Recently I have discovered an interesting phenomenon - when you are supposed to be working on an assignment, the time spent on the work has an approximately 1 : 2 ratio with the time spent messing around. Therefore, when you propose to spend 3 hours doing work, you inevitably spend 6 hours doing completely unrelated things.
This ratio holds true specifically for Internet work, and may vary slightly for other computer-related tasks.
Luckily for me, I have spent enough time working on assignments in the past few days to discover some very fun and useful tools. Top of the list is gleeBox, which (I feel) is easiest described as 'browsing the internet with a keyboard.' This extension for Firefox and Chrome is simply amazing, and has impressed me many times over in only a few days. Even if you love your mouse like your mother, this tool will be extremely useful! Not only is it an interface for the pages you view, it can act as a command line for your browser. DOS has nothing compared to gleeBox. YubNub commands, jQuery selectors, bookmarklets, page sharing -- this tool handles these tasks and more with Web 3.0 ease.
On the subject of bookmarklets, did you know that Instapaper creates bookmarklets for each folder you make? Each bookmarklet sends the link directly into that folder. I found this extremely useful while doing research; I created a folder for cited references, copied the bookmarklet, and named it 'cite.' Doing this enables me to activate it through gleeBox using a simple
!cite command - sending whatever page I'm viewing straight to a collection of links. If you don't like using the LastPass extension, just copy some bookmarks! All you'd have to do is type !login, and it would be done!GleeBox is a wonderful tool that can do many things for an internet user. Paired with the powerful bookmarklets of today, it can help you accomplish virtually anything with just a tapping of the keys. The TipJar has even more strategies and tools to show you. This is an extension that's worth looking into.
Whoaw! What is this and how do I use this too? It's really cool.
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