I came across Gimparoo this morning on del.icio.us Popular. It’s a relatively new blog that aims to convert popular Photoshop tutorials for users of the Open Source GIMP image editor.

The author’s style is light and easy to follow, and the tutorials come complete with before and after screenshots and some process screenshots showing what settings were used.

There are some great tutorials on the site already, and perhaps it’s worth subscribing to to learn a bit more. The author of Gimparoo is also an open source advocate and gives a bit of information about his setup on the info page. Reading this stuff always gets me salivating for Kubuntu again!

Lifehacker has a post about dragging unlinked URLs to the address bar to navigate.

Let’s say you come across an URL that hasn’t been linked. Select it (careful with spaces at the start and end) and drag it up to the address bar. Release the mouse and FireFox will automagically jump to that page.

In fact, you can even drag regular links to the address bar for the same effect.

Other FireFox Navigation Tricks & Techniques

This got me thinking about other navigation tricks I wanted to share. Let’s try:

• ALT+HOME: This shortcut will take you back to the browsers default homepage.
• Changing Your Default Homepage: Drag a link from the address bar over the Home button. Release the mouse and you’ll be asked if you want to reset your homepage.
• ALT+D: This jumps you straight into the address bar and allows you to either type in a new address or modify the address that’s already there.
• ALT+Back Arrow/ALT+Forward Arrow: The essential Back/Forward browsing commands. Don’t leave home without them.
• CTRL+T: Open up a new tab in your browser window. It’ll start up with the cursor in the address bar waiting on your command. Literally.
• CTRL+TAB: Cycles through the various tabs you have open in FireFox. Bonus points for using CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to cycle backwards! Got too many tabs open? Then you might need…
• CTRL+W: Closes the current tab you’re looking at. Be careful, closing the last tab shuts down FireFox!
• Preloading Pages: I like to read stuff right through to the end before reading material that’s been linked to in the post. To have all the material ready and waiting, I middle click each of the links as I browse and they load up in new tabs while I’m reading.
• Bookmarking: If you’re old school and insist on bookmarking, CTRL+D will bookmark the page you’re on. Actually, I’m using the Del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for FireFox and CTRL+D brings up a new bookmark in that too! Hooray!

Conclusion

Well, the conclusion is that I am a FireFox ninja! Most of these tricks should work in Internet Explorer, only a few work in Opera (unfortunately). If you’re a Flock fan, everything should work as I foretold it.

Nonetheless, learning them has improved my web browsing experience no end.

Over to you. Care to share any Power User tips for FireFox?

You could almost see this coming. The response from the Performancing community was pretty hostile toward Nick Wilson when the deal with Pay Per Post was announced.

The credibility that Nick had built up over the past year or so through Performancing was directly attacked, and perhaps the only way to salvage that was to walk away from the deal.

I’m not a bandwagon hopper, so I’ve got no beef with Pay Per Post. Blogosphere, big place. Opportunities plenty. That sort of thing.

It’s good to see that Metrics will have a new lease of life as an Open Source product, and perhaps we’ll see some nice new developments. I’d suggested a couple to Nick a while back, like making the URLs in reports more readable instead of truncating them.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Performancing For FireFox blog editor that they released (now ScribeFire), and their advertising system has yet to yield any big rewards for me so far. Metrics also failed to hit the spot, except the useful AdSense clicks chart.

Anyway, the big point of interest is that both companies seem to have listened to feedback and reacted accordingly. Whether PPP can claw any kind of good reputation from the blogosphere is anyone’s guess, though I suspect Nick’s status will be relatively unscathed thanks to this latest move.

It had to happen. The clever folks at Pligg have spun off a content management system that mimics Digg, the popular social bookmarking service.

Now everybody can have their own version of Digg!

I’m pretty sure a Digg-clone won’t work on every website, but it might be useful as a forum replacement where users can submit stories as discussion points. The SEOmoz crew wrote about Pligg the other day and pointed to a few examples of sites which use the Pligg platform.

Actually, it might even be useful for those bloggers who blog snippets of stories with a link back to source. Just a great way to rapidly post content with the added benefit of the voting element thrown in. Whatever, it may be worth a look.

If anyone’s given Pligg a try, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

And while we’re on the subject of Digg, my Digg profile is GerryBot. Do feel free to friend me…

Launchy is a neat idea. At least in theory. It’s a Windows utility that allows you to launch applications just by typing their name into a little box in the middle of your screen.

At it’s most basic, Launchy scans your program files folders and indexes the names of the applications installed there. A quick press of ALT+Space activates a search box on your screen - start typing the name of the program (say, FireFox) and Launchy will present you with the most likely program. It’s sort of like predictive text for programs!

The thing is, Windows already has built in support for this type of activation. Alright, it’s not sexy (what MS implementation is?), but it works almost as well.

If you know the name of the executable you’re looking for, you can launch most any program straight from the Run command. To activate the Run command, press WinKey+R (where WinKey is the key with the Windows icon).

Let’s say you want to run Microsoft Word - type winword and hit return. Internet Explorer? Type iexplore and hit return. FireFox? Dreamweaver? Flash? Just type in the name of the executable and away you go.

Try it again for utilities like calc, notepad, etc. It works. I’ve been using it for years.

There’s nothing wrong with Launchy. In fact, kudos to the developer, Josh Karlin, for taking this built-in functionality and making it eminently more usable. Not everyone knows or cares what the underlying executable is called, so the ability to launch a program by typing a fragment of the name is definietly useful. In fact, it’s the sort of usability feature that Windows desperately lacks - wake up Redmond!

Finally, a feature request for Launchy - phased program startup. There are a series of programs that I launch each time I start Windows. I don’t want to overwhelm system resources by placing them in my startup folder.

If Launchy starts from the startup folder, wouldn’t it be useful to define a list of programs to start automatically, offset by 30-60 seconds each? That way, each program would have an opportunity to load in sequence, rather than all starting (and consuming) system resources at once.

Summary: Not a bad product, but in my opinion a bit of a one-trick pony. With a bit of thought into value-add features, Launchy could become a useful replacement for the Windows Start Menu.

Listible is a great resource for finding useful information. In true Web 2.0 tradition, it harnesses the wisdom of many to build definitive lists. If you’re a frequent visitor to the site, you might agree that the method is pretty hit and miss!

Anyway, Listible’s Open Source Applications For Windows list has become quite popular recently and I’ve dug in and tested a few of the programs.

It goes without saying that FireFox is my primary browser, and you’ll be aware of applications like Audacity, OpenOffice.org, and The GIMP (although not many people know there’s a Windows port of GIMP)

Aside from the better known apps, there are a few little gems that I haven’t heard about before.

7-Zip, for instance is a free zip utility that can handle a range of archive formats, meaning that you don’t need to have a copy of WinZip or WinRAR to open tar.gz files in Windows (something that I needed during my installation of Drupal)

The list has tons of other free resources for Windows, that might replace more expensive alternatives. This is certainly true of OpenOffice which would save you over £350.00 on the cost of Microsoft Office. Plus OpenOffice.org has PDF export capabilities which MS Office just doesn’t.

Ever since discovering the Performancing website for bloggers, I’ve had an itching to test out Drupal. To date, I’ve been a WordPress-only blogger, and very loathe to try any other blogging/content management systems.

When Performancing came along, they had an intriguing use of Drupal, both as a forum and to allow their members to blog on the site. I thought (and still think) that this use of a CMS is a fantastic way to build a community driven website. In fact, I’m planning to create a community-driven website using Drupal soon, so that’ll be an interesting experiment.

I’m currently building a Drupal site at my personal domain, which will be explicitly for testing purposes. I’ll do a bit of blogging there, create some content and allow visitors to sign up and join in discussions, etc.

I also came across a site by a guy called Nick Lewis, who among other things writes with authority on the subject of Drupal and how to customise your installation. I’ll be referring back to Nick’s site quite a bit (hopefully) and also writing about my experiences with Drupal here.

A while back I wrote about how to ’speed-dial’ your websites by creating smart keyword bookmarks in FireFox. James Yeang over at friedbeef.com has taken this about five steps further with his instructions for how find media files using advanced Google searches.

It’s a great hack for finding interesting stuff, and James also points to Mozilla’s instructions for using Smart Keywords, so you can set up automatic searches for your favourite sites.

Mozilla FireFox and Opera both have a nifty bookmarks feature which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut, sort of like speed-dial for websites.

Here’s how it works: Browse to a website you visit often, say Interweb World. Bookmark the site by either pressing CTRL+D or going to Bookmarks / Bookmark this page.

Once you’ve bookmarked the page, go to the Bookmarks menu and locate your new bookmark. Now, right-click on the bookmark and choose Properties. Under the usual title and URL fields, you’ll see a Keyword field. Type ‘IW’ as your keyword (assuming you’re bookmarking Interweb World!) and click OK.

Now, click into the location bar, type IW and hit return on your keyboard. The shortcut is instantly transformed into the URL!

Using Nicknames In Opera

As I said, Opera has offered the same functionality for a while now, allows you to assign the keyword at the time you create the bookmark. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

• Bookmark a site in Opera (Interweb World, of course).
• When the Add Bookmark dialog appears, find the Nickname field and assign the shortcut you want to use. Test it out by clicking into the location bar, typing the nickname and hitting Return on your keyboard.
• Done!

It’s not practical to use this for every website you bookmark. I tend to use it for sites I hit frequently to save me typing in long URLs over and over again.

Finally! I just noticed this evening that Google has introduced a delete button on the interface. No more irritating drop-down menu!

Just in case our grandchildren fail to realise - this was possibly the single biggest interface omission made by the Gmail developers! To have to select (or view) an email and then drop down a menu and click Delete was a serious pain in the ass!

I’m going to bed now. Happy.