Digital Streets

By creating a bookmark in your toolbar, you can access Compose Mail to quickly send an email from your Gmail account, while never leaving the page you were on. This is because you’d be drafting the email in Firefox’s Sidebar.

First, you need to get the address (URL) of your Compose Mail popout window.

1. Go to Gmail.

2. Click the Compose Mail link on the left of the page.

3. When the Compose Mail page appears, click the popout icon in the upper right corner.

4. A new window will appear, containing the Compose Window page. Go to the address bar of the new window and highlight and copy the address (URL).

5. Close the new window.

You are now ready to create your bookmark.

1. Open Firefox.

2. Go to the menu, click Bookmarks and select Organize Bookmarks.

3. In the right pane, select Bookmarks Menu.

4. Click the Organize button at the top of the window, and select New Bookmark.

5. In the Name textbox, input Compose Mail.

6. In the Location textbox, paste the copied address for the Compose Mail window.

7. Check the Load this bookmark in the sidebar checkbox.

8. Click the Add button.

9. Close the Library window.

The next time you need to send out an email while your surfing the web, simply click your new bookmark. Gmail’s Compose Mail will appear in the Sidebar, ready to go.

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Use Mobile Versions of Web Sites in Firefox’s Sidebar

Firefox’s sidebar is a perfect tool for accessing mobile sites. By using these sites in the sidebar, you can utilize various web apps and sites without having to leave the page you are on. In fact, you can create your own personal Flock-type browser if you take the time to find the necessary sites. I have used both Twitter and del.icio.us in my sidebar and have been quite pleased with the results.

Here’s what Twitter looks like in the Firefox Sidebar:

And here’s del.icio.us in the sidebar:

Other sites with great potential for Sidebar usage:

To add the desired mobile site to your Firefox sidebar:

1. Open Firefox.

2. Go to the menu, click Bookmarks and select Organize Bookmarks.

3. In the right pane, select Bookmarks Menu.

4. Click the Organize button at the top of the window, and select New Bookmark.

5. In the Name textbox, input the name of the mobile site.

6. In the Location textbox, input the url.

7. Check the Load this bookmark in the sidebar checkbox.

8. Click the Add button.

9. Close the Library window.

Now go select your newly created bookmark. When the page loads in the sidebar, login to your account and your ready to go.

Looks like the Google Calendar/Google Gears combo is getting near. While at Google Calendar I executed the following in the address bar of my browser:

javascript:_olp_showPromo();

I was immediately greeted with this:

I went ahead with the Google Gears installation and restarted my browser. Upon returning to Google Calendar, I found these on the resulting page:

I went ahead and allowed Google Calendar to use Google Gears, however, now I keep getting this page when I go to Google Calendar:

Clicking the Save or Cancel button will then bring up the Calendar. There are no links or controls on the Calendar (yet) for utilizing the offline feature. Looks like they are very close though.

With baseball season coming up soon, it’s a good idea to have your team’s schedule on your calendar application (like Google Calendar, Outlook, etc.). This is a simple task by using MarkThisDate.com.

1. Open your web browser and go to MarkThisDate.com.

2. Use the menu at the top of the page and select Sport.

   

3. From the resulting list of Sport types, select Baseball.

   

4. Go to the Top 10 Calendars section and select View all.

   

5. Browse through the listing for the desired team.  When you’ve located the team, use the select calendar dropdown to select your calendar application.  In this example we will use Google Calendar.

   

6. After selecting your calendar application, click Add to calendar.

   

7. If you are using Google Calendar, you will be taken to the site.  Login, if needed, and then select the Yes, add this calendar button when the prompt appears.

   

   If you are using another application for your calendar, you will be prompted to download the calendar file to import into your application.

8. Your team’s schedule will then be added to the list of available calendars.

   

Now you have easy access to who and where your team is playing.

Technorati Tags: mlb, baseball, schedule, calendar, google

If you want to send your friends or family a copy of your calendar or even your schedule for a particular day, Google Calendar makes it a simple task.  By following these simple steps, you can generate a PDF file of the desired day, month, etc. so that you can then email it for others to view.

1. Login to your Google Calendar.

2. Go to the view you wish to share, whether it is a given day, week or full month.
3. Click the Print link at the top of the calendar.

   

4. When the Calendar Print Preview window appears, use the dropdowns to adjust the Font Size and Orientation.  If you want the calendar to not be in color, check the Black & White checkbox.  When you are finished, click the Save As button.

   

5. Save the created file to your computer and email the file to those you wish to share the calendar with.

I frequently send links and images from various sites to my friends and family.  Gmail makes this quite simple as you can drag and drop the link into your new message instead of copying and pasting the url or typing it in by hand.

To send the url from the site you are visiting, simply drag and drop the address from your address bar into the body of the new message.

The link will appear in the new message:

This same technique works with images as well as any text that you highlight in the webpage.

I have run into several situations where I have found some useful information that I wanted to text message to a friend’s phone (and sometimes my own).  I would have to pull out my phone and plug away.  I recently came across the Google Send to Phone extension for the Firefox browser that lets you select text from a web page and then send it as a text message to a mobile number.

To install the extension, open your Firefox browser and go here.

Go down to the Install Now box and click the google-sendtophone.xpi link.

Read the privacy notice and the terms of service and then click the Agree and Install button.

When the Software Installation window appears, click the Install Now button.

The Add-ons window will appear.  Click the Restart Firefox button to complete the installation.

When Firefox comes back up, you will notice a new button (with a cell phone icon on it) in the upper right corner.

Now when you find info on the web that you wish to send to a mobile phone,  simply highlight the text on the web page and click the new button.  The Google Send To Phone form will appear.

Input the target mobile number, select the carrier from the dropdown and input a subject and any additional text that is to be sent.  Click the Send button and the message will be sent to the mobile number.

Searching for comic books on the internet can be quite easy if you know what to look for and where to aim your search.  Most comics stored on the web have a .cbr or .cbz extension for use with digital comic reader applications such as CDisplay and FFView.  These are simply .rar or .zip files that have had their extensions renamed (to cbr and cbz respectively).

One method of searching for comics stored online is to use Google to search the various index pages on the internet.  Another great method is to aim Google towards the various online storage services such as Rapidshare and Megaupload.

To look for cbr and cbz files, use a general query, such as:

Google: site:rapidshare.com cbr|cbz (Rapidshare)

Google: site:megaupload.com cbr|cbz (Megaupload)

Google: site:mediafire.com cbr|cbz (MediaFire)

Google: site:gigasize.com cbr|cbz (GigaSize)

You can look for specific titles by including the title name in the query, such as:

Google: site:rapidshare.com cbr|cbz batman (Rapidshare) or

Google: site:gigasize.com cbr|cbz superman (GigaSize)

Another site that can be a good source of comic goodness is the social content sharing site, eSnips.

So go to Google and begin your quest for comic riches.

I use T-Mobile for my cellular service.  For a few months, T-Mobile was allowing the Gmail App to be utilized on it’s tzones internet package.  Long enough for me to become totally addicted to it.  The Gmail App for accessing your Gmail on your cell phone is a super application.  I guess too super, since T-Mobile is now blocking the ports that are required for the application to function.  I don’t understand the decision, since I can tether my cell phone to my laptop for internet access, which would be a lot more traffic than just email.  I could use my WAP browser, or better yet, my Opera Mini to access Gmail, but it just wasn’t the same.  Then I came across flurry. 

While it is by no means the Gmail App, it does fine in email access, but it does quite a bit more.  It allows you to check multiple email accounts on your phone, imports contacts, acts as a RSS feed reader, sends pictures from your phone, and even can send you a text message when you get new mail.  If you’re a T-Mobile user (and even if you’re not), it is definitely worth checking out.

Last month (I think), Google made a specially designed Google Reader for viewing on the Wii.  Instead of the feed list appearing on the left of the screen, it becomes a menu that pops up when the 1 button is pressed.  You can use this same interface on your PC by going to http://www.google.com/reader/view/?ui=wii.  Pressing the 1 key on your keyboard will show the feeds list while pressing 2 will show the upper left menu of Home, All items, Starred items, Shared items, and Trends.   By using the 1 and 2 keys  plus the arrow keys, you have another way of viewing your Google Reader with just the keyboard.  Could be useful for those who use a media PC and don’t have a Wii.

Check it out.