It used to be Tabberwocky but that’s died with FF4
I now recommend Tab Mix Plus which lets you achieve the holy grail, duplicate tabs!
Who would have though it was so hard.
Maybe FF5 will get some chrome like tab controls but for now this extension does a fair bit
Firefox used to have an addon called duplicate tab. It was great, did exactly what it said on the tin. However it is no longer developed and so we are stuck without any duplicate tab functionality – damn.
Until that is I discovered tabberwocky. Not the most descriptive name which is probably why it didn’t come up in my Google searches. However I have now found it and among other things it allows us to duplicate tabs easily.
Hopefully this post will be more optimised for firefox duplicate tab. If that’s what you are looking for, then you are looking for Tabberwocky
If your firefox address bar is getting a bit slow and laggy as it tries to find suggestions, I found one single about:config tweak totally sorted it out for me.
browser.urlbar.search.timeout = 100
change to
browser.urlbar.search.timeout = 10
To do this, open a new tab and type about:config
Then agree to the thing that says you know what you are doing and in the filter bar at the top type:
urlbar.search.timeout
you can then double click on the value (set to 100 by default) and change it to whatever you want. I tried 10 and that seems to work great for me, but you might want to experiment.
Just discovered another great Firefox Addon
Custom Buttons..
tired or too lazy to use the right click for that frequent action (view source, reload all tabs)
this addon is for you
If like me you miss the duplicate tab extension from Firefox 2, this little tip might cheer you up:
Hold down [ctrl] then drag and drop an open tab onto the green + (or any free tab bar space) and you will clone that tab.
Unfortunately this doesn’t clone the history as well, so its not as good as the old duplicate tab, but at least it’s something and its fast.
Found the tip here
I have been looking for this for ages – A URL pattern matching cache controller to disable caching on local / dev sites whilst maintaining normal caching operations on the rest of the web.
The solution is a Firefox addon called Johnny Cache (boom boom)!
Firefox is awesome. The thing that really makes it awesome is the fact that it is very easy to customize it to have all the functionality you could dream of. The way that firefox does this is by allowing you to install add-ons. These little additions to the program bring extra functionality to firefox.
Here’s a list of my current favourites in no particular order:
SEO for Firefox
ColorZilla
Web Developer Toolbar
Live HTTP Headers
Google Toolbar
Ad Block Plus
Prefbar
Plain Text to Link
Here are some Other Favourite Firefox Addon Blogs
http://booststrapping.typepad.com/booststrapping/2007/05/top_firefox_add.html
http://www.noinham.info/e-commerce/nhung-firefox-plug-in-huu-ich-cho-web-design/
http://chris.pirillo.com/2008/01/08/favorite-firefox-extensions/
http://mouseblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/extend-your-firefox/
http://blogs.lib.umanitoba.ca/carol/2007/04/my_favourite_addons_for_firefo.html
http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/11/googlepedia_my_favor.html
http://gratemedia.com/fluentinmumble/2007/11/15/favorite-firefox-extensions/
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/05/on_my_favorite_.html
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2008/02/sarahs-top-ten.html
http://flyinghamster.com/blog/2006/10/31/favorite-firefox-extension/
A large part of an effective SEO campaign involves researching the current top ranking sites for your chosen key words or phrases and then trying to figure out what they are doing to get there. This can be a painstaking and laborious task. However there is one great tool which is highly recommended to give you a quick insight into the SEO factors contributing to a particular web sites ranking.
SEO for Firefox is an addon for firefox which does a few things. Firstly it can give you information displayed directly onto the search engine results pages. However this can seriously slow down your browsing experience depending on how many bits of SEO info you want to be displayed automatically, how many results you view in one page and of course how fast your internet connection and PC are.
Another neat feature of the SEO for firefox plugin is that it highlights any nofollow links on whichever page you are looking at in red. This is a useful feature which means you don’t have to read through source code to check for the nofollow attribute.
The final great feature is built into the right click menu. This allows you to open up a full report of whichever page you are looking at in a new window. I find this feature the most useful on a day to day basis as it is non invasive, but allows you to easily get the information you want on demand.
Definitely worth installing and playing around with, though by no means a substitute for proper investigation, the SEO for Firefox addon is a must for any web master or online marketing professional.
One of the most useful and powerful things you can do with PHP is to create a programme which will simulate a web browser and can grab data, post data to forms and generally interact with other web sites – automatically.
For PHP to be able to work like this it must have the CURL library installed and active. It is the CURL library which actually handles all of the interaction and PHP is my scripting language of choice for interacting with CURL.
A simple CURL function is like this:
function curl($url){
$timeout = '300'; //how long before CURL gives up on this page
$go = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
$page = curl_exec($go);
curl_close($go);
return $page;
}
This function when called and echoed will output the entire html of the $url specified.
For grabbing data from this page to be inserted into a database (for example when spidering a suppliers web site for product information to be inserted into your site) we then use regular expressions to find what we are looking for and then insert that into the database.
so for example if we wanted to grab the product title and we knew that this was wrapped in a h1 tag with the class “product title” we could use this regexp to grab this:
$page = curl($url); $pattern = '% <h1 class="product_title">(.+?)</h1> %i'; preg_match($pattern,$page,$matches); print_r($matches); //we can see the entire array of matches and choose which we want to insert into the database
We can also Post data to web sites using curl. This allows us to do all kinds of things including grabbing data that is displayed on the submission of post forms. Here is an example Curl Post Function:
function curl_post($url,$post_data){
$timeout = '300'; //how long before CURL gives up on this page
$go = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt ($go, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
//now for the post section
curl_setopt($go, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($go, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_data);
$page = curl_exec($go);
curl_close($go);
return $page;
}
It can be tricky to figure out exactly what data should be in the post string. To help you out though is this incredibly handy addon for firefox: Live Http Headers.
This addon lets you see exactly what is going on between your browser and the web site you are visiting. This can quickly and easily give you the information you need to replicate the same behaviour with your CURL script.
Edmonds Commerce specialise in working with PHP and CURL. If you have any spidering, screen scraping or other application that requires PHP to actively interact with other web sites – get in touch today to see how we can help you benefit from this incredibly powerful technique.
Related Resources
http://www.phpfour.com/blog/2008/01/20/php-http-class/
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/1988.html
