Investigations of a Dog

I’ve just finished clearing out my bookmarks folder and putting my links onto del.icio.us. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before as it’s much better than keeping over 300 links in my Firefox bookmarks. From now on bookmarks are only for the few sites that I access most regularly. Zotero is for pages that need to be dealt with in more detail, with snapshots, notes, and annotations, or which need to be kept together with bibliographies for projects that I’m working on. And everything else goes on del.icio.us. While I was rearranging everything I took the opportunity to add some of the best sites to History Nexus.

Some other cool things:

Operator is a Firefox plugin which detects and displays Microformats. Microformats are a simple way of embedding metadata in web pages using only HTML.

Firebug is another Firefox plugin, a bit like the Web Developer toolbar but much more powerful. It lets you inspect the code of a webpage with expanding and collapsing tags, highlights the current element on the page, displays all CSS styles which apply to an element, debugs Javascript, and even lets you rewrite the code on the fly! I’ve found it very useful for developing Exhibit pages, and it would also make it a lot easier to design or modify Wordpress themes.

Yahoo Pipes is a set of tools for data mining and mashups. It’s kind of what I was wishing Google would do in a previous post. It looks complicated, but still easier than programming from scratch, and very powerful. I’ll be trying it out whenever I get time.