My Guide to Power Surfing

The Internet is full of information which many people could use to educate and inform themselves. There are a few Firefox extensions and tricks I use to make the most out of my web surfing experience.

Check out my Open Search Plugins for Firefox!

Read about the Google Browser Sync Extension here.

Define
You’re at some site and they throw a word at you that you’ve never heard of. You can ignore it hoping that the information you’re reading will make sense anyways, or you can use the power of Google and take various definitions from various sites. Get the Define extension. Simply select some text, right click, then click “Define”. It’ll create a tab in the background with the Google definition page, which lists definitions from various sites such as Wikipedia, Webster’s site, and all types of other sites usually pertaining to the subject of the phrase. So if you put define “(Some medical thing)”, you’ll get some medical site as one of the definition givers.

gTranslate
You’re at some site and someone decides to pull a foreign phrase or expression on you, probably not the entire page. Well, in a situation like that, gTranslate might come in handy. Simply select the text, right click and it’ll automatically detect the languages, to and from (i.e. From Spanish, to English). If these end up being wrong, you can easily change them. The best thing of all though is that the translation is within the right click menu, you don’t have to go to a new page or anything. If the translation is too long, it’s truncated and when you click on the translation it opens a tab in the background with the Google Translation page for the selected text.

Wikipedia as Primary Search Engine
What?! I search with Wikipedia instead of Google? Nah, but I mean, in Firefox, on the top right, make sure it’s Wikipedia. After all, for Google you can easily either go to Google, type in a phrase into the search bar and have it be treated as if you typed it into Google I’m Feeling Lucky, or simply type ‘Google my query’ into the address bar. When you have Wikipedia selected as the search engine on the top right, you’re now able to select some text, right click, and click ‘Search Wikipedia (English) for the text’, which is yet another great source of reference. Whenever you hear people talking about something you don’t understand, just do this and you can get the breakdown on it easily.

Bookmarklets
We wish there were extensions for other search engines as well, but often times the need for an extension could be circumvented. Two other sites I suggest you guys have access to are AcronymFinder and UrbanDictionary. This can easily be done with the help of BookMarklets. Basically they are pieces of JavaScript that you add as bookmarks and you use them by selecting text and then clicking on the bookmark. You might be thinking, “But I don’t want to have to look through my bookmarks just to use it! That’s inconvenient!” Don’t worry though, you can add it to the Bookmarks ToolBar. You might have other things there as well, and you might see yourself running out of space, well, you could do what I do and abbreviate bookmarks. I abbreviate my bookmarks all the time, whether or not I’m running out of space. I abbreviate “DreamHost Control Panel” to DHCP, “Discuss Fitness” to DF, “Calorie Count Plus” to CCP, “FaceBook” to FB, and so on and so forth. This saves tons of real estate in the Bookbmarks toolbar, and it makes it look a lot more condensed and neater.

AcronymFinder Bookmarklet
Let’s face it: The Internet is flooded with acronyms. This is usually a good thing, not to the point where you’re overusing them, but sometimes if you spell things out completely it makes you look like some type of boring nerd. For this reason, there is the AcronymFinder Bookmarklet. Simply right click and bookmark this link, I suggest you put it in the Bookmarks Toolbar folder and abbreviate it to AF so that it doesn’t take much space up there. Now you could simply select any text, such as AFAIK, then click on the Bookmarklet to view the expansion of said acronym.

UrbanDictionary Bookmarklet
Now you’ve pretty much have everything you need to survive in the language rich Internet, you can take any word they throw at you, become familiar with any topic you’re given, and so on and so forth. The only problem is that all these things are formal, there are often times slang words or phrases that you’ll encounter, especially if you don’t always hang around with nerds that only use words from the dictionary. For this reason, there is the UrbanDictionary Bookmarklet. Simply right click and bookmark this link, and you’ll be able to select any text, click on the Bookmarklet, and see the definition.

Tiny URL Bookmarklet
You’re at some site such as Ebay, Amazon, or any other site that creates crazy long encrypted links that contain every type of punctuation and symbols imaginable as well as the entire alphabet and you want to share the link or put it somewhere but it’s too long and ugly. Well, you can use the TinyURL Bookmarklet which will shrink long links and make them share-able and presentable. Simply right click and bookmark this link. Now whenever you’re at a page like this, simply click the Bookmarklet and it’ll create a shorter link which you can use, which will take you to the same page.

Flickr Bookmarklet
Flickr is the place to find pictures. Beautiful pictures ranging many topics and what not. Say you’re looking at a very nice picture that you would absolutely like to have on your computer. The problem is that usually you’re not able to directly download the image by right clicking on it and clicking save image. If you try that, a ’spaceball’ image downloads instead. You can dig around in the Page Media properties but that’s too troublesome. Instead, bookmark this link and name it something like ‘FGET’. Now, whenever you’re in this situation, just click the bookmark and this bookmarklet will take you to the image itself, allowing you to save it.

Sharing Your Power Surfing Experience
The Internet is full of wonderful things, one can spend a long time venturing through the infinite content it has. In this day and age, people share what they find with others. There are sites where you could do just that; Social Networking Sites. I’m not talking about FaceBook or Myspace, I’m talking about sites like Digg and SlashDot. I’m more of a Digg user; SlashDot is usually behind on the news and is typically geared towards “Nerds”; stuff which I get tired of, however, SlashDot is known for having a smarter community (Duh). Digg works by having users post links to things they have found such as pictures, videos, articles, tutorials, etc. The thing is that Digg is democratic so to speak; if a Digg user likes a post, they ‘digg it’, or vote it up, and vice versa. Digg is a great way to find new things, and get news instantly, often times before it even gets to TV (Even if it’s breaking news for example).

The thing is that Digg and sites like these work by contributing, it wouldn’t be that great of a site if users couldn’t contribute and post things up there. That’s why there exists the Smart Digg Button. This tiny little button lies on the bottom right corner of your Firefox window. Whenever you view a page, it checks to see if it has already been dugg, if so, it shows how many diggs it has and if you click on it it takes you to the Digg page for it, where you could comment on the site and digg it up as well if you like. If it hasn’t been submitted to Digg, it’ll say “Digg This”, and if you click on it you will be taken to the Digg Submission page, where you’ll be able to submit the page in just a few seconds. This is great, because as I mentioned earlier, you can see if it has already been submitted and if it has you can be taken to the Digg page for it, where you could read comments that have already been posted, where people post other helpful resources related to the topic.

Make Links Clickable!
There’s nothing worse than having an unclickable link. Well, honestly I’m not entirely lazy where I can’t just copy and paste it into the address bar, but sometimes links are too long or complicated and this could be a hassle. For this reason, there is an extremely simple extension called Linkification, which will ‘linkify’ any links it sees, any types of links as well. This is a lot more useful than you might think.

All-In-One-Solution
There is an extension called HyperWords, which is pretty much a big context menu that allows you to search tons of sites such as Google, Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, AcronymFinder, etc. You might want to have this instead, but I honestly think it’s more of a hassle and it’s very ugly/bloated. I’m just saying this so that people don’t say “You just wasted an hour typing this when there’s already a plug-in that does all of this”, it doesn’t do everything I said as intuitively as I like it, but I guess it’s up to each one of you as to whether or not you like it.

To be honest, you might not need some of these features, but I do. They have worked wonders for me and have saved me lots of time and confusion, but there’s no denying that some of you could do without some of these, such as the Linkification extension. The good thing is that these things are unobtrusive and so you don’t really lose anything in having them. Hopefully your surfing experiences will be more comfortable and faster, while getting twice as much out of it.