a.k.a. The Nerdy list of programs and web applications I use and love*
Now, on with the show. The following list is long. John Holmes long. But I’m trying to be thorough. What I’d like to do is use this to prompt a little feedback in the comments to hear from you what your programs of choice are. If I get enough, I can put up an updated list every once in a while. I’ll start with stuff that might be of use to all, and move to the more geekish stuff as I go on. I’ll also try to give a brief explanation of terms as I go on for the non-tech-savvy. After all, not so long ago, more or less all of the things in this list were completely unknown to me.
Web Browsing: The clear winner for me in this category is Firefox. Hands down. How do I love Firefox? Let me count the ways:
1. Tabbed Browsing - For those still using Internet Explorer, you may not know what tabbed browsing is. Basically, tabs are the alternative to opening a new window. Instead of opening a new window to read a link when you want to keep the original site open, you can simply open a new tab in the same browser window. You can have many tabs open at one time in your window, clicking easily between them. This function has changed my browsing habits forever. Firefox is not the only browser to have this function, but it’s the best.
2. Speed - Faster than explorer by far. Maybe not the fastest browser, (Opera claims to be faster) but fast enough for me.
3. Pop-Up Blocker - Firefox blocks pop-ups so well, I’ve almost forgotten how much of a pain they used to be when I used explorer.
4. Cost - Free!
5. Extensions - These, my friend, are what makes Firefox great. Extensions are bascially little plugins that add functionality to Firefox. Want some examples? Here are the ones I can’t live without.
a. Measure It - Basically, a way to measure things in your browser. Helpful for site design.
b. Colorzilla - A color picker for your browser. Also helpful for site design.
c. Linky - What a great extension. Allows you to right click and do a couple of things with links: 1) Open all image links in one tab, 2) Open all links in new tabs, 3) Show all images in one tab, 4) More like that.
d. Download Them All - An easy way to download all selected content from a web page. Especially nice in conjunction with Linky.
e. Plain Text Links - This helps you with irritating plain text URLs. Right click and open as link. Very helpful.
f. Ad Block - Once you install, provides an option to block ads on sites you visit. Very nice.
g. Fast Dictionary - Ctrl Click on any word (no highlighting needed) and get the definition. I also use it as a quick spell check if working in a program without one.
h. Session Saver - Keeps the last page (or tabs) open when you close and reopen Firefox. Also works if your browser crashes.
i. Stumble Upon - Installs a “Stumble” panel that allows you to give feedback on every site you go to (if you want to). Uses this feedback to custom tailor (ostensibly) sites that you will like. His the “Stumble” button and go to a random site you might like. Site selection gets better when you pick friends with similar tastes and pick categories you like in the control panel. Awesome plugin. I think it’s also available for other browsers…
j. Greasemonkey - For advanced users (or the brave) only. Greasemonkey allows you to create javascripts (or, in my case, use other people’s javascripts) that will customize your experience on a certain web page. For example, remove all ads from Google’s site or change the look of a bland site. If you do install it, make sure to also go here for a list of existing javascripts.
Desktop Picture Management: If you’ve got way too many pictures (I have over 1,000) you’ll love Picasa. Free to download and easy to use, Picasa will allow you to sort your pictures easily from one window. It also allows you to edit the photos in several ways. Not as good as Photoshop, clearly, but pretty good, especially the awesome red-eye remover. Additionally, Picasa allows you to easily e-mail photos, or share them online with Hello, a service I don’t use, thanks to….
Web Photo-Sharing: Three words. flickr, flickr, flickr. Boy, this site is awesome. This is everything free photo-sharing should be. With easy uploading, easy organization, tagging and a huge community of users, flickr is simply one of the best web applications to come out in the last few years (with the others being RSS feed readers and Tagging sites [as I call them] - more on those later).
- A brief aside about Tags, which flickr uses to great effect: If you’re not familiar with tags, it’s understandable. Tags are a pretty recent phenomena on the web, but they’re spreading like wildfire. Tags are, at their root, a word or two that describe something. What they describe might change, depending on the application you’re using (we’ll get to some more of those later). flickr uses them to describe pictures that you upload. You can use as many tags as you think apply to that picture. You can then sort your pictures by the tags, look up other user’s pictures with certain tags, etc. Very, very useful feature. flickr also allows you to sign up your blog (if ya have one) and post a picture directly to your website. I could go on, but that’s enough for now. Two last notes on this. If you use flickr, you should be sure to get the flickr uploading tool which will allow you to upload a bunch of photos at once from your desktop. Also, free accounts have a limit to how much you can upload a month, but the limit is high and the pay account (if you need one) is relatively cheap.
Tagging Sites - I’m using this term as an umbrella to cover two types of sites: Link Repositories and Post Repositories. Let’s break that down a bit.
Link Repositories: Well, there are many, many, many of these sites out there now, but Delicious was the first and (in my opinion) the best. But what is it? It took me a while of hearing about Delicious before I tried it. Basically, it is a way to collect links to sites and articles that you find interesting, so you can easily access them from the web at any time. With the easy addition of a bookmarklet to your browser, you can add a site to delicious anytime you want. When doing so, you add descriptive tags. Like flickr, you can search by tags to find sites or articles that are of interest to you. As I said, there are other sites of this type, such as Furl, if you aren’t happy with Delicious. I’d suggest trying a few and finding one that you like. But again, Delicious was the first, and is incorporated into many other sites.
Post Repositories: For lack of a better term, this is what I’m calling sites that receive tags and categories from blogs (if they choose to send them to such sites) and organize them by those same tags. For example, at the bottom of each post on my site, you can see a tags that describe that post. These tags are sent out to such sites. My favorite is Technorati. Like delicious, it’s the first and best of its kind. Recently it updated its look and functionality, and I find it even better than before. I sure wish delicious could update its look….
Whew. That took some time. To be continued….
if you get the program.
