this window:

Click OK and your links will open, each in a separate tab like so:

Few other similar tools that were mentioned on MakeUseof Directory are:

- ShareTabs: The Easy Way to Share A Bunch of Links
- Shrink2One: Merge A Bunch of Weblinks Into One

Does this make your life easier? Let us know if you use this or other similar features….in the comments!

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Get Incredible Web & Image Suggestions With inSuggest

T.J. Mininday — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:01:27 +0000

Sure it can be fun to search for new discoveries on your own. Scouring the web, looking for that new website, web application or social network that you need for your next blog post, to kill some time at home or work, or to maybe find out whom your competitors are.

How you go about this may vary. You’ll probably go to the most rock solid of options, such as Digg, RSS, Stumbleupon, or Google, but how about doing it with a completely different recommendation or suggestion engine?

inSuggest is a simple, beautiful and virtually unknown suggestion engine that can analyze manually entered websites, images or your personal Delicious bookmarks, to give you a decent plethora of website and image recommendations.

Web inSuggest

There are three different suggestion engines built into inSuggest. The first of these quick and simple engines is the website engine. After adding each of your favorite websites (up to six), the engine displays eight different websites based on your suggestions. Along with the suggestion engine, you also have the ability to quick-search websites via keyword or just browse several random sites as well.

Images inSuggest

Images inSuggest combs the web and various image sites for any pictures that relate to your personally selected choices. Although the Images section works very well, it’s limited to only images on the website. You can’t upload your own.

You do have the additional capability of searching by keyword or searching for random images, but this section definitely needs to offer the ability to upload your own images, or at least enter an image link.

Bookmark inSuggest

The bookmarks section of inSuggest is far and away the best part of the website. It only requires your Delicious username. Once you have entered your username, your bookmarks are analyzed and results are displayed on the next page.

Also on the results page is a list of a few of your most popular and few random tags throughout your various bookmarks. So by selecting a tag, you can get another completely random list of suggested sites. The username entry page additionally includes the ability to search a random user’s Delicious account as well.

After trying out inSuggest, I found that the results did a pretty good job on sites that I don’t normally visit, or haven’t even visited at all. It looks to me they are slowly working through development, because there are definitely areas it needs to expand, and I hope they do so.

Here are some suggestions on what I think they still need.

In the website section, they need to display a longer list of results. It would be nice if the random websites tab gave you random sites, based upon your suggestions.
The images area definitely needs to allow the ability to upload your own images. They already give you a pretty good selection of similar items, but it would be nice to have your choices. Likely the problem they have with this, is that the images are based upon tags or keywords, so this may not be possible.
The bookmarks section really gets it a lot more right then the rest. You get a huge selection of sites to choose from and usually are pretty accurate. The one problem I see with the product is that they are typically always the exact same sites in the exact same order. If possible, it would be nice have this completely random as well.

I hope the designers continue to develop on the site, because I believe they have a solid foundation for what could be a very popular web suggestion engine.

Please try it out and throw some suggestions at the developers in the comments, because I’m sure you have some.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Scuttle – Create Your Own Del.icio.us Site

T.J. Mininday — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:01:09 +0000

Far and away, the most popular website, when it comes to storing ‘in the cloud’ bookmarks, is Delicious. It became so popular so quickly, that Yahoo picked them up in December of 2005 for somewhere between $15 million and $30 million.

For those of you who don’t know what Delicious is, it is simply a one stop shop, for storing your bookmarks in one quick and easy location.

Of course with success comes competition, with sites such as Diigy or Simpy and you could possibly even consider Digg or Reddit as well. However sometimes you find your own opinion matters the most, and you’d like to create your own Del.icio.us-like private bookmarking service for your family, friends or maybe even your workplace. That’s where with some prerequisites from your web host, and a little MYSQL knowledge, you can create your own social bookmarking site, with Scuttle.

Scuttle is simply defined as a “Web-based social bookmarking system. It allows multiple users to store, share and tag their favorite links online.” It is an open-source del.icio.us alternative that requires only PHP and a MYSQL database from your web host. After installation, you’ll have a very similar look to what Delicious offers.

Similar to Delicious, the Scuttle system offers tagging with keyword relations, a tag cloud and advanced searching for your own bookmarks, or the entire site.

Just like Delicious, you also have advanced security for protection on your bookmarks. You have the ability to make certain marks publicly available, or just private. There is also RSS options, MP3 playback and for Firefox users, even the ability to add marks via a very similar Delicious like Firefox extension.

Being open source, Scuttle’s options are endless. You can customize the product at will and possibly even bring yet another competitor to the strong social bookmarking arena. It’s hard not to like what you get with Scuttle’s options, and the price. I haven’t played with it enough to find any flaws or bugs, but with a little basic knowledge of setting up a MYSQL database, PHP hosting and lots of web surfing to add a plethora of bookmarks, you may be able to come up with some. Whatever the case, you should find your expectations extremely fulfilled with Scuttle.

What are your thoughts? How would you utilize something like Scuttle? What advantages do you see over many of the other bookmarking sites? Do you know of any similar products?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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17 Greasemonkey Scripts to Diversify Social Media Experience

Ann Smarty — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:01:03 +0000

If you frequent your favorite social media community daily, you might have grown tired of its look and feel.

Below I am listing 17 Greasemonkey scripts to diversify your social media experience (for Digg, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious).

Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon, which allows to edit the way web looks and works with the help of wide variety of already available scripts. To use the scripts you find here, install the Greasemonkey extension first.

Digg

(Use Digg scripts with caution as some of them can get you banned from the site)

Digg Larger Images on Mouseover – enlarges images on Digg home page (including the users’ avatars) when hovered over;
Digg AdBlocker (as the name suggests) removes adverts from Digg (or this one moves the ad spot down the page);
DiggRatingExtender shows extended Digg submission and comment history: up and down diggs as well as the total rating. This might be really interesting to see how many people like / disliked the comment:

Digg User Topics Cloud adds a tag cloud to each user’s profile based on his recent submissions (useful for evaluating if the person is worth a follow):

Twitter

Twitter Friends Bio at a Glance – shows bio text, following count and a web link for all friends and followers on the Twitter friends list.

Retweet This – adds a retweet button to the end of each twitter entry. The button opens in a new tab with the full retweeted message (including @member);
Twitter friend name helper: suggests the friend name after you type @

StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon Avatar Bubbles – adds some fun to StumbleUpon by allowing you to see larger versions of your friends’ avatars when hovering over;

Preview StumbleUpon Posts – enables Preview functionality in StumbleUpon forums and contact pages and also warns you if you try to navigate away from a post without submitting it.
SU Visual Editor Plus enhances the built-in SU editor by matching the background color, adjusting the its width and displaying images correctly;
SU2Bookmarks (found under “You can also” section in the sidebar) scans your favorites and generates a bookmarks.html file. You may import this file into any web browser as a list of bookmarks. Favorites will be sorted in folders by their SU topic.

Reddit Zebra-izer adds color to Reddit rows for better usability:

Reddit – Undeletion: recovers deleted comments and users on reddit.
Reddit Filter Plus filters or highlights submissions by user, domain or keyword. Tired of some submission topics? Or of some specific user’s submissions? Or of some domain? Now you can filter those out! Alternatively, you can use any color to highlight submissions by any user, using any keywords or belonging to any domain. The script is easily managed right from your Reddit “Preferences” page.

Delicious.com

Sort Visible Links (as you might have guessed) sorts your bookmarks by title, URL or popularity.
Show Delicious Images: looks at each delicious image link and shows the image on the page.
Fav.icio.us3 adds a favicon to each Delicious listing:

What Greasemonkey scripts do you use for your social media sites? Tell us the links to them in the comments so everyone can benefit!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Use Stacks To Save Websites For Later Reading [Mac]

Jackson Chung — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:01:29 +0000

Addiction to the internet is cruel. It doesn’t release you from its locking grip and worse, draws you deeper into the realms of the internet anti-socialites. One site links to another and the clicking never ceases. While browsing one story, another interesting one might just arouse your curiosity and – click, down the rabbit hole. You know what I’m talking about, right?

The average number of hours that a person is reported to surf the internet is approximately 1 hour/day. I’m guessing that those are the “regular” people and the sample population doesn’t include “techno-geeks” like us who spend the better part of the day browsing the Web.

For those of us who work online, we’d spend up to 10 hours/day browsing and researching about anything new and gripping. The problem is: there is never enough time to browse through everything. Because of the infinite number of links that tempt us, there are always some left-over. Sometimes, some sites just might seem interesting but you couldn’t really go into it at that moment. So what do you do?

Do you bookmark it? Do you open it in a new window and leave it there?

I have found that if I bookmark a webpage, I tend to forget about it the next time I open Safari. Luckily, I’ve run into a pretty clever way of using Stacks to keep sites temporarily until I have the time to browse through them some time later.

By creating a new folder anywhere (I put mine in Documents but anywhere is fine, really) and naming it “To Read Later” then adding it as a Stack on my Dock, I can just drag the favicon from any website from Safari into that Stack. It will be saved as a .webloc file (which is basically just a URL). This way, all of the websites which you need to read a little later are displayed right on your Dock. With Stacks, you will always know if there are sites pending to be viewed.

This next step is entirely optional because it’s merely eye-candy – you can add a Stacks drawer overlay so that the folder icon won’t pop up with the Stack is empty. Instead, it will show a blank drawer icon and you will know that you’ve gone through everything that needs to be read!

Here are some Stacks drawer icons. Download it, mount it, then add the icon of your choice into your Stack. If the drawer icon doesn’t load properly, just remove that Stack and add it again to your Dock. The icon should always appear in front of the contents of your folder. If it doesn’t, you will need to arrange it by ‘Date Modified’.

How else do you remember which sites you need to come back to read slightly later? Are you using Read It Later Firefox extension that we covered earlier? Do you rely solely on bookmarks? Let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Dump Delicious And Dig(g) Deeper With Twine

Tina — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:01:49 +0000

Quite honestly, I’m not much into online social networks. A membership with sites like MySpace or Facebook doesn’t appeal to me since I don’t see what the benefit would be, and although I’m a member, I don’t have a use for Flickr or YouTube at the moment. Nevertheless, I appreciate the existence of these networks because they allow me to find information or look up stuff I like, for example I check out new music through MySpace.

Today I want to introduce you to a different type of social network that can help you collect material about the things you like. While you expand your profile, collect links and connect with others, you’re teaching the tool what you like and it will suggest more things you may be interested in. Could that be your thing?

Twine is a semantic web application and a new type of social network. The idea is to have one central place where you can collect, organize, discover and share anything you find relevant, with the semantic side of the tool tracking your interests and helping you discover more things you may like.

Twine unites many different elements of other platforms such as Digg and Delicious. Here is a summary of its most important features:

social bookmarking
archive for things found online or things you upload
user groups (Twines) to share and discover topic-based material
blog style posts to add items, which can also be commented by others
recommendations for you to discover related things

Getting started always is the most difficult part, but it’s rather simple with Twine. Given you are convinced this might be your thing, you should jump right into it. Sign up, create a profile, list your interests, add the bookmarklet (get it, it’s useful!), explore the most popular Twines (groups) and join ones you like.

From there it’s easy. Twine has already learned a little bit about you and will continue to learn as you’re using it. It will soon start suggesting other Twines or people you may be interested in. For now you can follow the Twines you joined through your Interest Feed or join eMail updates, browse Twines randomly, collect posts you really like (note the share and collect buttons over each post), eventually connect to others who seem to enjoy the same things you do, and most of all submit your own material.

You should start at least one personal Twine, so you can add stuff that may not fit into any of the Twines you’re a member of or to keep some of the things you add private. Once you come across something on the web you would like to add, use the Twine bookmarklet you were offered during signup and you’ll see it’s extremely convenient to use! Alternatively, you can manually add stuff through the website’s Add Item menu, as pictured below.

Once you get the hang of things you may become a regular contributor to existing Twines and/or feed and promote your own Twines. Either way, information will now be flowing into channels and you can potentially gain a lot from it, without having to cruise half a dozen pages for pretty much the same effect. You can stay informed and entertained in an organized way, while socializing (sort of) at the same time.

For a much more detailed review also covering the technology behind Twine please visit Think Artificial.

So what do you say, could this be your thing? It certainly is my thing!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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7 Reasons Diigo Tastes Better Than Delicious

David Pierce — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:01:33 +0000

I’ve used Delicious for a long time to manage my Web bookmarks. It was easy to use, accessible from any browser, and worked well with Firefox. For all my needs, it was a great bookmarking service.

Then I found Diigo, and suddenly Delicious didn’t look so good anymore.

Diigo is another social bookmarking service (and one we’ve covered before), offering all of Delicious’ relevant features and much more. I left Delicious, and haven’t ever looked back. There are a lot of things I love about Diigo, but there are seven features that sold me on using Diigo for all my bookmarking needs.

These are all in addition to the features I deem non-negotiable for social bookmarking sites- tagging, Firefox extensions, looking at popular bookmarks, etc.

1. Highlighting

I seem to always bookmark a page, and then come back to it later and forget what it was that I cared about on the page. With Diigo, you can highlight the page you’re bookmarking, and then later view the page with highlights, or just the highlights themselves. No more searching through the page again to find what it was you cared about.

2. Saving Pages is Easier Than Ever, Regardless of Browser

If you’re using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Flock, the Diigo toolbar has all the features you could want – bookmark, search, highlight, and organize all your Web pages right from the toolbar. If you’re not into those browsers, though there’s a great bookmarklet that lets you do most of that with any browser.

I use Chrome, and all the functionality I need is built right into the bookmarklet. Delicious becomes more difficult to use outside of Firefox (there are bookmarklets, but they pale in comparison), and Diigo keeps on working fine.

3. Functional Commenting and Real Conversations

This is one of my favorite features of Diigo – when you’re reading a page, you can make comments right on the page, that show up as speech bubbles. If another Diigo user comes across the page, they’ll be able to see your comment. You can see (in the Firefox sidebar) who’s reading a page you’re on, who’s talking about it, and a real conversation can happen – unlike in Delicious, when all you can see is someone’s bookmarks.

4. Send Bookmarks to Facebook or Twitter with one click

With one click, you can send a Diigo bookmark to Twitter, Facebook, or your blog. It truly takes one click, from “Send” to the service you want to use. If you want to send bookmarks to Facebook, you’ll have to install the Diigo Facebook app.

You can also have Diigo create a daily digest of your latest bookmarks and send it to your blog, which I’d debate the usefulness of, but the functionality is there. Being able to bookmark a site on Twitter in particular straight from Diigo is big for me, and makes Twitter easier and quicker to use.

5. Sites Help You Find Deeper Cuts

I’m a big YouTube fan, but there are way more videos than I can possibly figure out. With “Sites“, you’re able to go through a particular site (including MakeUseOf) and find out what other people are bookmarking and reading about. You can create a watchlist, and whenever someone bookmarks a page from that site, you see it. It’s a great way to find popular and cool stuff in big, content-full sites that you might not notice otherwise.

6. Simultaneously bookmark things to Diigo and Elsewhere – even Delicious!

If you have a Ma.gnolia, Delicious, or Simpy account that you want to hold on to for posterity, you can set up Diigo to simultaneously bookmark pages to Diigo and to your other service, using the “Save Elsewhere” feature. I like this because it means you can use the vastly superior Diigo, but for all four different services. Just enter your account info, and you can start bookmarking all over the Web, with one click!

7. Bookmark and Search Entire Web Pages

When you bookmark a page with Diigo, it bookmarks more than just the link (like those other sites). It bookmarks the entire page you were on, which has two great implications. First, it means you can preview sites within the Diigo page. You can view your bookmarked page, without ever leaving Diigo.

It also means that you can search the full text of pages you bookmark. You don’t have to perfectly tag everything, because every word on every page you bookmark is totally searchable. Your bookmarks live in Diigo, so if a site goes down or is unavailable, you can still find it in Diigo, as well as search and view it.

Diigo’s become a social-bookmarking machine, and I left Delicious and never looked back. If you want to make the switch, you can import your bookmarks from most other services- making the switch is so easy, there’s no reason not to! Diigo’s the new gold standard in social bookmarks.

Do you use social bookmarking services? Which one? What are the killer features that make you use the one you’ve got?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Make Use Of Podcast #23: Tizmos

Jason Mayoff — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:30:30 +0000

Today on the Make Use Of Podcast we will take a look at a start page called Tizmos. It’s a simple page where you can create thumbnail links for any number of websites.

The podcast is available through iTunes so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Share Your Firefox Data Across Operating Systems & Computers

Varun Kashyap — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:42:33 +0000

Many of us prefer to dual boot our systems. It could be that we don’t want to completely move to Vista or it could be that we are trying out Linux along with Windows.

Let’s face it, no matter which operating system you are using, you got to surf the web. It seems like a good idea if your browser automatically knew what you had bookmarked on the other operating system and you don’t have to customize your settings, passwords and search pages all over again.

Well if you use Firefox, and want to achieve something like this, then read on:

The Profile Manager

Firefox geeks may already know this but just to be on the same page, let me tell you that a profile manager exists for Firefox. The profile manager can be accessed by typing “firefox.exe -profilemanager” on Windows and “firefox -profilemanager” on linux systems. We are going to use this profile manager and Firefox profiles to accomplish our task.

The Steps

2. Take a note of these locations, we will be using them in steps that follow.

- Windows XP : C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\xxxxxxxx.default\
- Windows Vista : C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\xxxxxxxx.default\
- Ubuntu / Other Distros : ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default

where xxxxxxxx refers to a random string, username to you windows user name and ~ to you Linux home directory

3. Make sure that the profile directory in Windows XP as mentioned on step 2 is accessible from within Ubuntu. This should not be a problem as modern Linux systems have read write access to almost any file system that is used by Windows.

4. Now boot into Ubuntu, open terminal and type: “firefox -profilemanager”

5. Click create new profile, a wizard appears, give the profile a name, click next and when prompted to choose a directory, choose the Windows XP directory for your profile as found from Step 2.

6. Click Finish and you are done. You will now have access to all the add-ons you installed, the bookmarks and other settings!

Variations

I want to do this the other way round Ubuntu to XP?

No problem, everything is the same except you have to make the Linux File System accessible from within Windows. This is easy to achieve using the freeware Ext2fsd. Once you do this, create a new profile for Firefox in XP and point it to the Firefox directory on Ubuntu / other distros. (refer Step 2)

I want to do this between XP and Vista ?

Still no problem, I already mentioned the location for the Firefox directory on Windows Vista. Just use that location and create a new Firefox profile on either operating system that points to the other.

What if I have a dual boot of Vista and Ubuntu ?

Same steps, just use the respective directories.

How can I get more creative?

If you have a home network, and you switch between computers you can share the profile directory on the network and obtain the same results.

How about sharing the profile over the internet ?

Well you can use the same method and share the profile directory over the internet as well, however this may not be the best solution. Try looking into Weave (Make Use Of article), or sync your bookmarks using Foxmarks (this will only sync bookmarks).

Any other Profile hacks?

Well not really, just a mention that if the browser is the mainstay of your work and you do a lot of work online and you don’t want to lose your customizations and bookmarks then you can backup your profile directory, just in case something goes wrong.

Also try using different profiles for different types of work you need the browser for. This way you don’t clutter up your browser with too many add-ons and this also avoids some problems. Like for example I use different profiles for developing sites in which I have installed Firebug, Web Developer Tool bar and similar add-ons, and I use a different profile for the casual – fun – entertainment browsing!

Have you used the Profile Manager creatively in a way that I forgot to mention? Why not share it with the world? Write it up in the comments.

(By) Varun Kashyap, who blogs about such interesting tip, tweaks and hacks on TechCrazy Blog

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The Winners of ‘Extend Firefox’ – Best Firefox Addons

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:01:53 +0000

Firefox is close to our hearts. In the past, we’ve reviewed a number of Firefox add-ons here on Make Use Of. Any guesses what this article is about? Yes, you’ve guessed it – it’s the ever popular Firefox add-ons list compilation.

However this time, its a list with a difference. The add-ons in this list are the Winners of the Extend Firefox contest organised by Mozilla Labs.

The add-ons are classified into three categories.

Best New Firefox Add-on

Pencil

Pencil is a GUI prototyping and diagramming add-on. This means that you can use Pencil to create mockups of windows, buttons, panes etc. Some of the features of Pencil are:

Built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping
Multi-page document with background page
On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
PNG rasterizing
Undo/redo supports
Installing user-defined stencils
Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
Cross-platforms
Adding external objects

This may not seem useful for an average user but it means and speaks a lot about the capabilities and the extensible nature of Firefox (apart from the countless uses for developers and UI designers)

Tagmarks

Firefox 3 offers a neat feature for bookmarking webpages that you visit by clicking on the star in the address bar. If you thought that was clever and useful wait till you have a look at Tagmarks. Tagmarks adds a set of icons to the quick bookmarks, allowing you to quickly add tags to your bookmarks by clicking on each icon. A lot like Gmail Superstars which let you classify your mail and then search them based on the star you applied to the conversation.

HandyTag

Can’t think of relevant tags for the page you are bookmarking? Fear not HandyTag comes to the rescue!. Handy tags simply provides a set of the most relevant keywords in the bookmark’s edition panel. These keywords are retrieved from many different sources so that you don’t have to think much!

The following add-ons are the runners up in the ‘New Addons’ category. However I like some of them better than the winners! Read on ahead and see if you agree or disagree.

Webchunks

This is one of my favourites and one of the most anticipated add-ons. First off you need to know what a webslice is. A webslice is a new way that allows you to subscribe to only a part of the webpage. Using webslices you could subscribe to the area containing the most recent article here on Make Use Of. This is an Internet Explorer 8 feature, but Firefox can’t be left behind, can it?

In fact Firefox does it even better than Internet Explorer because using IE requires the author of the webpage to specify an area of the page as “Webslice”. However using Firefox with Greasemonkey, you can get webslices on any page on the Web and then subscribe to that slice using webchunks.

Check out this link to know what I am talking about.

Badges on Favicon

Badges on Favicon allows you to put a rounded badge over the tab favicon of some pages.

These badges will show numeric snippets of information from the page, for example your unread mails from Gmail or the stock quotes from Yahoo Finance.

This way you can always see that data, even if you’re navigating on another tab.

The extension uses little scripts, called badgets. Each badget is designed for a particular webpage and you can get more here. There are not a huge number of badgets available at this time, however it is an interesting concept, especially when you combine it with the Faviconize Tab add-on.

Devo

This one is again one of my favorites. Devo is like Enso Launcher for your browser. Hit SHIFT+X to open up the UI. Just type the action keyword followed by the parameters (if there are any).

(i.e) to search Make Use Of on Google you would: Hit Shift + X, type google and then type in Make Use of and hit enter. There are many more complex commands like “play.song”. You can even write your own commands for Devo.

Close ‘n’ Forget

Close n Forget is simple and useful. It lets you close the current tab and practically forget about the visit. This means that it removes the related cookies and the whole domain’s pages from the history (if it is configured to do so). I can see some mischevious uses for this one!

Callout

Callout allows the web applications and Greasemonkey scripts access to the notification area of your operating system provided that they use the Callout API. Not many web applications and scripts use the callout API yet, but this certainly has a potential to become huge.

Reasy

Reasy is a RSVP (Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation) Reader. In English this means that it presents a word or two at the same place at a rapid rate to help you read better. Select some text ( > 25 words) and a pop up appears, click on the text and the Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation starts. Great for reading large chunks of text on a web page. Check out spreeder which is a similar web app.

Best Updated Firefox Add-ons

Read it Later

Read it later has already been covered on Make Use Of before here and here . Some of the newer features include offline reading, sync between computers, and RSS feed creation.

TagSifter

If you have lots of bookmarks in your browser, consider using tags to sort and classify them. Then if you use tags, Tagsifter is a must. Tagsifter provides you an efficient way to browse your bookmarks by tags. Tagging helps in managing your bookmarks and tagsifter helps you to find that link which you bookmarked two months back but only vaguely remember what it was about.

Bookmarks Previews

If you liked the Pogo browser but couldn’t use it, then Bookmarks Previews allows you to get some of those features. This extension allows you to view you bookmarks in style! You can choose from among the coveted album flow animation, thumbnail view of the bookmarks and a tool tip preview of you bookmarks. Excellent to jazz up your browser a little while still remaining useful.

Best Music Addon

And the award goes to…

Fire.fm

Fire.fm allows you access to last.fm’s music library. You can listen to music related to your favorite artist, and discover new artists and music in the process. You can find Last.fm users with musical tastes similar to your own. Quickly access your favorite stations by just typing a few letters into the location bar. If you are into music, you must check it out.

Please note that some of these add-ons are still experimental and may require you to login with your Mozilla account (which is free to create), or alternatively you can download the extensions from the developers’ pages.

Which ones are your favorite add-ons that can perform similar tasks? Tell us about your dream add-ons and functionalities that you wish existed.

(By) – Varun Kashyap who loves Firefox add-ons. He blogs about latest on the web, firefox, tech tips, tweaks and hacks on TechCrazy Blog

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Zigtag – A Web App For Extreme Tagging (BETA Invites Included!)

Will Mueller — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:01:00 +0000

Zigtag is an awesome social networking, web tagging, digg-type site. The name should give most of it away – Zigtag – tagging being their main purpose. It essentially makes available all of the sites that people thought were cool.

Zigtag is currently in private BETA, yet the wonderful folks at Zigtag have given MakeUseOf readers exclusive BETA invites. The only other thing you need is their Firefox/Internet Explorer Add-On which allows you to add tags, share pages, etc. (You are also able to simply drag and drop a bookmarklet if you are unable to install the add-on.)

After that you should be ready to start tagging! To do so, simply click on the Zigtag logo in your web browser to allow it to load in your sidebar. You should then receive a certain number of suggested tags that Zigtag believes are directly related to the page you are currently viewing. You may then click on one of the tags to add it to the page and/or add your own by typing it in the box. All of which are used to describe the page you are currently viewing, and make them available to the rest of the world – somewhat like Digg or del.icio.us in that sense.

Let me give you an example:

I picked the “Powersurf Through Friendfeed with StumbleRead” article by Mark. I added some keywords and “favorited” it. I then decided to share it with the group I created by clicking “Share,” and “Group.” The article then showed up on the group page, which I created. Even more options arise including the availability to: comment on pages, tag them further, view other pages with the same tag(s) – which I may add includes even more options.

Of course, as you can see, groups are a major part of Zigtag. You are allowed to create your own group or join another (there are tons of them). Groups range from computers to being existent, so I am sure that you could find many different groups. Furthermore, in groups you may discuss different things on the group page and see updates on your Zigtag homepage regarding your groups.

One really neat feature of Zigtag is the option to import del.icio.us bookmarks. You may do so by clicking “My Account,” then clicking “Import/Export Bookmarks.” You are as well allowed to import existing bookmarks from different web browsers, including: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera (sorry Flock users). Once your bookmarks are imported you should receive an email indicating that they were successfully imported.

Zigtag is definitely a great resource for finding sites related to anything and possibly could be the next level of Digg? I highly recommend trying it out as you will most certainly enjoy using it.

If you like, you may even add me as a friend here, or join my group here.

What do you like – or not like – about Zigtag? Grab your beta account, test it out then come back and tell us what you think in the comments!

Will Mueller is a computer nerd and geek that has been working with computers for far too long. He currently works on one of his blogs at FirefoxGeeks.

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Hooeey – Track And Organize Your Web History From Any Computer

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:58:04 +0000

Hooeey is a free service which lets you track and organize the websites you surf, on any computer. It goes one step ahead of Google Web History and stores all of your web history online in your Hooeey account which then lets you access it from any computer. It can be a pretty cool service especially for those who spend a lot of time online doing research and may forget to manually bookmark the sites.

How To Use It

To use Hooey, you first need to register as a user and then download and install the Hooeey toolbar. After you are through with your browsing for the day, you can log in to your Hooeey account and then upload your entire browsing history or just a part of it, with just one click.

Web History Analysis

You can also turn off website recording anytime by clicking a button on the toolbar. Hooeey also lets you tag the links while you browse and share them with your friends. It further lets you analyze your browsing habits through charts and graphs and makes the data visually appealing.

Features

2. Tag, comment and rate your history record, even when you are offline.

3. Access your web history from any computer.

4. Analyze your web history and browsing habits based on different metrics and parameters.

5. Share links with friends and track them too.

6. Web tours – This is a unique feature of Hooeey which lets you combine different websites and create a slideshow and send them to your friends.

Overall, I think Hooeey is a nice tool and it can certainly come in pretty handy if you visit several websites in a day and use them to extract information.

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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Manage your Online Social Life with SecondBrain

Daniel Pataki — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:19:59 +0000

So far I have not been a huge fan of any social site. Don’t get me wrong, I love social sites like Digg, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Twitter and so on, but that list is one reason I haven’t used them much. I need to visit four different sites to manage myself, not to mention additional stuff like StumbleUpon, Youtube and some more I use. Even if I use desktop clients, I still need to download separate tools for most of these sites.

A great solution I found was SecondBrain, a social media aggregation site. I’ve seen a few around the web, but I don’t think any of them offer as great features and as elegant presentation as SecondBrain. Since I love this site so much, I thought I’d invite you guys to take a look and sign up. You can even follow me if you like – my username is danielpataki.

Now, let’s see what SecondBrain can really do!

Setting up

After you’ve signed up and logged in, you can import your favorite services through the “Import Content” tab on your dashboard. You can choose from 19 services, including Picasa, Flickr, Youtube, Blogger, del.icio.us, favourites, StumbleUpon, and so much more. Other sources you can add content from is your hard drive (this was an unexpected one for me) and you can add links manually too.

Using SecondBrain

The main part of this service for me is the continuous wall of content I create and share with others. All your activities are listed here in chronological order, whether a Twitter, a Stumble or a shared Flickr picture. At the top, you can post text content directly to SecondBrain, but the coolest part is, if you use Twitter, you can also post to Twitter directly from here. A very unique part of SecondBrain is the ability to add Zoho documents, Google Docs documents, which I haven’t really seen anywhere else.

Once you have some entries and visit other people’s, things start to get really interesting. Through every entry you can visit the persons SecondBrain page, their relevant service page and you can comment on the entry. Once you get into the comments, you will have some more options, Flickr pics will be shown, screenshots of links will be available, and you will have the option to share or add stuff to your collection.

Your collections are tidbits from the net, but since this is an aggregation site, you aren’t limited to just links, or just photos. You can organize content from all the services available, in essence creating a true personal collection from the web. You can have multiple collections, which makes it that bit easier to view all your content.

You also have a library, which is a slightly expanded and searchable version of your wall. The search function is the most notable here, it is one of the best I’ve seen so far. Since SecondBrain imports tags, it not only searches by content, but by tags as well. If you search for the word “technology”, you get a list of all such posts. However, at the top, you also get a tag breakdown showing you the number of results which match the tag “technology”, but also the list of different tags. This is a very easy way to specify content you want to find when you don’t really know exactly what you’re looking for.

Is SecondBrain worth it?

The question I always ask myself is if a service is worth it. I know a host of services which I really do like, but I need to put too much input into it to be of real value to me and others. However, in the case of SecondBrain, I will be using it for a long, long time to come.

I have two big arguments for this service, the lesser of the two is that it is totally automatic. If you set it up and never touch it afterwards, you will still have an automatically nicely organized aggregation of your social life. There is no need to send constant updates, since your activities on other sites are the updates.

The second argument is that it is oh so much simpler than anything else I’ve seen so far. You don’t have to go to six different places to keep in touch with others content, all you need to do is log into your account, and find them on SecondBrain. You will see all their updates as they happen, and never miss a thing.

My third bonus argument is that there are a lot of added, small features I haven’t talked about. You can view your (and others’) updates via RSS feeds as well, there are favorites, options for public and private collections and the list goes on and on. Services are also being added continuously, so if you don’t see all your favorites, don’t worry, they might be in soon.

There are some areas where SecondBrain still needs to improve, but I’m confident they will. Support for adding generic RSS feeds is not in there which is a big problem, since support for blogs is also limited. If you have a Wordpress.com or Blogger blog you’re ok, but if you host your blog on your own domain you won’t find any options for sharing your posts. Nevertheless, I am now never giving up SecondBrain. It’s perfect for managing your content on your own or connecting to dozens of people.

(By) Daniel Pataki is the writer of Hack Your Day, his productivity blog and founder of Blogtastique, a blog management service. I feel like I’m leading three lives at once, I’m even too tired to continue using third person here!”

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“Useless” Websites you should Bookmark

Ken Burkes — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:53:13 +0000

There are so many websites out there that it’s getting harder and harder for developers to come up with a good idea. Since all the ‘good ideas’ have been taken, website owners need to come up with innovative ways to portray their web application.

The problem with this is that many people think these websites are useless because the website is either hard to use, a waste of time, or too different. But there are a lot of sites out there that people should take another look at, even if they do seem to be useless at first. Sites that are in beta will improve overtime, and a “useless” product can turn into the “next big thing”.

Here are a few sites that might be useless at the moment but should be bookmarked for use later on.

1. ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ dılɟ (Flip your Text)

What it is: ˙ǝʇɐpdn ǝɹnʇnɟ ɐ uı ǝlqɐlıɐʌɐ ǝq llıʍ ǝɹnʇɐǝɟ ʇɐɥʇ ǝqʎɐɯ ˙ʇǝʎ pǝɹǝpuǝɹ ǝq ʇ’uɐɔ lɐʇıdɐɔ ʇɐɥʇ sı ɯǝlqoɹd ɹǝɥʇouɐ ˙ʇı pɐǝɹ oʇ ǝlqɐ ǝq llıʇs llıʍ ǝldoǝd ʇnq ‘ǝɔɐld ɟo ʇno puɐ pɹıǝʍ ʇıq ɐ ɯǝǝs ʇɥƃıɯ sɹǝʇʇǝl ǝɥʇ ɟo ǝɯos ˙ǝɹǝɥʍǝɯos ʇı ʇsod puɐ ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝɥʇ ʎdoɔ ʇsnɾ ʍou ˙punoɹɐ pǝddılɟ ǝq plnoʍ xoq ‘ʇxǝʇ lɐuıƃıɹo’ ǝɥʇ uı pǝdʎʇ noʎ ʇxǝʇ ǝɥʇ ‘ʎlʇuɐʇsuı ˙uoʇʇnq ‘dılɟ’ ǝɥʇ ʞɔılɔ puɐ xoq ‘ʇxǝʇ lɐuıƃıɹo’ ǝɥʇ oʇuı dılɟ oʇ ʇuɐʍ noʎ ɹǝʌǝʇɐɥʍ ǝdʎʇ ʇsnɾ ˙ʇı pɐǝɹ oʇ ɹǝpɹo uı uʍop ǝpısdn sǝʌlǝsɯǝɥʇ uɹnʇ oʇ pǝǝu ǝldoǝd ʇɐɥʇ ʎɐʍ ɐ uı ʇxǝʇ sdılɟ ʇı ˙sǝıldɯı ǝɯɐu ǝɥʇ ʇɐɥʍ sǝop ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ dılɟ

Flip your Text does what the name implies. It flips text in a way that people need to turn themselves upside down in order to read it. Just type whatever you want to flip into the ‘Original Text’ box and click the ‘Flip’ button. Instantly, the text you typed in the ‘Original Text’ box would be flipped around. Now just copy the upside down text and post it somewhere. Some of the letters might seem a bit weird and out of place, but people will still be able to read it. Another problem is that capital letters can’t be rendered yet. Maybe that feature will be available in a future update.

Why it seems useless: While it’s extremely cool, there isn’t really a use for for this tool. It’s not like you’d use this when you’re applying for a job or when you want to break up with someone over Facebook. If you were to write an entire blog post with the letters all flipped around, your blog readers are going to scamper away like they’ve seen their boss in pink undergarments.

Why you should bookmark it: Flip your Text is one of the best ways of getting attention. Since it uses a combination of ASCII and UT8 characters, it can be rendered by most websites, which means you can use this just about anywhere, including Twitter and your e-mail. If a title of your blog post is flipped around, it’s going to attract a lot of attention because everyone’s going to be thinking “How did they do that?”. Just make sure you don’t use it too much because it can get annoying…

2. AudioTool

What it is: Hobnox’s Audiotool is a flash based web application where you can create your own music, using the same tools many of the DJ’s in real life use. It’s a place to experiment, fool around, and maybe even learn something. When you start the application, you’ll be brought to a flash page where you’ll see a mixer, three synthesizers, and two rows of pedals that you can play around with. Everything you see can be manipulated. Fool around with knobs, connect tools together, and just have some fun with it. It’s still in beta so things are not perfect yet and you’re not able to save your work, but AudioTool is definitely something fun to play with.

Why it seems useless: Sometimes websites are considered to be useless because it’s just too hard to use. This is one of them. Unlike other hard-to-use tools like Photoshop, the quality of the end product all depends on your skill level. Hardcore Photoshop users are going to argue this matter, but you have to admit that even Photoshop newbies can use basic tools to touch up their pictures. I tried playing around with Audiotool, and made the mistake of turning my speakers up while testing things out. About five minutes later, I got a call from a neighbor telling me to “stop banging the table”. Guess I should have watched the tutorials first…

Why you should bookmark it: This site is still being developed so it might be a while before it becomes a site hardcore users are going to use. At the moment, this is just something for people to begin learning how to use audio equipment and also a place to fool around. Later on, the tool will really help people who don’t have the money to buy the equipment, and once Version 2.0 comes out and users can save their work, this tool is going to be embraced by everyone interested in creating music. If you’re going to create something in AudioTool, just be sure to watch the tutorials.

3. Dipity

What it is: Dipity is the King of timelines. It’s a great web tool that you can set up to keep track of all your feeds (including RSS, Twitter, Flickr, blogs, Last.fm, and more) and Dipity will make a visual timeline of what you do with your life. The timeline doesn’t have to be personal either; you can create one about a topic (like internet memes) and invite others to add to the timeline.

The only bad thing is that the amount of information available depends on how much information is in the RSS feed. If the RSS feed only shows a few articles, your timeline isn’t going to be that long. If you don’t like the way the timeline is organized, you can click on the other tabs and display all the information in a list, a flipbook, or in a map.

Why it seems useless: While most people would agree that this is a great idea, they don’t really see how it can be used. Yes, you can load it up with all your RSS feeds, but what good is it if you’ve already seen all the articles already? Looking at old articles or old Twitter posts isn’t going to do you any good. You’d just be wasting your time looking at things you have already seen before.

Why you should bookmark it: Dipity is one of those websites that are as useful as you want them to be. If you decide to put up feeds you read daily, then the timeline that you make isn’t going to be useful to you. However, if you decide to put up feeds of specific websites, you can make the timeline do whatever you want it to do. Here are some suggestions on using Dipity.

- Add in RSS feeds of websites you really like but don’t have the time to look at everyday. Then you can visit Dipity each week and catch up on what you missed.

- Create a timeline of current events (such as the presidential election or the war in Iraq) or just find one already made and add your own links to it. If the links are good, then you can stay up to date with all the info.

- Be a creep and use this as a tool for stalking others. Just type in the username someone uses and you’re all set.

Another cool thing about Dipity is that you can embed a timeline into your blog or website. Here’s one of Make Use Of…

The folks at Dipity have also created a site called TimeTube, a site where you can search for YouTube videos and the results are displayed on a Dipity timeline based on time and popularity. You can read the previous Make Use Of review of TimeTube here.

4. Midomi

What it is: Midomi is an extremely innovative music search engine. Instead of searching for music using keywords and names, you can find songs using your own voice. Remember that beat you just can’t get out of your head but don’t remember the name of the song? No problem, Midomi will find it for you. To start a search, just click on the search button and allow Midomi access to your microphone. Then you can then hum, sing, whistle, or burp a song and Midomi will try to find it for you. Once you’ve found the song, you can listen to how others sing it, buy it from iTunes, or watch videos of it.

Like AudioTool, this site is in beta and needs some improvement but it works pretty well. I tested it out by “singing” (or what least trying to sing) three songs. It found two of the songs, but missed the last one. Midomi will only work if there have been previous members who have sung the entire song. The more users there are, the better the search results because Midomi matches your tune to the tunes in its database.

Why it seems useless: It takes a while to set things up, and searching for something only takes a few moments. It’s not exactly the most accurate tool on the block either. If you accidentally sing the song wrong, you’re going to get bad results. Besides, it’s not often that you can’t remember any words at all. As long as you remember a few sentences in a song, you can just put it into quotes and search it up on a regular search engine. Going through the hassle of setting up your microphone for Midomi seems like a waste of time.

Why you should bookmark it: Midomi is one of the most innovative sites I’ve ever seen. I can imagine other websites following in Midomi’s steps and use voice as a means of search. Even though people might not be using it as a search engine, you can still enjoy the site. You can sing your favorite songs, and each song you sing will improve the searching experience of others. If others like the way you sing, you could become a Midomi star getting your own place on the website. Test it out, you’d be surprised on how accurate it is.

5. Other Goodies

Having already written about four awesome sites that you’re probably going to use a lot, I think it’s time to mention a few useless sites you might never use, but you’re going to want to take a look at. The first one was brought to my attention by Aibek. He showed me this great site called Hencam where you watch chickens. That’s right. It’s an entire website dedicated to watching chickens in real time, don’t what they normally do. Useless? Yep. Cool as heck? Totally.

Another site that I pretty ashamed of of admitting I’ve used before is called Cheddar Vision. It has the same concept as Hencam, but instead of watching chickens, you watch a 500 pound chunk of cheese mold. Exciting, isn’t it? If you notice, the people at Cheddar Vision have Facebook, Myspace, and YouTube groups. If you’re interested in moldy cheese, be sure to add them on whatever network you’re on. If you go onto the website, you’ll also notice a little counter that tells you how long the cheese has been molding. There is another counter at the bottom that shows how many people have visited the site. (I sure am glad that there are over 1 million others out there who watch cheese just like me.)

There you are. These sites might still seem a bit useless to you, but I still hope you’ll take the time to check them out. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find them to be the coolest sites you’ve seen. Try them out and tell me what you think. Do you know another site that others think is useless but you use anyway? Tell me about it in the comments.

(By) Ken Burkes is an active web surfer who diggs, stumbles, and blogs in his free time. Being too lazy to get a blog of his own, you should stay up to date with Make Use Of to find more of his articles.

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Backup and Sync your Firefox User Data with Weave

Wez Pyke — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:17:47 +0000

With the unexpected news that Google was dropping its Browser Sync Firefox addon, attention is now turning to Mozilla Labs’ “Weave” project.

Weave is also a Firefox add-on and its purpose is to allow you to backup your Firefox settings such as your bookmarks, history, passwords, customizations and preferences and then sync them with the Mozilla servers so that you can access them from anywhere that allows you to access the internet. Obviously this data is encrypted so that it’s securely stored.

Setting up Weave

The first thing you have to bear in mind is that Weave is still a beta experimental project so you have to decide if you want to risk your Firefox user information in testing this. If you decide you fancy taking a walk on the wild side then read on.

To get started using Weave the first thing that you will have to do is go to the Weave homepage and create an account. Within a few seconds of hitting the Create Account button you will receive an email asking you to verify your account. Once you’ve verified your account you will be able to download the Firefox add-on.

Once you’ve downloaded the add-on and restarted your browser, press the sync icon at the bottom right of the browser then sign in. Once you’ve done this you’ll go through five steps of setting up Weave such as backing up your bookmarks, entering your account details that you signed up with and an encryption pass-phrase and performing an initial data transfer.

When the setup is complete you will see a confirmation message telling you that Weave will connect automatically each time you load up Firefox. However you can uncheck this option in the Weave preferences.

Your Firefox settings will now be synced automatically.

Weave Preferences

Under the Account tab in Weave Preferences you can sign out of the account and use another account if you have a separate account and choose whether Weave should automatically connect each time you start Firefox.

You can choose which items you would like to have syncing to the Mozilla servers from the Data tab. The items you can choose from to sync are Bookmarks, History, Cookies, Saved Passwords and Saved Form Data.

The Add-ons tab in the Weave Preferences will let you find, install and manage Weave add-ons.

The last tab under the Weave Preferences is Advanced. In the Advanced tab you will be able to choose the location of the server that you want your data to be synced to. There are debugging tools below the server settings. Under the debugging tools you will be able to reset your login, reset server lock, reset server data and reset client data.

Obviously it’s still early days for Weave but with Google Browser Sync out of the picture, Weave has little serious competition to worry about.

If you have tested Weave, please post a comment about your thoughts on Weave and let us know what you think about it. Is this something you will use? Do you see potential in Weave?

(By) Wez is a student studying computers, also does programming and video tutorials and writes about technology, software and websites, check out his blog @ www.TheTutorialBlog.com

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Get The Awesome Read it Later Extension For Firefox 3

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:28:19 +0000

We have already covered the Read it Later Firefox extension twice before, once when I wrote about some time-saving Firefox extensions and also when Mark wrote about the benefits of this extension.

But now this wonderful extension has been updated for Firefox 3 and in a big way. It brings some awesome new features which, I am sure, could make it one of the most popular extensions for Firefox 3.

So without any further delay, here are the power packed features of this updated extension.

1. Now Save and also add to social media/bookmarking sites

Yes, apart from just saving the web page for reading later, this extension now also allows you to add it to a bunch of social media sites. It shows as a red check mark just beside the bookmark start icon in the address bar after you’ve installed it.

You can click it to save a page or mark it as read. When you click on this red check mark, just below it a small arrow appears which gives you more options like adding it to social media sites. Plus, it hasn’t spared any social networking site either. It lists the popular sites such as Digg and Delicious and then there is a drop down menu which gives you a huge list of other social media and bookmarking sites.

2. Sort pages easily through date and tags

We know that Firefox 3 now supports tags in bookmarks. So when you click on the red check mark to save a page for reading later, you can also click on the star beside it and give it some relevant tags.

Now your reading list icon will appear at the extreme right beside the browser search bar. When you click on it, you should see a revamped interface which allows you to sort the list by date and by tags.

3. RSS Feeds of your saved pages

You can now get the saved pages in the form of RSS Feeds. When you go to your reading list, on the top right there is a small link to the RSS feed of that list.

4. Syncing and Offline Reading

Sometime back, LifeHacker reported that Google Gears may become irrelevant in Firefox 3 because it has built-in support for web apps going offline and developers could make use of it. Here we see an example of that. There is a small link to offline reading in the reading list, which allows you to save webpages for offline reading.

Also it goes one step further and allows you to sync your reading list between different computers.

5. Save All Tabs For Later

Although we do have the “Bookmark All” tabs feature in Firefox, this extension also adds ‘ Save All Tabs for Later ” in the right click, when you right click a tab, thereby allowing you to add all the tabs in your reading list at one click.

6. Click To Save Mode

This is another cool feature. If you switch to this mode by pressing Alt+M, the links which you click on a site will be automatically saved in your reading list. This could also be a nice time-saver.

Overall I found the extension to be very impressive. I did face some hiccups while using it but when I retried, it worked. It’s in beta so sometimes it may fail to deliver.

So have you tried this yet ? What do you think ? Let me know in the comments.

Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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5 Excellent Firefox Extensions to Manage your Bookmarks

Michael & Eric — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:28:45 +0000

If you browse the internet on a regular basis (and which Make Use Of reader doesn’t?), it doesn’t take long to stack up a big list of website URL’s that you will want to check up on later. The default bookmarking feature in the Firefox browser only takes you so far, so let’s take a look at some ways to better organize your growing bookmark collection, whether it’s synchronizing with another computer or just accessing the links a little bit easier.

1. Foxmarks : The Add-on Multiple Computer Users Can’t Live Without

Do you have multiple computers or multiple operating systems that use Firefox? If so, you need Foxmarks, a Firefox add-on that automatically synchronizes your bookmarks between multiple computers. It also allows you to access your bookmarks online. This is particularly useful if you often find yourself using public computers where you do not have administrative privileges to install anything. Foxmarks synchronizes your bookmarks by storing them on a remote server. With Foxmarks you no longer have to worry about backing up your bookmarks when reformatting or changing computers. If you are worried about security, there is an option to turn on encryption.

2. Speed Dial : See Thumbnail Views of Multiple Websites On One Page

Do you have a favorite set of websites you check daily? Would you like to be able to see thumbnails of them at the same time? Want to access frequently visited sites using ‘Ctrl+1/2/3/4…’ shortcuts? Speed Dial does just that. You can specify how many thumbnails it should show, organize thumbnails into multiple groups (sort of like tabs) and choose whether you want a thumbnail to be opened in new a tab or window.

Speed Dial is full of options that allow you to customize each thumbnail to your specifications. It even lets you set how often the thumbnail reloads. Speed Dial also provides an import/export feature which allows you to easily setup Speed Dial on multiple computers.

3. Delicious Bookmarks : Integrate Del.icio.us Account into Firefox

Are you a del.icio.us user? This add-on is not the standard del.icio.us button that every member already has. This add-on gives easier access to your del.icio.us bookmarks by integrating them directly into Firefox. You can easily add your existing Firefox bookmarks to del.icio.us and keep all of your bookmarks organized with tags. Also allows you to search your Del.icio.us tags from within Firefox.

4. GMarks: Integrate Google Bookmarks into Firefox

Are you an avid Google user? GMarks integrates your Google bookmarks right into the Firefox browser. GMarks allows easy migration to and from Google Bookmarks. Gmarks is completely separate from your existing Firefox bookmarks and does not remove or hide them.

5. Smart Bookmarks Bar: Helps Save Space On Your Bookmarks Tool Bar

Is your bookmarks toolbar overcrowded? Smart Bookmarks Bar is an add-on that helps ease the clutter by reducing the space each bookmark takes up on the bar. It does this by only showing the icon for each website. If a website does not have a specific icon, you can set one using the Favicon Picker 2 add-on. By default, when you hover your mouse over an icon, the name of that bookmark is shown. There is also a preference that allows you to auto hide the tool bar allowing for even more browser space.

Other

The following Firefox add-ons didn’t quite make our top 5 list, but we thought they were worth mentioning anyway:

To Read Later : This add-on allows you to temporarily bookmark a site so that you can read it later. Check out Mark’s Build an Online Reading List with “Read It Later” for more information.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector : Like the name implies, this add-on will check for duplicate URLs when you add new bookmarks. (WARNING: be sure to back up all of your bookmarks before deleting anything!)

What do you use to keep your bookmarks organized? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Michael & Eric are two college students who are balancing classes, work, and their personal lives. In their free time they enjoy relaxing and working on their blog http://wlmtips.com

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Build an Online Reading List with “Read It Later”

Mark O'Neill — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:06:51 +0000

When I go through my RSS feeds every morning looking for story leads, I end up finding approximately 10-20 stories that I see some possibilities in. But I don’t want to end up with a Firefox tab jam having those 10-20 tabs constantly open. When that happens, browser organisation gets shot to hell and my overall productivity goes down as a result.

So what’s the solution? Build up a reading list for later with the Firefox “Read It Later” extension. This instantly became my number one Firefox extension of all time, so much so that I eventually removed the bookmarks menu from Firefox to use the RIN extension exclusively.

When you install the extension, you end up with two small buttons on your browser which you can drag onto another toolbar if you wish :

The one on the left with the arrow is what you click to add something to your reading list and the right hand box is your actual reading list which you open by clicking on it.

So say you are browsing through your RSS feeds one day and you open some interesting stories in different tabs. You have no time to read them right now so you want to save them to your reading list for later. Just click the left hand arrow tab. You will then see that the arrow has changed colour from green to red :

Or you can right-click on the page with your mouse where you will find an option in the menu to bookmark the page.

Now later when you want to read that page again, you can either click the reading list button to be taken to the first link on the list or to be taken to a random post on the list (a bit like Stumbleupon I suppose). Or just expand the list manually with your mouse and click on the link you’re looking for :

Do you like that article that you’re reading? Then by clicking the red arrow button, you can then bookmark the link on various popular social networking sites :

When you have finished reading the page and you want to remove it from your reading list, just click that left hand arrow button again and watch the arrow change from red back to green again. The link is now off your list.

The extension is beta so it does tend to be a little buggy sometimes but on the whole this is an excellent tool which will rapidly become indispensable if you do a lot of online reading.

Here are two other useful features :

Integration into your Firefox bookmarks : your reading list is also integrated into your Firefox bookmarks menu. So if you use FoxMarks, you could access your reading list on other computers.

Offline viewing : I haven’t personally tried this one yet but it looks to be something like Google Gears. You can download copies of each webpage on your reading list onto your PC for offline viewing.

Two similar websites which perform the same service are ToRead and InstaPaper. However, I don’t like these services. With ToRead, a copy of the page is emailed to you which is not good if you’re already suffering from an overloaded email inbox (which may result in you losing the actual email when you need it the most). Or what if the email hits your spam folder and you don’t realise it? It’s gone for good.

InstaPaper is also not ideal in my opinion because you are reliant on the InstaPaper site always being accessible when you need it. If the site goes down for any reason, you can’t access your reading list.

With the Read It Later extension, the links are always stored on your own computer until you remove them.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a British freelance writer and blogger based in Germany. You can subscribe to his blog at www.BetterThanTherapy.net

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5 Beta Sites to Keep in Your Bookmarks

Aseem Kishore — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:48:29 +0000

There are literally hundred of new Web 2.0 sites that appear every month and many of them sound interesting, but only a few actually get people excited and anxious to get their hands on the goods! Most of these sites start out in private beta, so only a few select people get to play around with them.

Here’s my list of some of the popular and most anticipated Web 2.0 sites that are still in private beta, but already have a pretty large following!

	Hulu is probably the one site I’ve heard the most about lately and that looks to have the most promise. Imagine being able to watch any of the most popular TV shows online for free including Heroes, Bones, 24, and the late night shows also! Plus all of the shows are in pretty good quality. It’s video on demand plus video sharing. It will also include shows from Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance, etc

	Jooce is another very cool looking service that will help bring the desktop to the web, also called a web operating system. Basically, it’ll look just like your local desktop, but all of the processing, software installation, etc will take place on the server, thus freeing your local computer resources. As of right now, they have an IM client, file uploader, file sharing features and a few media players. Eventually, though, it will have photo editing apps, and office suite, and more! Jooce came out of private beat only couple of days ago.

	Adobe Cocomo is are components being developed by Adobe that will allow for real-time collaboration across web apps. If you haven’t played around with Adobe Buzzword, definitely check it out because Cocomo will add cool features to that such as real-time chat while you write documents and a shares real-time whiteboard.

	Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that aggregates all of your inbound and outbound activity online and manages it in one place. Other services like this are Tumblr and FriendFeed. It’s like an RSS reader and a social network rolled into one product. As more information is gathered from your online activity, a fuller profile is created.

	Xobni takes the effort out of organizing, searching, and navigating your email. It extends your IM (MSN, AIM, etc.) program and email client (Microsoft Outlook, etc.) by adding additional sidebar menu. View sender profile for each email (contact details, phone nr., social networking profiles, sent attachments, etc.), threaded conversations, extremely quick search, and more. [Video Demo]

Are you looking out for some other site to come out of private betta that you think will be even better? Go ahead and post a comment to let us know!

(By) Aseem Kishore

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