Rubberband Wound

I’ve struggled for some time to find a balance between my computers - work, home, laptop, and beyond. Links weren’t the same, Firefox extensions were missing, and I never made the effort to correct the situation. Finally, I’ve come across a few Firefox Extensions that I expect will make my life so much easier and consistent, regardless of where I’m working that day.

Google Browser Sync

Google Browser Sync was only just released, and I’m already pretty excited about it. Install the extension, sign in on the browser, and start syncing your bookmarks, tabs, history, passwords, and more. I’m really only using it for the bookmarks at this point, but even that’s pretty powerful. My work bookmarks (actually, everything about my computer setup at work) was much more thought out, managed, and useful than my set up at work. After setting up the Browser Sync, I cleaned up my links on one computer, did the sync, and voila, consistency and happiness on all my browsers. I use the link toolbar, and made folders for my major groups of links

• Work Administration - ColdFusion Admin links to our servers, project management, scripts to send me server logs.
• Work Projects - Grouped by project and client (most projects are used by several clients) as well as the development sites.
• Development Resources - Mostly ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, and Prototype, as well as NoPaste and CodeMash (which I hope comes back soon), plus the Dreamhost Control Panel.
• Personal Projects - The sites that I develop and maintain
• Other Stuff - blogs, news readers, calendars, and sites with a similar usefulness as those.

Additionally, I put up a few bookmarklets: CF7Documentation Search, ReCSS, TinyURL Creator, and Library Lookup (absolutely indispensible if you browse any online booksellers but have to keep the book budget under control).

FEBE

FEBE is a Firefox extension that allows you to dump your browser settings to a folder - spit out your extensions, cookies, bookmarks, and more; then import them on the computer of your choice. I used this to get my extensions out and back as .xpi installers, easily transferable from machine to machine without having to find all those download sites again. But then along came…

CLEO

Cleo is a Firefox extension that takes the .xpi files we just dumped to a folder and does one amazing thing with them - it combines them in to one super file. Running the extension opens a dialog box where I select the files to include in my new .xpi - I give it a name and save it somewhere safe. Now I can take this single file to Firefox on any other machine, load the file, and away we go - all the extensions I saved to the file are loaded up. And just like that, I’m caught up on all my machines.

What Else?

I have a few grand schemes for what I can do with these new powers. I’ve already left a copy of my mega.xpi on my USB drive; next is to pop a copy in to GMail so I can get to it anywhere I can get on the internet. That covers myself. For work, I’m planning to make a simpler file with the necessities for Firefox web development - Web Developer, Firebug, Colorzilla, and MeasureIt. Maybe I’ll throw Del.icio.us in there as well to motivate the new guys to create accounts.