Firefox Profiling People – The old fashioned way

So upon upgrading my Mozilla Firefox Browser just now, I was asked (optional) to answer a 20 question survey about my web browsing habits. The questions were a bit silly in some cases, being your atypical style multi choice, with not much variance/choice.

You arrive at a party, who are you?

a/ wearing the crazy rented costume, drawing everyone’s attention

b/ slinking in as unobtrusively as possible

c/arriving with a group of friends to spread he scrutiny or

d/ what party?

You get the picture. I don’t believe very scientific. However, I plough through the questions and as reward, it generated the below profile of myself.  The full flash driven, menu pop up experience can be seen at the WebifyMe.org website here: http://mzl.la/oroULb

1. I use a Blackberry. I do own an Android Honeycomb Tablet though. Half right.
2. I do have a 2nd old school phone for when I go snow skiing and mountain biking, as a backup. So half right again….
3. I do eat well, but not to the extent of being a hypochondriac and carrying a thermometer around with me.
4. Master of Disguise. I think not.
5. Tarot? What’s that? BUT, to be known as a magician able to weave magic out of thin air. Now that’s cool.
6. Tech Mag. Guilty as charged: Wired, Monocle, T3, occasionally.
7. USB Key: Hmmmmm maybe. Maybe 2 of them. One Waterproof, the other made out of Titanium for rugged handling. Nerd alert!
8. Moleskin Address Book? For 2,200 contacts…. Urrggghhhh fail. However for a notebook, that’s a different story. Matched by a nice Schaeffer or Inoxcrom Pen. I use my smart phone to manage my contacts – enter: BlackBerry.
9. Buttons? Laughter. Plucky. Resourceful. If I could but live up to these noble traits.
10. Friendship Bracelet. Now this one was genuinely nice. If I could be remembered for such endeavor with my friends, than I am all the more enriched and humbled for both the experience and the opportunity.
11. FAIL Location being U.S.A. Nice to visit. Not to live. Australia all the way.

Intriguing. I wonder what my other friends would get on their walls?

Website Building Tools

Over the years I have collected a bunch of useful open source tools which have helped tremendously in building and maintaining websites. Most important – they are FREE! If you really want to go to town and have the funds get yourself Adobe Web Premium (Illustrator, Photoshop, Contribute, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Soundbooth)  and start looking at a software configuration management system, which manages your built environment with versions, baseline projects and affords the ability to build up a code base. But in lieu of burning some money, the free ones are below.

If you have any suggestions, I’d love to you hear from you and I’ll add the useful ones to this list.

File Transfer Protocol Program (FTP Client)
FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org

HTML/CSS Editing
Notepad ++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Image File Viewers/ Basic Editors
FastStone http://www.faststone.org – Slick looking interface. Really good for managing large numbers of images. Can bog down in network drive situations i.e. cataloguing images across multiple hard drives/server locations, however this can be rectified by dumping the Thumbnail database on a regular basis. Can view PSD’s.
Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com – Fast loading, non intrusive. Not quite as flexible as Faststone, it nonetheless is lightweight enough to run concurrently when you just want a fast preview of images sent to you i.e. email attachments.

Rulers for measuring windows, images, text blocks
Sizer http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html. Brilliant, lightweight application for quickly resizing windows to any parameter you care to program in i.e. 1280X1024, 1280X 800 (laptops), 1024X768, 640X480. Will work with ALL windows, outside of the browser i.e. Photoshop, etc.
Screen Ruler http://wonderwebware.com/screen-ruler/ Configurable floating ruler pain which has X & Y planes with configurable transparency.

Firefox Browser Plugins
Firebug, Cooliris, Screengrab! I wrote about Firefox Plugins’ in my post Software: Firefox Browser Extensions

PDF for Finished Art
Cute PDF Writer http://www.cutepdf.com/ If you are producing print quality finished art or into publication of e-zines or editorial variants of a book, collected works etc, consider upgrading to the Pro edition. Significantly cheaper than Adobe’s Acrobat offering and I find the compression algorithm and font handling to be either equal or on better.

Evernote
http://www.evernote.com
Fantastic web based application which allows you to jot down notes, import images and manage articles in a secure, password protected environment. Once items are imported, they are indexed and you can perform searches on them. The ultra cool aspect about Evernote is the ability to import images with writing on it and Evernotes servers run Optical Character Recognition protocols on it, allowing indexing of the words in the image. So, you can take a photo of a business card (MAC = Photobooth, PC = MSN, Trillion, Logitech Cam etc) and it will index the details.

Contact’s Management
So you have hundreds of contacts, they sit in your iPhone or Blackberry. Store them securely online and Sync them with one of the below:

• Google Contacts in Gmail - http://www.gmail.com
• HighRise by 37 Signals – http://www.highrisehq.com
• Zoho CRM – http://www.zoho.com