A couple of Firefox plugins that I have been playing with recently which I think are worth mentioning:
Mouseless Browsing
The more you get used to the keyboard, the more reaching for the mouse seems like a burden. Browsing the web tends to be quite a mouse happy activity, but there are times when you are in the keyboard “groove” and you don’t want to leave it. The mouseless browsing addin for Firefox (there are similar ones for Chrome) allows you to navigate the web just using the keyboard.
This Firefox plugin can be obtained from the following link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mouseless-browsing/
Once installed, you can configure a hotkey to display a special code beside each link on the page you are looking at, that you can type the id to navigate to that link.
An example screen shot of what I am talking about is as below:
After installing, I have modified the extension with the following settings. This is just my personal preference, the plugin itself is very customisable.
Display Ids only on demand
The webpage tends to look ugly when the ids are displayed so I prefer not to have these visible all the time:
Use standard characters instead of numeric
Like the mouse, I find the numeric keyboard too far away from where my hands are, so I’ve defined the ids to be standard alphabet characters instead:
Redefine Toggle visibility and Postfix keys
Since I don’t have the ids visible by default, I use Ctl-J to bring them up (only because of it’s natural touch typing finger position).
Turning off the numeric ids in the second step unfortunately means you can’t use modifiers anymore for opening in new tabs or windows. You can however have Postfix keys which I have setup to be the convenient keys J and N:
Example
Now when viewing a webpage I can use Ctl-J to bring up the ids which will all be standard letter combinations.
In the screenshot above of my site I would type ‘B’ to go to the archive section - I could also follow this by J or N if I want to open in a new tab or window respectively.
I don’t use this plugin all the time for browsing as sometimes I am just feeling mousy, but it is a handy alternative for sure !
Password Management – LastPass
As we all know, it isn’t recommended to have the same password for everything – but if you are going to have a new password for everything, how on earth do you remember them all? I have been using LastPass for a good year now and it has been great.
With LastPass, all you need to remember is the one master password, and then it will keep track of all the other passwords for you so you don’t have to remember them plus keeping them all different from each other.
When you sign up for a new website, last pass will suggest an auto generated password for you. It will then register your username and password for the site when you go to login so you don’t need to type these in for the next visit (you can specify that you always need to type your master password if you like before autocompleting the login). Their business model is a small amount per month to make use of their smart phone apps to access your passwords etc, otherwise it’s free!
The passwords are all stored on the server so you can access these anywhere you have an internet connection, but they are encrypted with your master password so no-one else including LastPass employees will be able to decipher your passwords, and all communication to LastPass is over SSL for security.
It really has streamlined my online experience - Recommend !