Plug-ins

What were the Seven Most Popular Posts of November? Enquiring Mimes Want to Know Why

December 1, 2008 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

em-logo Looking back at November, it’s worth taking a look at which of our posts were most popular with readers and try to guess why, and what should we do to provide what our readers want in the future.

Here goes:

How to Raise a Charitable Child? - I'm happy this post was popular. I try to pepper the website with a few articles other than technology, especially on raising great kids since I've started so late, myself. Is it off topic? Not if I define the topic.
Big Boy Competition for Google Docs and Zoho Office Coming from Microsoft - Pretty straight news with a snarky title. Microsoft moving some of Office to the web is consistent with stories about web services that we normally cover.
You Tube Challenge: Make an Actually Good Video - The Onion - Straight satire. Very funny and on-topic to the extent that I've found humor in the mania for watching YouTube before. Do readers like satire better than straight articles? We do get our news from Jon Stewart.
Making Picasa and Flickr Play Nicely Together - Straight "how to" article, useful if you've tried to make these two work together.
Our Two Worst Posts of October and one (dis)honorable mention – Enquiring Mimes Last month we picked our worst posts of October. Readers must like to share our humiliation. Q:Write more bad articles? Probably.
XMind Mind-mapping is Now Open Source A short review and download link of a good previously, for sale, now free tool. I like free things.
Read It Later, A Must-have Firefox Plug-in Good short review for a Firefox plug-in, if you're using Firefox. Our November stats say that your probably were using Firefox more than any other browser. More plug-in info?

Tell us what you liked and hated in the comments.

Filed Under: Desktop applications, Digital Pictures, freeware, How To, Just Kidding, Life skills, Making Them Work Together, Office Suites, Open Source, Plug-ins, Technology, Weekends

Twittering the Enterprise — Microblogging with Yammer

December 1, 2008 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

Months ago I was skeptical whether there was a use for Twitter, and wrote here "Twitter - Why" Silly me. I did eventually allow that it could be useful. Since then I've become a fanboy and am following more than 400 individuals with about 200 following me. (Shameless self-promotion - follow me on Twitter ). I do believe Twitter is a great communications and marketing (self-marketing?) vehicle. I first heard of the Mumbai attacks via Twitter and now follow world news and industry news via Twitter. Yammer allows you to use "microblogging" which is blogging a la Twitter privately only within your own company. I want to share the same kind of information as Twitter but only to colleagues not the world or twittersphere. Yammer is free and easy to setup. All you need to launch it for your company is to provide your corporate email address, then you can invite your colleagues, boss, and direct reports. Anyone can join Yammer for your company as long as they use the same domain name. yammer-screen

I'm vp of marketing for a software company called Virtual Bridges, our domain name is vbridges.com. All of my friends at Virtual Bridges can join the Yammer conversation using their somebody@vbridges.com email address. yammer-screen2

Give it a try.

Filed Under: Plug-ins, Productivity, Shameless Self-Promotion, Tools, Websites

ThumbStrips: Firefox Plug-in Keeps Visual Track of Where You’ve Been

November 24, 2008 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

Boy, I spend a lot of time visiting web pages and following links. When I’m doing research, I flip from web page to web page and sometimes can’t figure out where I’ve been, when I find a page that interests me and want to give credit to the referrer. ThumbStrips is a Firefox plug-in that can help solve my problem. It puts a graphic filmstrip-like panel of thumbnails across the bottom of the Firefox page with thumbnails of all the pages I’ve visited. (You can turn off the recording if you want to go some place that you don’t wish to keep a graphic reminder - I guess pron-mode). When you want to return to the page, click on it’s thumbnail. If you have multiple Firefox windows open, each window keeps track of it’s own pages with a separate Thumbstrip. The thumbnail includes the time of the last visit and the scrolling position within the page. Thumbnail can be annotated with comments or deleted. intuitlabs-logo

ThumbStrips was developed by a research group called Intuit Labs within Intuit, the Quicken and TurboTax folks. Download ThumbStrips plugin here. [via downloadsquad] thumbstrips-screen

Full feature set from the product page, after the jump. The various features include:

showing time of last visit. The ThumbStrip displays the time you last saw each page, right below each thumbnail. And it's meaningful; instead of just a date and time, it tells you precisely how long ago it was.
capturing page scroll position. As you scroll up and down a page, the page's thumbnail shows exactly what you see on the screen. And when you click a previous thumbnail, it will take you to the exact spot where you last were.
resizability. Whether you like the thumbnails small or large, you can find a height for your needs. Simply drag the bar separating the ThumbStrip from the page, and the thumbnails will move right with you.
smart tab behavior. Each separate Firefox window has its own ThumbStrip, and within a window, the window's ThumbStrip will capture thumbnails from every tab. So you can keep using tabbed browsing to your heart's content, without fear of losing pages. You can even middle-click or Ctrl+click thumbnails to open them in a new tab.
multiple ways to scroll. By default, you can scroll through thumbnails by simply sliding your mouse left and right along the ThumbStrip, so you can find pages faster. If you prefer another method, you can turn mouse scrolling off from the ThumbStrip menu under Options and use either the DVD-type controls at the top, or the old-school scrollbar at the bottom of the window.
starting/stopping recording. If you want to browse without taking new thumbnails, you can stop recording for as long as you want. You can access this option not only from the ThumbStrip menu, but also by right-clicking either the toolbar button or the status bar icon. In addition, you can use the View menu option, or for the keyboard users, you can press Ctrl+Shift+S or F4.
instantaneous search. As you type, thumbnails will disappear and appear in the blink of an eye. And everything within every page is searched, so if you read it, you can find it. Click the Clear link to instantly show every thumbnail again.
filtering by domain. If you want to see thumbnails from only one or more particular sites, you can filter the ThumbStrip by domains. The filter can be set to any combination possible; for example, if you want to see only Wikipedia and Google pages, go to the ThumbStrip menu and set the filter to show en.wikipedia.org, google.com and nothing else. Turn the filter off at any time by setting it to show all domains.
sorting. We often visit a page multiple times (for example, a search results page). To handle multiple visits, the ThumbStrip condenses all the visits into one thumbnail, and sorts different thumbnails so that the most recently viewed thumbnails are at the end. As you browse, the thumbnails will even resort themselves instantly, without any effort on your part. If you want to change this default behavior, you can do so from the ThumbStrip menu under Sort.
saving and loading thumbstrips. When bookmarking single pages isn't enough, try saving your thumbstrips. Delete thumbnails you don't want (by right-clicking on the thumbnail), or filter them out, and save the thumbnails for later access. You can even save them to disk, so that you can share thumbstrips with friends and family. This is ideal for collaborative projects, academic research, step-by-step tutorial creation, unfinished window shopping, and more.
drag and drop placement. Just move thumbnails around to organize the filmstrip the way you want before saving and sending.
add comments so that you can easily take notes on a specific thumbnail. Notes that are saved, searchable, and shareable as well!

Filed Under: Plug-ins, Productivity

Read It Later – Another Must-Have Firefox Plug-in

November 6, 2008 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

I admit it. When I'm reading web pages I'm a compulsive ctrl-clicker. If you don't have this ADD-like habit, in most browsers if you press the control key and click with your mouse on a link, the link opens in a new tab. Yikes, after ten minutes or so, I have tabs open from here to the freeway. These are all pages that I want to take a closer look at but may not want to keep around forever in bookmarks. Read It Later is a Firefox plugin that let’s me mark web pages for later reading. It also allows me to sort the pages I’ve collected by date added, alphabetically, sitename or apply a “quality” score to the page, automatically using PostRank, so that when I have time, I can read the most important pages first. A “Click to Save” mode let’s me collect pages to read just by clicking on the link without having to open the page. It’s great for a compulsive clicker like me. Also nice is the ability to synchronize my reading list between computers and an offline mode that let’s me read my pages while not online like on a plane or in my case, at dog agility. Download Read It Later [via webworkerdaily] ril_screen