Category Archives: Add-on

Metadata for Bookmarks

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Posted in Add-on, Bookmarklet, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Research Management and tagged , , ,

When you bookmark a site, you are typically able to capture 3 pieces of information:  the site name, the site URL, and a location you create to store and organize that bookmark.  The first two are the whole point of creating a bookmark.  The latter is the folder structure that you devise to manage all of your bookmarks.  In most cases, there’s not much else you can do with a bookmark without an extension.

I was reminded of this when I saw MakeUseOf‘s review of Bookmark#, an add-on for Google Chrome.  Plug-ins can add the ability to extend a bookmark with additional metadata.  The failure of folder structures is that you can only put a bookmark in one place.  The ability to add tags can make that bookmark appear readily.

Chrome isn’t the only browser to have plugins that support additional metadata.  Delicious and Pearltrees are Web sites that enable additional markup to bookmarks.  Delicious was bought, then sold by Yahoo!, and appears to have returned to its roots.  Pearltrees is a site I like because it has a graphical node organization structure – the metadata is in the organization.  In both cases, though, you use a bookmarklet to save the site and then add the metadata.

The ability to add the metadata directly to the bookmark within your browser seems more useful, based on how I use my bookmarks.  A survey of the bookmark plugins didn’t show any category killers, although it surfaced Zotero, which I haven’t used for awhile.  The standalone version plugs into any browser and it may provide the best all-around option since it allows for substantial metadata around any resource – not just Web sites – that you bookmark or save for later citation.  The downside is that the metadata leaves your Web browser so that, if you synchronize your bookmarks across computers, the metadata doesn’t come with it unless you are synchronizing and using Zotero in each location.

Mozilla Firefox’s latest versions have added tagging to the bookmarking feature.  Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 still only take the URL and title and leaves you to organize it.  You can improve Chrome using a plugin but you’re on your own with IE.  If you’re an Internet Explorer user and are interested in enhancing your bookmarks, give Delicious or Pearltrees a try.

Saving Your Research

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Posted in Add-on, File Management, Google Chrome, Research Management, Research Notebooks and tagged ,

Evernote offers a great way to clip information while you are in the midst of a research project.  Microsoft OneNote can also help you to get organized.  A new extension for Google Chrome users enables saving of elements of a Web page or the page itself directly to Google Drive.  It’s called Save to Google Drive, naturally.

If you haven’t already committed to another research tool, and are heavy into the Google-verse, this seems like a great option.  Since Drive synchronizes to your computer, it means you can easily open up the content when you’re offline.  It has less of the organizational functionality of the research notebooks but that may be a boon for people who aren’t used to tagging or adding metadata to content.

Secure Your Browsing with Disconnect

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Safari and tagged , ,

If you perform research outside of the office, you have a number of ways to secure your research session.  The most obvious is to use encrypted browser sessions, like searching https://www.google.com – note the s after the http – rather than the unencrypted site.  You might also use a VPN.  Lifehacker has a nice description of the Disconnect Web browser add-on, which can protect your wireless connection against sidejacking.  An added bonus is that it blocks some of the tracking done by advertisers and other sites while you’re surfing the Web.

Disconnect is a free add-on for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

Highlight and Save Pages with Annotary

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Posted in Add-on, Business Information, Firefox, Google Chrome, Research Management, Research Notebooks and tagged , ,

If you want to save and mark up Web pages with a tool that’s a bit lighter than Evernote or Microsoft OneNote, Annotary may be an option.  It is a browser extension for Firefox or Google Chrome.  When you hit a Web page that has content you want to save, you click the Annotary button in your Web browser toolbar and save the page.  You can add it to a collection – works like a folder – and you can also add a bookmark.

You can share a single page.  You can also create a group of people, sending them an invitation to participate, and share a collection with them.  This could work well for librarians supporting a practice group or faculty on a given project.  However, the sharing feature seems to be excessively social.  There is a way to see who else has annotated or highlighted the same page, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to turn off this sharing.

Save Attachments to Google Drive with Chrome Extension

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Posted in Add-on, Document management, File Management, GMail, Google Chrome and tagged ,

A lot of things going on in the Googleverse that can improve your Google Mail experience.  The oldest in the backlog of items I’ve been meaning to write about is an extension that allows you save e-mail attachments directly to your Google Drive account.  You have always been able to View or Download to your local machine.  If you are using your Drive space, though, or want to have the attachment accessible for editing in Google Docs, this can be a handy shortcut.

Under Chrome’s Hood: Grouping Your Chrome Extensions

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Posted in Add-on, Google Chrome and tagged ,

Modern Web browsers are powerful tools but they all can be improved and enhanced with add-ons or extensions.  These small software applications live inside the Web browser to provide extra features that the browser itself may be missing.  One issue with adding many extensions to your browser is that it can slow down your browser’s operation.  Another is that they become unwieldy to keep track of what is running and what is disabled.  Ghacks has an interesting post on the Context extension for Google Chrome.  It enables you to create groups of extensions so that you can turn on and off a grouping all at once.  This can be useful if you have a number of extensions for one purpose – say multimedia extensions that manage sound and video files – and you are doing some other sort of research.  Turn off extensions you aren’t using to speed up your browser, and save yourself from having to uninstall and reinstall extensions.

Deeper History for Frequent Firefox Finders

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox and tagged ,

CTRL-F is one of the most useful keyboard shortcuts when trying to find information in a document.  It works in your word processor, spreadsheets, and on Web pages and PDFs.  If you use Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, you can grab the Findlist browser extension to make your find function work harder.  Lifehacker has a great review of how it works:  you get a drop-down menu of up to 50 recent terms you’ve looked for with CTRL-F.  The extension will be useful if you use CTRL-F on one page, then flip to another and have to rerun the search.  Skip retyping and select from your list.