Tech and life

Most visited posts

Here’s a list of the most visited posts on this site throughout 2009. Site analytics are from Woopra. I’ve only included those posts with over 500 hits. As you can see I had a phenomenal response to my slow Firefox post. If you’re new to this site you should find some interesting older posts listed below. If these aren’t of interest, have a look around – there are about 90 posts to choose from at the moment.

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 11736 visits

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 2880 visits

Finding lost bookmarks in your info archive – 2037 visits

Send free SMS reminders to your mobile phone -1128 visits

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 776 visits

Uploading files to your website with Notepad++ – 649 visits

What is the best time to tweet? – 599 visits

Useful links: A to Z of search – 543 visits

Most retweeted posts

What is the best time to tweet? – 29 tweets

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 19 tweets

My top 15 useful bookmarklets – 13 tweets

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 9 tweets

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 5 tweets

Quick tip: Disable or remap the Caps Lock key in Windows and Linux – 5 tweets

Can I take this opportunity to thank everyone who has visited this blog throughout the year – hope you found your visit was worthwhile and thanks too to all who’ve taken the time to comment on the posts. Please subscribe to the RSS feed if you can – I blog in my spare time and it’s blog comments and rising subscriber numbers which are a great encouragement to keep blogging. Link back to any of the posts if you can and retweet any if you like them. And if there’s anything you’d like me to cover, or like to see more of, drop a comment below.

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2010!

If you haven’t used bookmarklets before, they’re just useful pieces of JavaScript code which you can bookmark and which let you be more productive by simplifying tasks. Installing a bookmarklet is as simple as just dragging the bookmarklet link to your bookmark region or right clicking on the link and bookmarking it. I’ve made a folder for bookmarklets on my browser bar to keep them all together. Here are 15 of the most useful bookmarklets I’ve come across. If you think they may be useful to you, just drag the link at the start of each section across to your bookmark region and try them out.

BigTweet: Lets you share links on Twitter with your followers without leaving the webpage. It automatically shortens the link in the process and captures the title and any highlighted text. Of course you do have to log into your Twitter account through BigTweet to allow it to tweet your link but I’ve had no problem here in the year I’ve been using it. This is possibly the bookmarklet I use the most.

TwitterKeys: A pop-up box gives you symbols which you can copy and paste into your tweets.

Pagezipper: If you’ve ever come across articles split across multiple webpages, this bookmarklet combines them into one long scrollable page. Saves a lot of time clicking and waiting for the next page to load.

Clippable: Reduces all the clutter from a webpage and makes it easier to read. Adverts, sidebars, etc are all removed and you are left with the text and images. There are other bookmarklets which are very similar like Readability.

Printliminator: Lets you select what you want to keep on a webpage before printing the page – you could of course print to a pdf using say doPDF which I’ve blogged about before.

Clip to Evernote: Use this bookmarklet to save a webpage to Evernote, the popular notebook app. I know Evernote has a Webclipper to clip text from webpages or entire webpages, but I find this bookmarklet useful in combination with Clippable mentioned above to just clip the text and images to Evernote and leave the rest of the clutter behind.

Read Later: Save a webpage to your Instapaper account to read later. You have to register with Instapaper to use this.

Save webpage as pdf: Sends a webpage to pdfdownload which converts it to a PDF. You can then download the PDF.

Subscribe with GReader: Quickly subscribe to a blog in Google Reader with this bookmarklet.

Show RSS Feed: Try this bookmarklet if your web browser has trouble detecting the RSS feed associated with a site. It will show you the full contents of that feed and also give you options to subscribe in your favourite newsreader.

Delicious Talk: See how many people have saved a particular page on Delicious and what tags they have used to describe the page.

Map that address: Highlight an address on a webpage and get a map showing its location.

List all Links: Lists all links on a page in a pop-up window.

Translate: Uses Google Translate to display the content of the page in English.

Youtubian: Go to a video on YouTube and click this bookmarklet. The page will reload with the video, a search box on the right, related videos below, and download links for Flash, MPEG, and mobile versions of the video also on the right. Click on the Expand link at the top of the page to revert back to the original YouTube page.

If you want to search for more bookmarklets, there’s a directory at marklets.com and here’s a site with over 100 useful bookmarklets for better productivity.

Hope you find some of these useful. Drop a comment on any I’ve missed that you like.