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Helpful Firefox Tools

Firefox users are familiar with search "plugins". According to the Firefox site: "A search plug-in allows you to access a search engine right from your browser, without having to go to the engine's page first... Technically, a search plug-in is a text file that tells your computer what information to send to a search engine and how to retrieve the results. A small icon completes the plug-in so that search plug-ins are easily recognized."

More information on available search plugins may be found at the Firefox Add New Search Engines site.

You may also use Rollyo to quickly create your own search plugin. This site lets you specify which URL's you want to include in a search. Use it to comple a list of up to 25 news sources, web developer sites, music or entertainment sites, etc. This is a great way to search a number of similar sites at once. You cannot (at this time) use it to utilize the search engines on those sites, however. @~@~

Axe Search Plugins

- Axe Library web site search plugin

- Axe Library Online Catalog search plugin (subject keyword)

- Axe Library Serials Solutions plugin ("Title begins with")

Other Search Plugins

- Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet

- Google Scholar plugin, via BiomedCentral

- Library of Congress plugin

- Openly Jake plugin

- PubMed/NCBI plugins. There is also an NCBI search toolbar, available for Firefox and IE both, that you may find more helpful.

- PubMed Journals search (search by journal title keyword or abbreviations)

- WorldCat "Find in a Library" plugin

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Helpful Firefox Extensions

• All Customized Links - Right-click menu is one of the quickest and most useful ways of web navigation, especially for tabbed support Firefox browser. This extension enables you to add unlimitted customized URLs to your right-click menu. Each link can be set individually to open in: Current Tab, New Tab, New Foreground Window or New Background Window. You can also flag the status of each link to either as active or inactive.
• Autohide - Full Fullscreen for Firefox - Allows you to actually see an entire screen without any browser bars. You can pick and choose what bars you want to display when you mouse up to the top of the screen.
• Colorful Tabs - The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a lot of sense. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appeal of the interface.
• Copy Plain Text - Have you ever copied something to Thunderbird or Office and been annoyed that the text formatting (table cells, bold, font size, etc) came with it? Don't you wish you could just copy the text itself, without having to copy it, paste it into notepad, then copy it again? This extension gives you an option to copy text without the formatting. You can even set it to trim extra space in and around the copied text!
• Html Validator (based on TIDY) - HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page. The extension is based on Tidy. Tidy, was originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. And now extended and improved by a lot of persons. Tidy is embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server.
• IE View Lite - With the click of an icon, you can load your current page in IE, to see how it looks in that browser.
• LinkChecker - Check the status of links on your page. A color code tells you which links are ok, have been re-directed, or are dead. HINT: open another tab and continue your work while the page is being checked, or to track down new URLs.
• New Tab Homepage - loads your home page when you bring up a new tab.
• Translate - convert a page from another language to English.
• Web Developer Toolbar - add an icon to your Firefox Bookmarks toolbar. Click to drop down a new bar loaded with tools to help you view and tweak html, css, images, etc. Outline various sections of code, such as external links, positioned elements (absolute only, floated or fixed only). Also includes validators, screen size views, line guides to adjust page elements on screen. Much, much more. This is a very important add on for any web developer! Web Developer Toolbar home page

More Firefox Tips:

Creating Search Shortcuts

Here's a creative way to use Firefox bookmarks and the location bar to quickly search another site:

1. Go to the site you want to search.
2. Right-click inside their search box.
3. Select "Add a keyword for this search".
4. A dialogue box will come up. in the "Name:" field, type the site's name or other notes. This is what identifies your search in your bookmarks.
5. Type a short "Keyword:" of some kind that you can easily remember, i.e. "psu" or "axe".
6. Create a bookmarks folder where you can save your search shortcuts.

Now that you have this bookmark set up, you may use it simply by going to your location bar and typing "psu search terms", or "axe book title"... Firefox looks at the id prefix you've typed, goes to the bookmarked site, then searches the form using the terms that follow. Experiment with using quotation marks to do phrase searching, etc.

TIPS: Choose the most common or effective method of searching the site before setting the bookmark. For instance, if setting a search in another institution's online catalog, how will you usually search? Their default may be "Journal Title", but if you select "Keyword Anywhere" before you right-click and add a bookmark, that will be the method of the search. Even though it may not be the type of search needed in every case, it gets you quickly to their site, and you can navigate to the appropriate search method from the results screen.

This seems to work well on most search forms that are not a pasworded or proxied locations. In an instance where a library has a "quick search" box on all of their pages, it may not work, so go into their online catalog to set the bookmark.

If the search begins returning error messages, it's probably because they've changed their search form. Delete the bookmark, and set up another one in it's place, repeating the steps listed above.