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?

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.

On first glance, the Flock web browser only seems to allow you to set up one blog account. If you’re like me and you manage more than one blog, this is a big limitation!

Fear not, there’s another way to add extra blogs. It’s hidden away in the options, but it’s there!

How to add additional blogs in Flock

• First, go to Tools, Options
• Click on the Blogging button (second from last) and the Accounts tab should be the first one to load.
• Click on the + icon and the Blog Account Setup Helper will appear. You’ll need to give it the URL of your blog and the username and password to log on.
• That’s it. Simple, wasn’t it?

I’ve been meaning to play with Flock for a while now, but never quite got around to it. I’m using it to generate this post and it’s all going swimmingly.

One of the big benefits of not being in the wp-admin area is that I’m not tempted to check my stats, comments and all that stuff that distracts me every day.

Anyway, more on Flock later. 

technorati tags: flock, blogs, blogging, wordpress

I’m writing this post with the new Performancing Plugin for FireFox.

Now, unless I’m being a complete numpty (always possible), there were no clear instructions for how to access this plugin. We (the blogging public) were left to our own devices to find out how to even access the Performancing plugin. After scouring the FireFox interface (I expected some kind of toolbar, to be honest), I found a new right-click option for Performancing with a sub-menu which allowed me to “Blog this page”. And yes, I did check the Performancing website for a getting started guide. I couldn’t find one.

Getting Started

When you eventually gain access to the plugin features, the interface is quite straightforward. The first thing you need to do is add a blog. This again is very straightforward and I added this WP.com blog, as it’s one of my less-critical blogs. Select the blogging platform you use, enter your username and password and that’s about it.

Performancing gives you access to your blog categories and previous post history (this is a new-ish blog, so I’m not sure how far the history goes back). On the down side, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add new categories to your blog from the plugin. That’s not a major problem, though.

I’ve not tried this with multiple blogs yet, but if I warm to Performancing, I might just add a few more….

Blogging With The Performancing Plugin

Was pissed off from the outset with Performancing. The input seemed to be working well, until I formatted some text in bold and italic. Instead of using strong and em, the plugin inserted inline CSS via span tags. Disaster!

I discovered an option in the settings to disable the use of inline CSS, so I did this and tried again. Instead of

strong

and

em

, it gives us <b> and <i>! Can someone remind me what century it is? Why, in the name of XHTML, would someone use those antiquated tags?Final gripe (before I post this) is the lack of features in the toolbar. Now, Performancing isn’t alone in this - even WordPress is currently missing what I consider vital elements. We don’t have options to insert various levels of

hx

. Coming from a bunch of guys who are promoting the idea of professional blogging, I’m surprised they can release a product that ignores the value of semantic XHTML, particularly in terms of Search Engine Optimisation! Where is the support for heading tags, strong and emphatic text? Also, enabling and advertising keyboard shortcuts for common commands would have been a big thing for me.

After The Rain…

All gripes aside, Performancing is not a bad wee plugin. It gives you what you need to blog straight from your browser, which is a definite bonus compared with flicking between tabs/windows! Oops, noticed that the plugin grabs the focus of tabs, so that CTRL+Tab cycles through the various post views. When you click into a web page it returns to normal though.

I’m not sure what the long-term future for browser-based blog editors is, though. I downloaded and tried Flock for a while, but a bookmark away was my WordPress dashboard and all the stats plugins and stuff that will never make it into a stand-alone program. And missing the ability to maintain the blog means you’ll always end up back at your dashboard.

I s’pose I’m maybe not totally sold on the idea in the first place. Which means that Performancing, like many other blogging products, has a long way to go before it tempts me away from my WordPress admin screens…..