This week I made a few changes to my totally-customisable Firefox and found some new toys to make browsing the web fun and useful again:
1. MenuX Firefox Extension: Makes the already free-to-move menu bars in Firefox even more user-friendly. When combined with the QuickNote extension and the TwoView extension, my browser now looks like a word processing sheet with integrated browser. I can be typing and taking notes in one pane with multiple sheets, while I continue browsing and researching in the other pane with multiple tabs. It all looks very clean and well-organised, and I don't need to keep copying and pasting, much less switching between windows. I almost never touch my mouse anymore.
2. PubSub Matching Engine: This crazy little ditty searches the 10.5 million-odd sources of blogs, news sites, press releases, newsgroup posts and more and collects links for any entries that meet your search criteria. When I worked at InstaTrac, we did something similar with bill text, and we charged 4 grand a year for it. Now you can get it for free. I've been playing with the search engine for a few days. You really have to refine it in order to get what you want. It will collect all matching links on their website or create a static RSS feed that is updated in real-time for you. Current uses for me are research for my thesis and keeping tabs on friends and family members.
That's it for now. Switch to Firefox!
Flown by mariposa at 01:06 PM on June 04, 2005
