Tech Blog: SEGA Tech has Great Tech Tips

I try to keep up with good technology blogs from people in Georgia, particularly if they are related to education or libraries. I found SEGA Tech (Southeast Georgia Technology) a few months ago. I learn something every time I read a post, but there have been two particular posts that have helped me solve endlessly frustrating tech problems.

1) My home laptop is a few years old. I have particularly noticed that Firefox has been running quite slowly the last few months. Along came this post, The seven steps to a faster Firefox. Browse faster! I followed the steps, and, although Firefox is still a little slow on my laptop, I have seen a big improvement in performance. YAY!

2) Since I do some limited tech support at work, I need to be familiar with both Firefox and IE since they are the most common browsers among our users. Although my preference is Firefox (and, oh, let me count the reasons), I often use IE7 at work (and have kept IE6 on my home laptop in case we need to do testing or troubleshooting). With IE7, I have been quite frustrated that I cannot change the homepage. My homepage comes up, but I can’t navigate to another site – argh! Then, I found this post, Fix for Internet Explorer Runounce Error. Ahh! The joy of finally finding the fix to an annoying little problem!

Keep up the great work, guys! I’ll be reading!

Firefox Extensions: Read it Later

I read a lot of news, blogs, and discussion lists, but I don’t always have time to read some of the great stuff that is out there. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this problem. So, when I found this extension, I was glad to have something to help!

Read it Later is a Firefox extension that allows you to easily mark any website – a news article, a blog entry, a page with several links you want to visit, etc. – as something to read later.

The extension works by placing two buttons in your browser window that look like this (for me anyway):

To save a site, just click the first button, and it will look like this:

When you finally find time to catch up on reading your articles (if you ever do!), just click the second button for your list of saved items:

After you have read something, just click the first button again to remove it from the list.

IdeaShower has also created a nice YouTube video to show this as well. The buttons are different from mine, but it works the same way.

Updated 12/27/07: IdeaShower released a new update for this extension. I downloaded it, and it still kept the items I had already saved.

Library Tools: LibX Firefox Extension

LibX – A Firefox Extension for Libraries
http://libx.org/

LibX allows users to have a search box to find your library’s resources right in their browser toolbars. These extensions also include right-click context menus, library branding, and more. Each library can create its own customized extension. There are many examples on the site.

I wish I would have had this when I was in college!