Firefox

I love Firefox. One of the reasons I love it so much is because it is designed so that other software developers can create their own "add-ons" to it. Here are some of my favorite add-ons:

Adblock Plus
This add-on blocks most advertisements on the Web. While I disagree with this from a capitalist point of view, it really removes the clutter from your screen.

GBookmarks
Say you use one computer at work, another at home, and a laptop when you travel. You end up with bookmarks on 3 different computers and can never find the ones you need. GBookmarks solves that by allowing you to use Google Bookmarks just like you use your regular bookmarks. Then, no matter what computer you use, you can just sign-in to your Google account and retrieve the same set of bookmarks.

Undo Closed Tabs
Ever spend a lot of time searching for something only to accidentally close your tab and lose your place? With this add-on, if you accidentally close your tab, you just right-click and click "Undo close tab".

There are also some great add-ons for Web developers such a Firebug. There are many other various add-ons from weather reports to e-mail notifications.

Another other feature I love about Firefox is how it keeps track of where you are. For example, in Firefox 3 if you have several tabs open and close the browser, it will ask you if you want to save your place. And if Firefox accidentally crashes (which will happen no matter what browser you are using), when you open it back up it will ask if you want to restore your session and you're back where you left off.

Adding Life to Your Blog Comments

Whenever you post a comment to a blog on blogspot.com, you may have noticed that it says "You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>." So what does this mean? It's geek for "bold", "italics", and "link". They are actually called "tags" and you need a beginning tag and an ending tag.

For example, if you wanted to say: "Hey Hucklebuck, that was a great post!". You would type:

Hey Hucklebuck, that was a <b>great</b> post!

Or if you wanted to italicize something, you might type:

Hey Hucklebuck, you are <i>so</i> cool!

The last one is a little different, but still very simple. Say you wanted to post a link to Google with the text "Click here to go to my favorite site". You would do it like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com">Click here to go to my favorite site</a>

That's it for this post. I've got several more ideas, but if you have any computer topics you'd like me to blog about, please send me an e-mail at scl.hucklebuck@gmail.com.

Intro

I have been a professional software developer for the past 10 years. Because I work in the information technology field, I get asked lots of computer-related questions from friends and family. So I've decided to pass along a few tips and tricks that I have learned along the way that I hope will be helpful to you too. I'm working on my first post now. Stay tuned...