Firefox Extension: TinyURL Creator

If you haven’t already got it installed I highly recommend the TinyURL Creator Firefox Extension. I’ve been using it more and more recently, simply browse to a page and right click, select ‘Create TinyURL for this Page’ and it generates the url and places it on the clipboard ready for you to paste.

For those who don’t know what a TinyURL is TinyUrl is a service that takes a long URL as input, and gives you a short URL to use in it’s place. For example the TinyURL for https://virtualchaos.co.uk/blog/ is http://tinyurl.com/39sbbh. This comes in useful if you want to put a link into Twitter or in an SMS message where you have a limited number of characters to use. I’ve been using the service a lot, but it’s so much easier with the firefox extension.

Some more useful Firefox extensions

Been using several  very useful Firefox extensions that have made my life considerably easier lately.

The first is called Duplicate Tab, which allows you to create a new tab that duplicates a currently open tab – along with all its history. I’m finding this very useful when im writing SPARQL queries against our platform where I invariably end up having lots of tab’s open because I often write a query, run it, but then want to be able to keep the results open so I can write another query but to do that I have to manually open a tab, navigate to the bookmark … and thats tedious when your trying to get stuff done. Its so much nicer being able to run the query – and then duplicate the tab, hit back in the duplicated tab and now I have one tab with the results in it and one tab with the editing pane in it … away I go!

The second is the Google Preview extension. When you do a search in Google this extension inserts preview thumbnail images of websites, which I find quite useful.

The final extension is Pearl Crescent Page Saver (basic), which allows you to take a screenshot of the current page your viewing in the browser as a png.