The Browser Split extension for Firefox allows you to have several pages open in the same Firefox window. This way you can have your post window open along side the other web pages so that you don’t have to have multiple windows open or keep switching back and forth between tabs while you blog and search for links and text and whatnot. See the attached screenshot for an example situation.
Here are several other Firefox extensions I recommend to make browsing and blogging easier:
- Adblock Plus – block ads!
- Copy All Urls – copy the urls of your current tabs to the clipboard (to save, email, etc.)
- Copy Plain Text – copy only plain text without any formatting
- Download Statusbar – eliminates the download popup window
- Forecasfox – live weather in your status bar
- It’s All Text! – edit text areas with an external editor (notepad, gvim, etc.)
- Link Alert – shows and icon beside the cursor when hovering over a link to indicate what type of content the link points to
- OpenBook – customize the Add Bookmark dialog so that you can enter a Keyword; you can type a keyword in the address bar and Firefox will load the associated bookmark (skip the bookmark menu for frequent pages, e.g. “g” for google.com, “m” for mail.gmail.com, etc.); use Ctrl+L to select the address bar (& Ctrl+K for search)
- KeywordBar – display all your bookmark keywords
- PDF Download – gives you options for handling annoying pdf documents (save, new tab, convert to html, etc.)
- Split Browser – split the content area into multiple panes (see above)
- Tiny Menu – reclaim valuable screen real estate by making the standard menu bar into a tiny menu (see example in the screenshot above)
- TinUrl Creator – convert long urls to tinyurls (see tinyurl.com)
- URL Fixer – correct typos in urls that you enter in the addres bar (e.g. “imdb.cmo” becomes “imdb.com”)
And a couple others I have installed:
- Answers – search Answers.com; includes the Wikipedia entry!; searches from areas where the standard context menu “Search with Google” doesn’t work (viz: form fields)
- ErrorZilla Mod – replace the standard error page with a fancy error page
- FireFTP – FTP client within the browser
- Tabbrowser Preferences – more options for the tabs
Happy browsing and blogging!