After asking our iTeach participants to blog about the FireFox extensions they are trying, I thought I should take my own advice and do the same. Below are the extensions I’m currently using in some capacity:
Advanced Dork: Gives quick access to Google’s Advanced Operators from the context menu
Aging Tabs: Colors tabs based on the last time the page was actively viewed
All-in-One Sidebar: Quickly switch between sidebar panels, view dialog windows such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source or websites in the sidebar.
Attention Recorder: Record yor browser activity
Better GReader: Enhances Google Reader with Greasemonkey scripts. I use this to add an “add to del.icio.us” script to Google Reader.
Clear Cache Button: Clears your web cache with just one click
Colorzilla: Advanced eyedropper, color picker, and page zoomer
Colour Contrast Analyzer: examines the foreground and background colours of text nodes, and provides a report to see if they are correct according to AERT and WCAG’s luminosity colour contrast algorithm
CSS Viewer: Adds a flyout that displays CSS properties for different objects and elements on a page. Very handy.
del.icio.us Bookmarks: The Official Delicious Add-on seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us, the leading social bookmarking service on the Web
deliGoo: deliGoo searches on the sites, indicated in your del.icio.us bookmarks. With its help you can find the necessary page according to any phrase or word, which it contains
Digg This: Adds Digg This! to the right-click menu, Tools menu, and optionally the toolbar
Diigo Toolbar for Firefox: Social Annotation – a superset of social bookmarking and more
Evernote Web Clipper: provides a toolbar button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to the EverNote Application as a new note. I’m not quite convinced that I like Evernote yet
Firebug: edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: Synchornize your bookmarks across multiple computers
Gmail Space: Use Gmail as online storage
Google Send to Phone: send text messages to your phone
Greasemonkey: Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at https://userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Check out https://wiki.greasespot.net/ to get started.
JavaScript Debugger: a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers
MySocial24x7 Bar: A companion to FriendFeed that allows yout to explore Everyone’s, Your Friend’s, and Your Feed
Operator:leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services
Palette Grabber: Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, or OS X based on the current page
PDF Download: lets you know before trying to open it, and then offers you choices such as downloading, opening, or converting it straight to HTML
Poster: for interacting with web services and other web resources that lets you make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type. This allows you to interact with web services and inspect the results
powertwitter: allows you to add photos from Flickr and your YouTube videos directly in your tweets. It also unwinds the tiny URL’s
Professor X:let’s you see inside a page’s head without viewing the sourcecode
Resizeable Form Fields: Allows you to resize text areas
ScribeFire: a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog
Stylish: Customize the look of the application and of websites with Stylish, a user styles manager
Super DragAndGo: Drag a link or anything like a uri (e.g. “abc.com” ), and throw it to anywhere blank on the webpage to open the it in a new tab
Tab Mix Plus: includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager
The Coop: keep track of what your friends are doing online and share new and interesting content with them
ViewSourceWith: Extends view source fuctionality
Web Developer: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools
WideFox: MOve tabs to the side of the browser for vertical display. Great for browsers that keep may tabs open
Zotero: helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources
This annotated list of add-ons is impressive and very helpful Christan! I have lots of questions about lots of the things I thought I “got” during the iTeach. First though, help me understand the diff between Blogger and WordPress? Why would I want to use one over the other, and of course, require my students to use the same?
Terri
Blogger vs. WordPress?
We have iTeach participants start with Blogger because it is easy to get started and because it requires a Google log in, which comes in handy again when we talk about RSS and GoogleReader.
WordPress has many advantages as well, and I must admit that I’m not impartial – I run my personal blogs on WordPress because I prefer the available features and flexibility it has. If you start on a WordPress.com blog and realize you would like to host your own WordPress installation (which gives you greater control over your templates and plugins), the change can be rather painless. In my mind, the advantages to running WordPress happens once a blogger has some experience and has developed some personal preferences.
In the end, they are both good platforms – even for beginners. I helped my mom start a WordPress blog over the winter and now, with little computer savvy, she has a number of posts under her belt. Our decision to use Blogger for iTeach was driven most by the single Google login for many services.
Christen,
I’m thinking it might me easier if I knew your email address to ask some of the many questions I have regarding our iTeach exposures. I suppose others might benefit too, but it seems like some of my questions are pretty mundane.
Question right now? I want to put my iGoogle page as my home page. Have it show my reader, my calendar, my weather… etc. and I don’t have a clue how to do that. Suggesions?
Terri
Log into iGoogle and open Tools > Options in FireFox. Click on the Main tab and then click the button the says Use Current page (as your home page).
Then, all you have to do is add things you want to iGoogle by clicking Add Tab or Add Stuff – depending on what you want to do.