Dave Haynes

If you’re a regular reader of this blog then you’ll get to know that i can often take great satisfaction in some embarrasingly geeky and boring things at times.

It’s always a great pleasure to find a new shortcut key, a new excel function or a neat little app, extension, plugin. Especially if its something that has the potential to save a lot of time and hard graft.

It’s also a great pleasure to share them with the people around you, and i thought i’d indulge myself a little and tell you about three I only just found out today. They all relate to the wonderful Firefox browser, so if you’re using anything else then please seriously consider what you are doing! If you don’t like geeky things you might as well stop reading now!

1) I’m a fairly messy browser. I like to keep towindows open, refer back to them and to jump between them. Quite often i need at least two windows running permanently as a bare minimum in a day. Imagine my delight when i found out there actually was a shortcut to jump in between them.

If you press ctrl+a number, it takes you to that number tab! So, if you want to jump to tab #4, press ctrl+4!

2) After discovering this tip and then reading the comments below i also felt a little stupid when i realised that you could also simply scroll between windows by using ctrl+tab (or ctrl+shift+tab to go backwards)

3) Moving on from tabs i came across a third wonderful discovery (in practically as many minutes) - the discover was CoLT.

It’s a tiny extension for Firefox which makes its extremely simple to copy a hyperlink’s associated text or copy both a link’s text and URL at the same time. Last but not least it also lets you create an unlimited number of custom formats for copying both the link text and location. For example you can copy a link directly into BBCode which is used on forums and message boards. very handing when you’re hyping your latest release on the music forums. eg. [url=http://www.musicstore.com/labellink]browse our latest releases[/url]

If you’re a serial poster or blogger this could be very handy. Check it out and see if it will be helpful to you.