Once you’ve been online for more than a month or two, you start to get enough experience to realize that Internet Explorer isn’t exactly the best web browser around. Microsoft just counts on you to be lazy and ignorant. The ‘blue E thing’ is sitting on your desktop, why bother changing to something else? Not surprisingly, if you spend all your time reading about the latest celebrity pregnancy or how angels visit Earth on UFOs, then you probably fall into Windows target audience who has never heard of critically acclaimed browsers such as Opera and FireFox which can make your online experience one heck of a lot better.

With your broadband connection, it’ll take you one or possibly two minutes to download a different browser. Add in 30 seconds for installation time. Or is that too much work for ya, leneş?

Let’s talk about FireFox. I like the vast amount of extensions available to customize the browser in thousands of ways, including making it comfortable for your blogging time. You have a comfortable chair. Maybe something to drink. Probably heating and air conditioning. Now, it’s time to adapt your computer, mmmkay? Comfort and productivity are the order of the day.

In the menu for Firefox, select Tools | Extensions. It will open a small window with a list of your current extensions. Kinda empty, nu? Click on the link for “Get More Extensions” for huge compendium of available tools and tidbits. Poke around as much as you like, there’s a zillion things to choose from. Ain’t it grand?

Start with SessionSaver. This puppy can be a lifesaver should anything ever go wrong with your computer while you’re online. It’s known far and wide that many Windows machines freeze up and/or crash for reasons most folks can’t figure out. It’s maddening. SessionSaver is perfect for just such emergencies. It keeps track of everything you were last doing, so it can be instantly restored. Once you’ve got your browser back up and running, you’ll find all the tabs reopen the sites you were just reading earlier. If you were typing a comment on this very blog when the power suddenly goes out, SessionSaver will remember everything you typed and you don’t have to start over. You literally pick up where you left off. Snazzy, huh?

Now that we’ve protected against the worst possibility, let’s do something about all these darn blogs we’re reading. How many do you keep track of? 5 sites? Thirty? Most people would make a big list of bookmarks and then go check each site daily. What are we, cavemen? Get with times, y’all. It’d be much easier if we didn’t have to mess with bookmarks at all and we could magically know if the blogs posted anything new or not. Save us a bunch of time, wouldn’t it? Yup.

Download Sage to clean up your mess. It’s a thing of beauty. Once installed, simply visit all your blogs one last time. Within Sage, click the magnifying glass to search for RSS and Atom feeds. Huh? Okay, just think of it like radio. Sage is going to pick up the broadcast signal of each blog. Add that signal (the feed) to Sage and you’ll know whether or not your favorite authors have published anything new.

When your blogs are added to Sage, you get this spiffy presentation of all the feeds you are subscribing to. See that purple-blue icon that looks like a piece of paper surrounded by circular arrows? Click it. That’s the ‘Refresh’ button that checks all your blogs at once to see if there’s been any new content you haven’t already read. Anything new it finds will appear in bold. If you’ve already read it, then nothing changes. E mai simplu, nu? Word.

I decided to set go into that options menu you see there and, under settings, disable the automatic display of feeds in the browser.  This way, no new pages load until I specifically say so.  Also, I set up the optional little green-leaf button that opens and closes Sage. Now, that’s lazy!

But then you’ve got all your other bookmarks, too. News articles, gambling websites, yiff forums, and religious book catalogs. Well, campers, that’s what the next icon is for. See the little humanoid on the toolbar (above)? I added that for the free Simpy service, which is a miracle-on-wheels when it comes to bookmark management. There’s a sweet little Simpy extension for FireFox written by the infamous Andu, über-elite Romanian hacker from the Debussey Seduction Syndicate. There’s even two online videos showing how to configure and use Simpy with the extension, for all you visual learners.

Basically, it works like this. Sign up for your free Simpy account. Install the Simpy extension. Now, go to whatever web page captivates your very soul and right-click. A contextual menu will come up and you will see the choice for “Add to Simpy.” Ding, ding! That’s the one we want, kids. Click it.

You are immediately whisked away to the magic land of Simpy. It will ask you to tag the bookmark with some keywords. Why? Because the olden days of nicely categorized bookmarks worked great back in 1994 when I first got online and saw all 50 of the internet’s websites. But we’re in 2006, people. There’s a gajillion places lurking around the seedy underbelly of humanity and most of us have 9,834 bookmarks at any given time. Giving them little keyword tags helps us later find the bookmarks we want. So, put in a few keywords. Click the “Add” button and you will be returned to the page you were originally reading.

Fastfoward. It’s 3 weeks later and you can’t remember where in the world all those websites are. You know, the ones you used in your latest essay. The one ready for publication, except you forgot to cite your sources. Whatcha gonna do now?

Well, that’s why we put the Simpy humanoid in our little toolbar a couple few paragraphs ago. When you click it, you get to see a giant pile of bookmarks. Only, they’re tagged and searchable, which makes finding stuff really simple. For an example, you can play with my boring stack I just started collecting.

Golly gee wilikers, Mr. Romerican, sir. What else can I do with this browser?

Say, I know, how about something incredibly geeky?! That would be nerdtastic!

Okay, you’ve been curious about that Earthlike globe icon. Well, I installed another extension called User Agent Switcher. It’s a clever git that lets your browser to cross-dress. Anytime you have some reason to fool a web server into thinking you are using a different browser other than FireFox, then you can change the way it introduces itself. Suddenly, websites think you’re using Internet Explorer, but you’re really not. Tee hee!

But, O Ye of Little Faith, the cool part is actually adding your own custom information. Like pretending you own an Apple laptop, by changing the User Agent settings. You can visit your buddy’s blog and tell him to check the web stats if he doesn’t believe you own such an expensive and glorious device. Sure enough, when he checks the log files, he can see you’re accessing his website with a Mac. Jokes on him, eh? Har har har. How about pretending to be on a mobile phone, so you can access WAP content? Mmmm. The geekery knows no bounds. Of course, you can do like I did and create your own fake web browser that doesn’t exist at all. If I read your blog, you’ll probably see my “browser” in your statistical charts. Ha!

Alright, let’s get back on track, shall we? No one likes to browse billions of blogs without some tuneskis, right? I mean except for you prarie dogs. There’s little more annoying than trying to read some website and needing to change the mp3 playing on your computer because you have to ALT+TAB switch over to your music player, change the song, and then ALT+TAB switch back to your story where you’ve now lost track of where you were. Bloody PITA.

But FoxyTunes will solve that for ya. Yessireebob, step right up and witness the latest miracle in socially-responsible internet home appliance technology convergence utopia. Once you install this extension in FireFox, all your music controls will simply appear in the browser itself. Check out the nifty little buttons in my lower right hand corner of the browser, seen here next to the Windows system clock.

It’s compatible with a wide variety of music playing software. If you’re like me, you fell head-over-heels in love with iTunes a long time ago and wouldn’t consider going backwards to a lesser player. However, if you happen to be someone who didn’t get the memo that WinAmp was cool last century, then don’t worry: it’ll work with The Lllama. Of course, if you’re truly hopeless and use shabby software like the decrepit Windows Media Player or evil RealPlayer, then you’re still covered — but you need a reality check.

Now all you have to do is decide whether you want to listen to Sarmalele Reci, B.U.G. Mafia, or that preposterous trainwreck from the musty bilge of Eurovision (a silly event which attempts to plague us all).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.