Kpjas here and now

I have been using Simpy (a social bookmarking site) for some time and I worked out some little time-saving helpers for this service. I only hope I am not reinventing the wheel here.

To work effectively with Simpy you probably want to consult their bookmarklet page and search plugins page. If you happen to be a Mozilla/Firefox browser user there are some shortcuts to URLs that you can type in the Location Bar of the browser to speed up things (see Mozillazine article on custom keyword searches and an illustrated tutorial).

Here comes Simpy integration. Just  bookmark your favourite Simpy bookmarks and in the Properties dialog use appropriate, short (preferably two letter) keywords. I use ’si’ for ‘Simpy This’ and ’sy’ for ‘Search Simpy’ other choices are ’sh’ for ‘Link History’, ’sn’ for ‘Note This’ and ’sin’ for ‘Search Notes’.

Related web resource on Firefox and custom keywords is here.  A blog post on the same subject.

A small gripe with my Firefox configuration is gone with a little help from a cute extension.

The story goes like this. Earlier I had got rid of Outlook Express and thus had no default email client on my system. Instead I used GMail and it was easy to adapt mailto: links to open in the GMail’s compose window. But as a side effect it resulted in a little irritating behavior of "Send this link" right click context menuitem. Namely it presented a dialog window with the error and spawned about thirty empty Internet Explorer windows. Then for several seconds the system practically came to a stop and I had to remove the annoying IE remains.

Luckily a little FF extension called Webmailcompose by Jed Brown rescued me. Now my problem has gone and "Send this link" opens in the Gmail compose window.

Firefox, the web browser, is gaining more and more of the market share (see more info).

One nifty feature is Firefox’s extensible and customizable searchbar (ext img). It has a handy keyboard shortcut CTRL+K so I use it almost constantly.

There was one minor gripe though. When you add many search engines to the searchbar you can’t reorder them in your preferred way. A solution comes to rescue - as always from the most predictable place - addons directory where you can find the Search Engine Ordering extension. With this extension you also get another minitool - in the right-click context menu (ext img) you can find "Add this search to the searchbar…" option.