Jessamyn West - Pimp my Firefox

Liveblogging:

Pimp my Firefox
by Jessamyn West

See Jessamyn's presentation on her website here.

This is my first time watching a presentation by Jessamyn. It is a room of 300-450 people, and she is very comfortable and entertaining on the podium. This is a dynamic presentation in many ways; she is jumping to and from websites and showing us how she uses the Firefox add-ons on her machine.

When you install something on Firefox, it sometimes has to re-start. However, Firefox restarts quickly AND reopens with all the tabs you had open opened up still. Cooool.

Smart keywords - allows you to find any box to search keywords on the web. Saves you time so you can answer a question quickly.

Themes allow you to put your own esthetic onto your browser.

Greasemonkey is a javascript enabler - smiley monkey down in the right-hand corner means that Greasemonkey is working. Installs scripts that other people have written and allows you to manage them. It does work between the website and what you see on the screen.

Examples of scripts:

• "Flickr more home script" - Greasemonkey allows you to see 8 pictures instead of 4 at a time on Flickr.
  
• "Yahoo mail welcome skipper" - by-passes the advertising for you.
  
• "Facebook auto colorizer"
• "Facebook auto login"
• "Gmail signature flow" - puts your signature under your text rather than all the way at the bottom of all the messages
• "Wikipedia cleaner" - she doesn't like the sidebar; changes the style sheet and puts the sidebar at the bottom
  

Greasemonkey can be used to remove ads from webpages. Do you want to block ads in a public library? Will this block out legitimate pop-ups?

What can you do with this at your job? See the resources on this page about using Firefox in the Library. "Walk Like a Librarian" page - great for new Firefox users. Will step you through the stages.

You can add searches onto Firefox (top right corner). See the Search Engines add-on page.

"Elder Statesman" links in her handout are for making web pages easier to see for anyone having issues viewing the page, including some seniors.

Wow. I have lots to learn about Firefox. But I guess that is why I attended this session and not Meredith Farkas' session which I also would have loved to attend! :-)