Writer's block, an owner's guide: Tech how-to: Firefox Live

If you like this web site but you wish you didn’t have to keep interrupting your writing to click over here and see if I’ve written anything recently:

(1) if you are reading this in Internet Explorer, then (a) please assume that I’ve ranted at you for ten minutes about how it slows down your computer and exposes you to all those annoying pop-up ads and exposes you to spyware that will let strangers watch what you are typing and what you are reading, and then (b) go download Firefox.

(2) if you are still reading this in Internet Explorer, that’s ok, that’s your choice, or your employer’s choice, your mother’s choice, your teenager’s choice, or whatever it was. Unfortunately the rest of this article is not information you can use.

(3) if you are reading this in Firefox, then here’s one of the many fun and useful things you can do. You can add a Firefox Live Bookmark. It looks like a bookmark but is actually a handy little menu of the titles of my recent articles. That means that before you open the bookmark, you can choose what you want to read about or, if there’s nothing new, or nothing about your interests, you needn’t open the page at all. Cool, huh?

Here’s how. Look down at the bottom right, at the little orange square with the white… er, things in it. That’s it, good. That tells you this site is enabled for Live Bookmarks. Click on it, and it will offer you several choices. Click any of them, I don’t care. In the window that pops up, edit the name of this blog to be whatever you want - probably “Today I Write.”

Next you have a choice. (a) if you just hit return, that adds a Live Bookmark to your bookmarks menu. Congratulations! You’re done. But (b) what I would like you to do is choose “Create in” and then “Personal Toolbar Folder.” That puts the Today I Write button in your toolbar where you can hit it whenever you like.

Then whenever you do hit it, you will see a little menu of my recent articles. If the titles don’t appeal, go back to whatever you were doing and the menu disappears, and you have wasted only about a second of your writing day. Reward yourself with something time-consuming.

And that is all there is to it.

Published on April 12, 2005 at 8:20 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/tech-how-to-firefox-live.html

Today I Write