Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for January 12, 2007

Friday, January 12, 2007 5:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

This week: OpenOffice.org extension, Universal Print, and the Link Evaluator.

Welcome back everyone and Happy 2007. I hope everyone had a great new year. With a little time off, I feel refreshed and ready to start reviewing some more Firefox extensions.

Let's kick it off.

OpenOffice.Org Extension

Rating: 3/5

OpenOffice has received a lot of press about it competing with Microsoft Office and has gained tremendous momentum being the fact that it is open source and can read and write Microsoft Office files. The OpenOffice.org extension eases the integration between Firefox and the extension.

After the extension is installed, it's inserted at the end of the pulldown menu at the top. A screenshot of the extension is shown below.

OpenOffice.org Extension Screenshot

There is an additional feature of a Search Context Menu. Select some text on a web page and right-click anywhere to apply your selected text to a search engine in the context menu.

OpenOffice.org Extension Context Menu Screenshot

Overall, the extension is great for developers, but after using the extension, I thought it would have a quick way to launch a certain application immediately from the pulldown menu as opposed to adding an extra step and running the OpenOffice application itself.

The OpenOffice.org extension is a great extension for power users and developers who need a quick list of bookmarks for reference purposes.


Universal Print

Rating: 3/5

I've loaded a lot of articles and posts that I wanted to print, but it just takes too long to go through each and every tab and press the Ctrl-P or hit the button for each. Universal Print is a utility extension that definitely has my support.

If you have trouble on how to use the extension, you can activate it two ways: 1). right-click on a toolbar at the top and left-click on Customize.  Look for the Universal Print icon and drag it where it feels comfortable to you; and 2). right-click on a tab heading and you'll get the Universal Print option in your context menu.

After using the extension numerous times, I've noticed the requirement for a print configuration dialog and based on some user comments, it seems its a feature that is definitely a necessity.

This is the type of feature that I thought the Mozilla foundation would've included in a Firefox release.The Universal print extension is a good extension for printing web pages with one button press. Ok, maybe two. :-)

Link Evaluator

Rating: 3/5

Once in a while, everyone needs to check their links on their site. Usually, I go to a web site that scours my site and gives me a summary at the end telling me the bad links.

The Link Evaluator extension provides this service for you instead of going to a web site. You can do it all locally. Install the extension and activate it by using Tools/Link Evaluator or use the context menu by right-clicking on a web page.

Now, the bad news. The Link Evaluator can only verify links on one page at a time, but the data stored by the Link Evaluator is definitely worth having. Open the Link Evaluator by clicking under Tools/Link Evaluator...

Link Evaluator screenshot

Move to the tab that says "red/green flag phrases." Once there, you'll notice the red list are the error messages and the green are the successful keywords. Basically, if any of the words in the red list show up in the scan, it will highlight it as red. If any phrases from the green list appear in the web page results, then the link on the page turns green.

Move to the Monitor tab. At the bottom, you'll see the start button and stop. Click on the start button to start the process. If the page you're on provides good links, all of the links will show green. If not, you may need to check the destination of that link. When you press the Start button, everything is displayed while you are watching the progress of the Link Evaluator and visibly see links on the page behind the dialog box change while you wait for the process to finish.

The interface of the Link Evaluator needs a little bit of a face-lift. While monitoring, it's almost like you are watching the raw data coming through the pipeline. If it was in a ListView or table of some kind, that would be a great enhancement. I know, I know...I'm picky.

Overall, I like the ability find out where the bad links are on my site. However, I don't like the idea of going through each and every page on my site using the Link Evaluator.

I guess I have to fall back on using a web site in checking my site links.


Have a great weekend, everyone!

If anyone has questions, please post them below or Contact me directly.

 

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