Book V Chapter 4 Using Firefox: The Advanced Course 517 Bookmarking with the Fox Bookmarking with the Fox Firefox handles bookmarks differently from Internet Explorer. The easiest way to understand Firefox bookmarks? Start with the Unsorted Bookmarks folder. If you hit a Web site that you want to bookmark, follow these steps: 1. Click the Bookmark icon on the right edge of the Address bar. (Refer to Figure 4-2.) This step bookmarks the page and puts the bookmark in a kind of All Other folder named Unsorted Bookmarks. 2. If you’d rather stick your bookmark in a place where you can find it later or assign a tag to it, double-click the bookmark star on the right edge of the address bar. Firefox opens its Edit This Bookmark dialog box, shown in Figure 4-5. Figure 4-5: Pull your bookmark out of the Unsorted Bookmarks morass in this dialog box. 3. Type any tags you want to associate with the bookmark in the Tags box, at the bottom. Tags help you find things on the Address bar. For example, if you assign a Conficker tag to the bookmark, typing conf in the address bar brings up this particular bookmark. 4. To organize your bookmarks into folders, or to place this bookmark on the Bookmark bar, click the down arrow to the right of the Folder box. Firefox lets you choose the bookmark folder that should contain your new bookmark or create a new folder to hold the bookmark (see Figure 4-6). 518 Bookmarking with the Fox Figure 4-6: Add new folders here. 5. If you create a new folder, you can leave it in the Unsorted Bookmarks folder, but if you want to make it more readily acces- sible from the Bookmarks menu, click and drag the new folder in the Edit This Bookmark dialog box so that the folder appears under the Bookmarks Menu folder. 6. If you want to put the new folder on the Bookmarks toolbar, to the right of the Latest Headlines button, click and drag it to the Bookmarks Toolbar folder (see Figure 4-7). Figure 4-7: Put a button on the Bookmarks toolbar by dragging the folder under the Book- marks Toolbar folder in the Edit This Bookmark dialog box. makes it appear as a button here. Placing a folder under the Bookmarks Toolbar folder After the folder has been created (and, optionally, located on the Bookmarks menu or the Bookmarks toolbar), you can place any book- mark in the folder by double-clicking the bookmark star. Book V Chapter 4 Using Firefox: The Advanced Course 519 Creating Smart Folders You can rearrange the buttons on the Bookmarks toolbar by simply clicking and dragging. Creating Smart Folders Firefox Smart Folders work much like a saved search. You can save searches of your Bookmarks folders, or of your browsing history in Smart Folders, and they can be accessed from either the Bookmarks menu or the Bookmarks toolbar. Here’s how to set up a Smart Folder saved search: 1. In Firefox, choose Bookmarks➪Organize Bookmarks. The Library appears, as shown in Figure 4-8. Figure 4-8: Organize your bookmarks, or add a Smart Folder, from this dialog box. 2. On the left, choose which folders you want to search. For example, you can search your browsing history by choosing the History folder, or you can search all bookmarks by choosing All Bookmarks. You can also narrow the scope of the saved search by click- ing a lower-level folder, such as News Sites. 3. In the upper-right corner, click in the Search box and type the items you want to locate. In Figure 4-9, I search All Bookmarks for the term windows. 4. Just below the Search box, click Save. Firefox prompts you for a name for your saved search, er, Smart Folder. 5. Type a name for your search and click OK. Firefox creates a folder with the name you provided in Step 5 and puts the folder on the Bookmarks menu. 520 Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way Figure 4-9: Set up your search. 6. If you want to put the Smart Folder/saved search on the Bookmarks toolbar, click and drag the new folder under the Bookmarks Toolbar folder. The new Smart Folder acts just like any other folder. If you open the folder on the Bookmarks menu, or click the button on the Bookmarks toolbar, Firefox runs the search and delivers the result. Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way In Chapter 3 of this minibook, I talk about RSS feeds in Internet Explorer, but I had to bite my tongue, er, stifle my typing fingers. Though IE can handle RSS feeds all by itself, there’s a much better way, using the Web site igoogle.com. Firefox makes it easy to add RSS feeds to your own, personal- ized igoogle.com page. Here’s how RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, works — really: 1. A Web site (usually with “newsy” topics, but sometimes just a site that wants to get noticed) creates a specific kind of file, an RSS feed. 2. When the Web site has, uh, new news, it adds a short new item to the beginning of the RSS feed file and drops the last item off the end. Typically, the new item is just a few sentences long. That keeps the RSS feed short and simple and reasonably up to date. 3. If you go to a Web site that maintains an RSS feed, Firefox can tell that it has an RSS feed, and a little orange box with “radio waves” appears to the right of the Web page’s address. You can see an example of the orange radio waves icon on the far right end of the address bar in Figure 4-2, at the beginning of this chapter. 4. When you find a site with an RSS feed you want to follow, you sub- scribe to the feed. It’s kind of like subscribing to a newspaper or magazine. Book V Chapter 4 Using Firefox: The Advanced Course 521 Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way 5. A program on your computer, an RSS reader, periodically looks at the RSS feeds for all Web pages on your subscription list, and keeps track of the latest items. Many different RSS readers are running around. If you like, you can use the RSS readers built into Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. Personally, I find all of them intrusive and hard to work with. My personal choice for an RSS reader is the iGoogle customized page from Google. Here’s how to set up a custom iGoogle page, with your own RSS reader: 1. If you don’t already have one, go to gmail.com and create a Gmail account. Be creative. Your name is William Gates, right? 2. In Firefox, go to igoogle.com. You see a sign-up page like the one shown in Figure 4-10. 3. Pick and choose the RSS feeds you want to see, and then click Save. iGoogle shows you your initial iGoogle home page. After you have the page set up, you can add more RSS feed content by using the steps later in this section. Figure 4-10: Get your own RSS reader going through iGoogle. 522 Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way Feel free to use iGoogle as your browser’s home page. I do. With an iGoogle account set up, you have everything you need to keep on top of every site on earth. Here’s how to start feeding your iGoogle page: 1. In Firefox, navigate to the site that you want to add to your RSS reader. You see the orange radio waves button to the right of the site’s address. 2. Click the radio waves button. Firefox shows you the latest news items from the site and offers to set up a subscription to it, as shown in Figure 4-11. Figure 4-11: Choose Google to have the news from this site fed straight into your personal iGoogle page. 3. Click the down arrow in the box marked Subscribe to This Feed Using, and choose Google. Then click the Subscribe Now button. Google jumps in and asks whether you want to use your Google home page as the RSS reader (that’s the iGoogle page you set up in the previ- ous steps) or use Google Reader. 4. Choose Add to Google Homepage. If you’re already signed in to Google, your personal iGoogle home page appears. (If you aren’t already signed in, you have to type your user- name and password.) The RSS feed you choose appears in the upper-left corner of the page (see Figure 4-12). Book V Chapter 4 Using Firefox: The Advanced Course 523 Adding Firefox’s Best Add-Ons Figure 4-12: The RSS feed you chose appears in the upper- left corner of the page. 5. You can click and drag the new RSS feed anywhere on the page. Every few minutes, iGoogle reaches out to all sites on your iGoogle home page and retrieves the latest news from the sites’ RSS feeds. You can customize the Google home page till the cows come home. A series of tutorials is at google.com/support/websearch/?ctx=web. If you don’t want all of your RSS feeds served on your home page, try the Google Reader. With the Google Reader (reader.google.com), you have to click one additional time — typically on a Reader widget on your home page, or a Favorites or Bookmark icon — but the feeds contain more detail, and you have more control over the layout than with iGoogle. Adding Firefox’s Best Add-Ons An enormous cottage industry has grown up around Firefox. The Firefox people made it relatively easy to extend the browser itself. As a result, tens of thousands of add-ons cover an enormous range of capabilities. To search for add-ons, mosey over to addons.mozilla.org/en-US/ firefox (see Figure 4-13). You can search for the add-ons recommended by Firefox itself or look for the most frequently downloaded add-ons. 524 Adding Firefox’s Best Add-Ons Figure 4-13: Firefox makes it easy to extend the browser with add- ons made by software developers all over the world. Here are some of my favorites:  ✦ Adblock Plus blocks ads. (What did you expect?) It doesn’t work all the time — in the free version, you have to choose which ads you want to knock out — but it certainly speeds up download times. See a demo at adblockplus.org/en.  ✦ Greasemonkey adds a customizable scripting language to Firefox. After you install Greasemonkey, you can download scripts from userscript.org that perform an enormous variety of tasks, from tweet assistance to downloading Flickr files.  ✦ Video Download Helper makes it easy to download videos from the Web.  ✦ IETab embeds Internet Explorer inside Firefox. If you hit a site that absolutely won’t work with Firefox, right-click the link, choose Tools➪ Open This Link in IETab, and Internet Explorer takes over a tab inside Firefox.  ✦ eBay Sidebar watches your trades while you’re doing something else.  ✦ DownThemAll “scrapes” all downloadable files on a Web page and pres- ents them to you so that you can choose which files you want to down- load. Click Start and they all come loading down.  ✦ NoScript lets you shut down JavaScript programs, either individually or for a site as a whole. Many sites don’t work with JavaScript turned off, but NoScript gives you a fighting chance to pick and choose the scripts you want. Book V Chapter 4 Using Firefox: The Advanced Course 525 Using Smart Keywords in Firefox  ✦ Ghostery keeps an eye on sites that are watching you. It tells you when sites contain “Web beacons” that can be used to track your surfing habits.  ✦ Linky lets you open all links or images on a page, all at once, either on separate tabs or in separate windows. It’s a helpful adjunct to Google image search. To install the latest edition of any of these add-ons, go to addons.mozilla. org/en-US/firefox and search for the add-on’s name. Using Smart Keywords in Firefox Imagine being able to type, oh, news obama high tech on the Firefox address bar and have the Google News site search for news with the words obama high tech. Imagine being able to type tv star trek and have TV.com search for star trek. Or, it might be blogs conficker and have Technorati search for conficker. It’s easy. Firefox calls them Smart Keywords. If you can find a Web site with a place to perform a search, you can create a Smart Keyword for that search. Here’s an example. I need to look up Google images all the time. It’s a pain in the neck to go to google.com and click the Images link, or go to images. google.com and run a search for a specific image. Using Smart Keywords, I can tell Firefox to treat, oh, im as a Smart Keyword. That way, whenever I want to search Google images for, say, pictures of the ASUS Eee PC, I can type im asus eee pc and see all the hits in no time flat. Here’s how to set up the Smart Keyword: 1. Go to a Web site that has a search box. In Figure 4-14, I go to images.google.com. 2. Right-click inside the search box and choose Add a Keyword for This Search. Firefox shows you the New Bookmark dialog box, shown in Figure 4-15. 3. In the Name box, type a name that reminds you of the purpose of the Smart Keyword. In the Keyword box, type the Smart Keyword you want to use. Click Save. Your Smart Keyword takes effect immediately. Go ahead and try it. 526 Using Smart Keywords in Firefox Figure 4-14: You can turn any search box, on any site, into a Firefox Smart Keyword. Figure 4-15: Smart Keywords are stored and handled just like bookmarks. You can easily set up your own Smart Keywords by using this three-step pro- cess, but if you feel so inclined, you can import lists put together by other people. Take a look at tucows.com/article/2094 for a collection of 25 Smart Keywords and instructions for importing them into Firefox. [...]... Online ID, you already have a Windows Live ID 6 Click Close Windows Live Mail is now installed on your computer You can’t see it yet, but it’s there Now you’re ready to run Windows Live Mail (WLM) for the first time Here’s the easy way to start: Sending Windows Mail Live Windows Live Mail is one of those Windows 7 Live Essentials that is distributed independently of Windows 7 I talk about the Windows. .. the free e-mail program in Windows Vista But Microsoft forgot about Windows Mail shortly after it shipped Orphaned Abandoned at birth Q: So what do we do for mail in Windows now? A: Microsoft now actively encourages all Windows users — even those with Windows XP — to download and install Windows Live Mail, the latest and greatest incarnation of the Outlook Ex — er, Windows Mail line Either that or you... almighty Google In this section, I show you several kinds of searches you can perform with Google (and the other search engines) No matter what you’re looking for, a search engine can find it! Searching for text One of the main reasons you use a search engine is to find textual information For example, you might want to find out what the longest river in Asia is You go to a search engine such as Google... other online mail services Choosing an E-Mail Program You have three good reasons to use Windows Live Mail: inertia, inertia, and inertia All the other reasons aren’t convincing If you’re stuck with Windows Live Mail because you have a big collection of old Outlook Express (OE) or Choosing an E-Mail Program 5 47 Windows Mail (WM) messages, you have my sympathies If you want to stick with Windows Live... river in Asia in the search field Figure 5-1 shows the results of the Google search for longest river in Asia Understanding What a Search Engine Can Do for You 529 Book V Chapter 5 Searching on the Internet Figure 5-1: Google’s search for the longest river in Asia The number -one result points to the Scottish Indoor Bowls Web site — surely a definitive source of information about rivers — which, indeed,... Microsoft dropped all significant support for Outlook Express and Windows Mail years ago Why? Because they don’t make Microsoft any money As “free” e-mail programs inside Windows, Microsoft couldn’t charge for them, couldn’t stick advertising in them, couldn’t make a sou Now, with the new, improved Windows Live Mail — which doesn’t ship inside any version of Windows — Microsoft feels free to “monetize” its... see a Posting form 5 Type your message in the space provided and click Post Your message appears on the group in short order That’s how hard it is to talk to anyone, on any subject, anywhere in the world Chapter 6: Sending Windows Mail Live In This Chapter ✓ Choosing the right e-mail program ✓ Whatever happened to [fill in the blank] mail? ✓ Using Windows 7 s Live Mail Essential ✓ Putting together... let it take over your Web browsing, uh, experience — and keep track of all your Windows activities 4 Deselect all the check boxes and click Continue The final panel asks you to sign up for a Windows Live ID 5 If you want to use one of the Microsoft online services and you don’t already have a Windows Live ID, click Sign Up and follow the instructions in Book V, Chapter 7 to create a completely bogus...Chapter 5: Searching on the Internet In This Chapter ✓ Recognizing that Google ain’t the only game in town — and neither is Microsoft Live Search or Bing ✓ Searching quickly and effectively ✓ Using Google pet tricks ✓ Posting on newsgroups with Google I nternet searching can be a lonely business You’re out there, on the Internet range, with nothing but gleaming banner ads and text links to guide you... 89 euros per liter in dollars per gallon You can also use to, as in 90 f to c ✦ To find a list of alternative (and frequently interesting) definitions for a word, type define, as in define booty 540 Posting on Newsgroups ✦ You can see movie reviews and local show times by typing movie and then the name of the movie, such as movie lincoln ✦ Try quick questions for quick facts For example, try height . come in handy, whether you use Google or something else. Contents Chapter 5: Searching on the Internet 5 27 Understanding What a Search Engine Can Do for You 528 Finding What You’re Looking For. perform with Google (and the other search engines). No matter what you’re looking for, a search engine can find it! Searching for text One of the main reasons you use a search engine is to find. 5 Searching on the Internet 535 Finding What You’re Looking For  ✦ Images: I think Google has the best image search engine around. I talk about the image search engine in the “Searching for images”