Thursday, January 13, 2005

Scrapbook

Over the past few months, I've come to appreciate the many fine features of Firefox.  Until today, the CSS editor (sidebar panel, where code-tuning reveals its effect immediately) and the Web Developer (good for revealing tags, splitting out different strata/backgrounds from a page) topped my list of favorite extensions.  I'm also fond of Linky, Quicknote and Flowing Tabs--the abundance of ease they bring into my net-tled life. But just now, I downloaded Scrapbook.  Is everyone else already using this?  It's brilliant really, allowing multiple sites and pages of notes to be tucked together into a custom folder--all at the sidebar.  It enables in-tab note-editing and HTML coding of the note (for whatever that might be worth).  And searchable.  Best extension yet for my needs.  Works great for the dilemma of a bundle of sites to return to that aren't quite worthy of del.icio.us or other bookmarking.  Shuttling them into the scrapbook is a cinch.  Granted, not as social as del.icio.us, but sometimes the mess I collect wouldn't be polite to share, you know?

Picked up on one other web development today.  In this entry, Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed pointed me to MSN's beta search engine with adjustable search criteria.  Just select "build a search," designate your preferred conditions, and it will run the search.  But--and here's the bonus punch for me--add "&format=rss" to the end of the URL generated by the search, and you have a live RSS feed, good for keeping up with the search criteria as a subscription in Bloglines, for example, or your aggregator of choice. We'll put it to the test in WRT205 in the term ahead, I think.

Posted by Derek Mueller at January 13, 2005 10:49 PM to Technologies