How To | Nerdlets

Firefox 3.0 Released!

Jun 172008

The much anticipated release of the excellent web browser Firefox 3.0 is available for download. Curious what all the fuss is about? Wondering if you should switch from Internet Explorer (you should, by the way)? Check out the discussion here and here for the best Firefox analysis. Wondering what’s new? Check out this list or a more in depth visual tour.

Convinced? Help Mozilla (the organization behind Firefox) set a record for most downloads in a day by downloading now! Once you have your very own copy, you can start adding extensions and customizing to your heart’s content.

In honor of this milestone in Web development, I thought I would provide some of my favorite extensions. Check them out!

Zotero of course. I have already posted a brief introduction. If you do any amount of research, Zotero is a must for organizing bibliographical material. It also generates citations in a variety of formats, including Chicago and SBL. If you are having trouble getting start, make sure you check out their online screencast, and I plan on developing my own tutorial for SBL/OpenOffice support in the near future.

Ever wish you could access your most-used internet bookmarks anywhere? Or maybe you want to share them with friends and family? Or post automatically generated links to your favorite posts on a blog (as I have in the sidebar to the right)? Well then del.icio.us is for you. The interface takes a little getting used to, and the website has the kind of interface only a techie could love, but its worth the effort. More to the point, it has a brilliant Firefox Extension.

If you’re a longtime use of Firefox, you probably already have a collection of favorite extensions. Some of them might not yet be updated for Firefox 3. Don’t worry, you can still use them: just download Nightly Tester Tools to override Firefox’s default functionality.

Gmail is wonderful, but it is even more wonderful when you install Better Gmail 2, which adds some customizable functionality to gmail’s site.

If you’re a blogger, you definitely want to check out Scribefire. Like Zotero, it runs inside Firefox, allowing you to browse and blog at the same time; no more switching tabs and juggling windows!

Well that’s enough to get you started. I would love to hear what everyone else finds helpful. Post your ideas in the comments!

Take your OS with you

Software No Responses »

May 242008

Technology like this has been available to hackers in the Linux community for a long time, but it looks like the excellent people at Fedora are taking things mainstream. Imagine: your entire computer in your pocket. Looks like I have a new weekend project!

Zotero: An Introduction, now with SBL support

Books, Software 7 Responses »

May 202008

$Zotero on Firefox at Westminster\'s Library$ If you have not already downloaded Zotero, the free, open source bibliographical reference manager for Firefox, now would be a good time. It now supports the cutting edge Firefox 3, and, for all those interested in writing papers in biblical studies, there is now an extension that produces SBL-compliant citations and bibliographies.

Installation is easy enough. You will need to have Firefox installed (either link above will guide you, but I recommend Firefox 3 RC1, as it is pretty stable and supports a lot of great features). Once you have firefox up and running, follow this link and click of “Download.” Firefox should do the rest. You will need to restart firefox to get started–you should see the Zotero icon in the bottom right corner. Click on it to play around!

To install SBL support, Click Here in Firefox and let Zotero do the rest. You will need to restart your browser for the changes to take affect.

Zotero takes a little practice. You can manually type in entries or download them by clicking on the little book icon in your browser’s address bar on cites such as Amazon.com or The Westminster Library. Once you have some entries, try creating a citation or bibliography. First, go to “Preferences” (an option under the gear icon in the main bar). Click on the “Export” tab and select SBL as your “Default Output Format.”

To create a citation, click on the entries you want to cite. Use the keyboard shortcut a to create a citation in your Clipboard, which you can then “Paste” into any document editor. To create a bibliography, select the desired entries, right click on one of them, and choose “Create Bibliography from Selected Items.” Follow the instructions. Paste wherever you see fit.

There is also a plugin for Microsoft Word that integrates the Zotero interface into your document editor. Usage instructions are provided in the previous link. For those more dedicated to open-source software, there is also an openoffice.org version available.

I hope to publish a full guide to using Zotero in a week or so–complete with Screencasts.