There are tons of services which help users shorten web address with TinyURL being one of the oldest and most popular sites of its kind. Another such services I came upon recently is Qurl which claims to create the shortest links of any other service. So what’s different about Qurl? The service allows you to sign up for an account and share your shortened web addresses with friends. By becoming a member, you can also password protect these links, and keep various statistics on them like how many other people have clicked on it, etc., making it one of the more social services of it’s kind. If you’re curious as to why you may want to shorten a web address, imagine those long, convoluted URLs many websites present and how annoying it may be to paste them into an e-mail and have them scroll for multiple lines. Qurl makes this a thing of the past, all for free, of course.

I tend to have a lot of tabs open on my Firefox window, and often lose track of how I got to a particular site. This is especially bad when I’m doing research for TipMonkies because we always do our best to credit any sources we use. If you’re a single tab kind of person, you could always just hit the Back button on your browser until you get back to the original source, but if you have multiple tabs open, you should check out a little Firefox extension cleverly called How’d I Get Here? This little extension keeps track of how you got to a particular site for you, even if you opened a link in a new window or tab, and even keeps track of how you find a site you bookmarked earlier on in the day or even the day before. Like all Firefox extensions, How’d I Get Here? is free. Please note you must have Firefox 1.5 or newer for it to work.

A few days ago, when I was writing the Ultimate Guide to Yahoo! Services, I found a pretty interesting offering from Yahoo! called Y!Q. The service is still in beta, but should offer an interesting service for site publishers by giving contextual search results to post with a one-click interface. Even though it’s still in beta, Yahoo! just released a Y!Q Greasemonkey script for Firefox users so you can use the contextual search on any site.

I originally learned about Viamatic from their Foxspose extension, but became so in love with the other extensions offered that I figured I’d write about all of them. First up, is the aforementioned Foxspose, which is basically a clone of the Expose functionality of Mac OS X for Firefox and gives users preview thumbnails of all open tabs. You can then select the approproate tab by simply clicking on the thumbnail.

Having used Linux for quite a few years taught me that you don’t always need to use the mouse to get things done. In fact, using the keyboard can sometimes be just as fast, if not faster, than using a mouse. We’ve written a few articles about keyboard shortcuts, and if you can memorize them, you really can make yourself a little more productive, mainly because you’ll be saving yourself a few seconds by not having to reach for your mouse all the time to get to the address bar, or click links. Lifehacker has put together a guide to using Firefox without a mouse. You won’t be able to do everything without a mouse, but you’ll be well on your way with the tips provided. The article has a list of useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts, as well as a couple of extensions which may help you become mouse free.

Wikipedia has become a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to do a little bit of research on just about anything. There is a new website called Gollum which aims to make browsing through Wikipedia a little easier. Once you enter the Gollum website, you can select a language, then launch the Gollum browser, which is a fully AJAXified (I hope that’s a word!) version of Wikipedia, and search through any of the millions of articles on the site. Some many argue that it would be just as useful to simply do this directly from the Wikipedia site, but Gollum could have some uses in educational institutions. If Gollum adds support for other sites like Dictionary.com and others, it could be a very valuable tool. If they release a desktop application with the same functionality, I could really see this taking off.

There has not yet been an official announcement made, but I just found Firefox 1.5 final on the official Mozilla FTP servers. I’m sure the Mozilla Foundation will update the Firefox page with an announcement anytime now. Until then you can click here for the Windows download, or go here to get Mac and Linux version.

As many of my close friends know, I love using the command line. I’m faster with a keyboard than a mouse, and I prefer to use the bash shell rather than a desktop environment on my Linux computers; however, the Web isn’t intended for people who like the command line. I recently found a tool called YubNub that accepts commands to perform certain actions. For example, you could type in g Beaches to do a Google search for beaches, or try stock GOOGL to see Google’s going stock, using Yahoo! Stocks. The cool thing about YubNub is that it lets you make your own commands to query things that you like. They also have a bash script, a Firefox plugin, a Dashboard widget, and many other ways of interacting with YubNub without going to the normal site. Command line lovers rejoice!