Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Back in October 2007 we previewed a new feature in Firefox 3 called Smart Bookmarks. Firefox 3 has a more advanced bookmarking system, and keeps tabs (no pun intended) on the sites that you visit the most. When those two things collide they form what has come to be known as Smart Bookmarks.

Since the feature’s initial launch the number of Smart Bookmarks has been trimmed down a bit. They initially started with six, but have now dwindled down to the ones I put in bold:

• Recently bookmarked pages
• Recently visited bookmarked pages
• Most visited bookmarked pages
• Recently used tags
• Most used tags
• Most visited pages

The question is how do you get these bookmarks back once they have been deleted? I expected that Mozilla would incorporate some sort of option into the Bookmarks Organizer, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead you need to dive into the about:config to get the Smart Bookmarks back:

Updated on May 19, 2008 to reflect Firefox 3 RC1 changes.

1. In the Firefox Address Bar type about:config and press Enter.
2. Find the option that is named browser.places.smartBookmarksVersion.
3. Change the value to 0 by double-clicking on it.
4. Restart Firefox, and you should see the Smart Bookmarks folder located on the Bookmarks Toolbar.

Now you’re back in business! I’m very anxious to see if someone creates an extension that lets you customize the Smart Bookmarks, and possibly even let you assemble your own based on visit frequency, date, keywords, and more.

[via Mozillazine]
Thanks to Jason for the tip!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Helpful Tip: Recover Lost Bookmarks in Firefox 3
• Tip Of The Day: Recovering Your Lost Firefox Bookmarks
• Space Saving Extension for Firefox Bookmark Toolbar Users
• Del.icio.us for Firefox 3 Released
• CyberNotes: Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks in Firefox 3

This article was written on April 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

How often do you open and save files on your computer? I’m sure that even the most casual users will do it several times throughout the day. Whether it be adding an attachment to an email, uploading a photo to a website, or simply saving a document you’ve been working on… opening and saving files is a part of our computer-driven lives.

Now the question of how to speed up the process comes into play. Most of the time spent opening or saving files is probably navigating through hierarchy of never ending folders on your computer that you’ve meant to cleanup for months. We’ve all been there, and luckily we have some excellent solutions for the Windows users out there!

–Vista Favorite Links–

First off Microsoft has made a valiant effort of addressing this problem in their latest Windows Vista operating system. When you go to open or save a file in Vista you’ll likely see a screen similar to this:

(Click to Enlarge)

Along the left side I’ve highlighted a section labeled Favorite Links. The Favorite Links is designed to serve as bookmarks for the folders you use the most on your computer. Vista ships with common bookmarks to the desktop, documents, music, pictures, and more, but you can add or remove them as you please.

If you come across a folder that you want to add just drag it into the Favorite Links. The order for the shortcuts can be changed at any time simply by dragging and dropping them where you would like. And if you want to remove one of the shortcuts just right-click on it, and select the Remove Link option. Nice and simple… just the way I like it.

–Direct Folders (Homepage)–

This is actually the application that sparked us to write this article. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that a free version of Direct Folders emerged, and there has been quite a bit of buzz about it around the Internet. The free version will be more than enough for most of you, and it’s actually quite slick as to how it works. Once you have it installed just double-click with the left mouse button in an empty area of Windows Explorer (or an Open/Save dialog):

(Click to Enlarge)

You should see a menu popup, and at first glance there isn’t much there. What you need to do is go through all of your favorite folders and add them to the list. You can do this by navigating to a folder that you want to add, double-clicking in an empty space with the left mouse button, and then choosing the Add here option.

The nice thing about this is that there are no buttons that clutter the interface, which is something many of you will appreciate. The one thing that I don’t like is that it’s sometimes a hassle to find an “empty space” to double-click.

–FileBox eXtender (Homepage)–

This is an open source project that I’ve used off and on again for the last few months. It has several advanced configuration options that power users will love, and even has a few features that almost any application will be able to benefit from.

This program works a little differently than the Direct Folders previously mentioned. FileBox eXtender adds a few buttons to the Titlebar of Windows Explorer and the dialogs. The folder icon with the heart is the one you want to look for because it’s where you can store your favorites:

(Click to Enlarge)

Next to the heart folder is another button with a clock, and that menu will contain folders that you’ve recently accessed through the open and save dialogs. That’s pretty smart since you’ll likely be pulling up the same folders over and over again.

There are two other icons you’ll see in other applications aside from just Windows Explorer:

• The up arrow will roll up the current window collapsing it down to merely the Titlebar. It’s just like WinRoll.
• The pin button will force a window to remain on top regardless of whether it is the window currently in focus.

Any of these buttons can be removed from the Titlebar by going through the configuration options, but it’s nice knowing that you’ll get some additional features that can be used outside of the Explorer windows.

–Overview–

Now we want to know about any tricks you use to make opening and saving files a speedy process. Drop off your tips in the comments below.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
• Folder Guide Gives You Easy Access To Your Favorite Folders
• Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
• Firefox 3 Places Gets "Smart Folders"
• CyberNotes: Best Firefox Extensions for Bookmarking

This article was written on February 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the reasons that I love Gmail the most is the remarkably powerful filter system that is integrated into it. With the filtering system you can analyze emails as they hit your Inbox, and then perform certain actions on them. If you spend the time to setup quality filters it can almost be like having your own personal secretary to sift through emails, but it’s a lot cheaper.

Google doesn’t limit the amount of filters that you can create in Gmail (although just 20 of your filters can forward emails to another address) so you can go as crazy as you would like. Today we’re going to take a look at some of the various ways that you can put the filters to work for you.

–Using Gmail Filters–

Setting up Gmail filters can be as easy or as hard as you would like. Some filters that I’ve setup are rather simple and are just based upon the from address, while others took a little more thought. Lets start with an overview of how you would setup a filter:

1. Click Create a filter (next to the Search the Web button at the top of any Gmail page).
   
2. Enter your filter criteria in the appropriate field(s).
   
3. Click Test Search to see which messages currently in your account match your filter terms. You can update your criteria and run another test search, or click Next Step.
4. Select one or more actions from the list. These actions will be applied to messages matching your filter criteria in the order in which the actions are listed — for example, you could choose to Forward matching messages to a specific email address, then Delete the messages.
   
5. If you’d like to apply this filter to messages already in your account, select the Also apply filter to x conversations below checkbox.
6. Click Create Filter.

–Tips & Tricks–

Using the filters can be pretty easy, but here are some things that might help you out along your quest for a cleaner Inbox:

• When blocking email addresses in the From field you can keep things a bit more general if you would like by specifying just the domain. For example, if you receive a bunch of messages from Orkut users instead of blocking each individual address just enter *@orkut.com in the From field.
• I’m able to use only one filter for blocking dozens of spam addresses thanks to the OR operator. For example, entering in spamaddress1@junk1.com OR spamaddress2@junk2.com will block emails coming from either of those addresses. There’s no need to create separate filters for each address.
• If you use Google Talk’s chat history feature you’ll soon realize that your conversations are also analyzed against your filters. To exclude chats from a particular filter enter is:chat into the Doesn’t have field. This will ignore all of your Google Talk conversations in the filters.
• You can scan filetypes in an email by putting filename:type in the Has the words field. Just replace “type” with the extension of the file that you want to filter. For example, to filter for Windows Media Player videos you would enter filename:.wmv into the field.
• Gmail supports what’s called “plus addressing” meaning the email address username+blah@gmail.com is still sent to the username@gmail.com email address. When signing up for services use this method so that filtering is even easier. For example, you could use an address username+amazon@gmail.com for all of your Amazon purchases. Then in the To field use the username+amazon@gmail.com to filter the emails sent from them.

–Useful Filters–

To get the ball rolling I thought I would list out some of the ways that I’ve put the filters to work:

• Anti-phishing – I use the plus addressing technique that I mentioned above for all of my financial accounts. Then when the emails come in I check the To address to see if it is from someone like eBay. If it is I’ll apply a “Financial” label to it. This coincidentally happens to serve as an anti-phishing mechanism as well, because if you think about it almost no scam artists are going to guess the “plus addresses” that I’ve created. When I see an email from eBay that didn’t get my label I know something fishy (no pun intended) is going on.

  Note: It’s not enough just to analyze the “from” address of an email when dealing with financial companies because those are often spoofed by the scam artists.

• Bacn – Remember Bacn? We talked about it last year when it was introduced as the “almost spam” emails we often receive on a daily basis. They refer to things like notifications from Facebook or newsletters that you’ve subscribed to. These are emails that you want to read, but don’t want cluttering up your Inbox. I have a ton of various filters set up for things like this, but my main one just applies a “Notifications” label to the email messages and then they skip the Inbox.
• Forwards – I receive quite a few forwards on a daily basis, and I normally never even open them up. Unfortunately the text “FWD” doesn’t show up in the subject line for most of the ones that people send, so I had to take a additional steps to block them all. Here are the two methods that work well for me:
• If you can see every person that they send the forward to go ahead and pick one of the email addresses that you’re not familiar with. Then just create a filter blocking all emails being sent To that address. That way you should still receive any of the personal emails that are directly sent to you while removing all of the ones that are mass-emailed.
• If the BCC (blind carbon copy) was used the previous method won’t work since you can’t see anyone else’s email address. But you likely won’t see you’re email address in the To field either. To get around this create a filter using the sender’s address in the From field, and then enter -youraddress@gmail.com into the To field. The minus sign before your address is crucial because this filter will check for any messages from the sender that aren’t addressed to you.

–Overview–

There’s a lot more that you can do with the filters, and the advanced operators guide by Google will definitely help you out on setting up extensive filters. I’m sure there are a lot of advanced Gmail users out there, and so we want to turn the stage over to you now. Let us know in the comments how you use Gmail filters to cleanup your emails.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Helpful Tip: Advanced Addressing in Gmail
• 20 Things you can do with Gmail Filters
• CyberNotes: Multiple Email Addresses In GMail Filters
• Hack Alert – Check Your Gmail Filters!
• CyberNotes: Your Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary

This article was written on August 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Opera is a free web browser that is available for the Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. One of the things that Opera is best known for is being highly customizable out-of-the-box, but I think that some people overlook how customizable the toolbars are.

I’ve seen quite a few people using Opera before, and almost none of them move thye toolbars or buttons around. I’m not sure if that’s because they don’t know how, or whether they love the default layout that much. On the other hand, almost all Firefox installations that I ever see have customized toolbars, and a good example of that can be seen at Lifehacker’s “Show Us Your Firefox“.

I thought about making this your typical tutorial that walks you through all of the different steps, but it would be extremely long and hard to explain. For that reason I’ve assembled a video demonstration that starts with a fresh installation of Opera, and shows you how I go about positioning things.

–Customize the Toolbars–

In the video demonstration I show you how to customize the look and position of any toolbar in Opera. Even the bar with the tabs and the sidebar are included in this category, and changing their location is as simple as right-clicking on them and choosing the Customize option. Then there is a drop-down menu next to a label called “Placement,” and that is what you’ll need to adjust to move toolbars around Opera.

–Tab Bar–

One of my favorite things in Opera is that you can move the tab bar to the bottom of the browser, or to one of the sides. Seeing that I have a widescreen monitor, I prefer to utilize the extra screen width by placing my tabs on the right-side, which is also nice because your tabs don’t get so small that they are unreadable.

In the video I’ll also show you how to move the tab bar below the address bar without any hacks or inconvenient tricks. By default the tab bar is above the address bar with Opera, which is something Firefox and Internet Explorer users might have a hard time getting used to.

–Sidebar–

I like to view myself as a minimalist when it comes to icons and clutter, but there are some things that I do simply because it makes me more productive, and the sidebar is one of those things. It takes up way too much room out-of-the-box, and I was anxious to find a way to condense it down. The reason why this is important to me is that I have hundreds of bookmarks that I frequently access, so to allow me to be as productive as possible, I need to leave the bookmarks sidebar open at all times. As you’ll see in the video, there is a surprising amount of customization options that pertain to the sidebar.

–Video–

Are you ready for the video? I spent a lot of time making sure that, despite the low-resolution, you can still clearly see everything that I’m doing. So without further ado…

–Overview–

Opera is about as powerful as you want it to be. Once you get diggin’ under the hood you’ll find all kinds of surprises that you didn’t know existed, and that’s one of the joys with using it as your browser. Play around, mess with the options, and don’t be afraid to screw something up…that’s my motto!

Opera Homepage

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
• CyberNotes: Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary
• CyberNotes: How To Customize Firefox’s Toolbars
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