Burning Ones

I have a confession to make: I’m a tab browsing nut! My morning browsing typically looks like this: Pop open Firefox, open up Gmail, GCalendar, GReader, Twitter, and Remember the Milk, Read my mail and open any links that look interesting in a new tab, switch to GReader and pop through my feeds and open up all of the interesting stories (typically over 25 which is when Firefox starts blocking the popups from GReader (I’ll give a big hug to the person who can tell me how to turn that feature off)) in new tabs, then start going through the web pages and, if I think some things are really interesting, e-mail them out to people I think would be interested in seeing it, closing tabs along the way. This process has never been very efficient, and beyond that for the rest of the day as I found myself jumping to Wikipedia or to the Java documentation or to The Google to research some other topic, I would often want to shoot an e-mail out to someone or draft something up in Burning Ones or shoot a quick twitter off and that would entail opening a new tab, typing in the URL or otherwise creating a tab that I use quite often. All of this has changed, however, thanks to some extensions that I’ve found that make the whole process of tabbed-browsing much more painless.

First off, the problem I was attempting to solve was that on a regular basis I wanted to begin browsing, not with a simple homepage, but with a set of pages. This comes from my proclivity for having 10 apps open up anytime I log in to my Mac or PC at work. I simply have a bunch of things that I want to be able to access immediately. It’s the same when I get online. I knew of no way to do this in Firefox.

Getting set up with Morning Coffee

Enter Morning Coffee. Morning Coffee, according to the addon website,

lets you organize websites by day and open them up simultaneously as part of your daily routine. This is really handy if you read sites that update on a regular schedule (like webcomics, weekly columns, etc.).

The interface is really slick. I added it’s quick access icon to my Firefox toolbar and quickly navigated to all of my common access sites and added them to Morning Coffee everyday. You’ll quickly notice that this is just one way to do it. Have a web comic that you access every M/W/F? There’s a pre-made entry for that. Something more complex? Add it to the days individually. Once you’ve configured MC with the sites you want on the days you want them, simply set Firefox to open to a blank page when you start it up. After it loads (it’ll be nice and fast since it won’t have to render a site), click Morning Coffee and boom, all of your sites open up. However, that’s where the real fun begins.

One of the options in Morning Coffee is to open the sites in a random order. That’s all well and good and I happily selected it when I first started using MC. I did this under the misguided assumption that it would add some spice to my browsing routine by introducing some anarchy to the situation. However, by deselecting this and combining it with a few other tools, you can get a surprisingly powerful effect that I’ll attempt to cover here.

Tools Of Power

Leaving MC for a little bit, let’s talk some Firefox pillow-goodness. An intrinsic feature of Firefox that is not terribly well documented is the feature that allows you to navigate your tabs by pressing Ctrl and the number of the tab you wish to navigate to. If you want to get to the fifth tab over from the left, you press Ctrl-5 and voila! you’re there. Obviously this can only work for a small number of tabs, but the good Firefox developers thoughtfully hotkeyed Ctrl-9 to automatically take you to the rightmost tab. It’s like magic really. But how useful is this? I mean, who wants to count over from the left every time they want to go to tab. It’d be quicker to use the mouse. And, if you have as many tabs as I tend to have open, you haven’t got a prayer to only use the keyboard to jump around because you simply won’t be able to see all the tabs. Enter the next uber-sw33t extension: Fancy Numbered Tabs.

Fancy Numbered Tabs replaces the close tab graphic on the tab with the number of the tab in the Ctrl Navigation engine. This means that with a quick glance at the tab bar, you can see which number to press to go to the tab you want.

So What?

OK, so those too things combined would be pretty nice alone, but then came the break through in my head. It goes back to the fact that I wanted to be able to quickly access quite a few things that lived in my browser. GMail was a must, GCalendar for quickly adding events as I heard about them, GReader for when I wanted to spend a little time reading some feeds, Twitter, Remember the Milk, etc. etc. All of the sudden I realized that with the proper configuration I could set up an environment where I would always know exactly how to quickly access my mail or any other site that I wanted to with the quick press of two buttons.

The strategy is as follows. Hearkening back to the fact that Morning Coffee can open your sites in a specified order, I simply unchecked the random opening feature so that GMail would always be tab 1 if I opened it with Morning coffee. GCalendar is tab 2. GReader; tab 3. And so on. Firefox, by default, opens links in new tabs and popups at the end of the tab list, not directly to the right of the tabs that they’re in. What this means is that wherever I am, so long as I haven’t closed any of my standard tabs, I can quickly access my mail or my calendar or anything else that I want that kind of access to because it’s always in the same location.

That felt pretty melodramatic with the set-up that I did, but let me tell you, I find browsing to be much more efficient now that I’ve done this. It’s configurable to match any browsing habit, and you can even quickly reset your browser because Morning Coffee will replace all current tabs with it’s own setup whenever you click its icon.

To quickly wrap up.

1. Install Morning Coffee and create the site list. If you have constant sites for every day, make sure they’re in the same position (early in the list) for every day. Then add day specific sites on top of those sites, etc.
2. Set Firefox to open to a blank page
3. Install Fancy Numbered Tabs
4. Begin tab browsing productively

Just to mention: an alternate way that you can accomplish this that I’ve only heard of is that apparently Firefox can accept multiple sites as it’s home page. This would be nowhere near as configurable as going with Morning Coffee, but may be easier for some.

Extensions I’d Love To See

One extension I’d love to see that would make this even better would be for a way to sync Morning Coffee data between multiple installations of Firefox. The fact that I have to set this up on every computer I use on a regular basis is a bit of a pain. Of course it’s also nice to be able to have separate preferences between work and home and such. It would just be a nice option to have. I’d also love to able to set Morning Coffee to a key combination for really easy activation. Also, some sort of integration with the Firefox homepage preference so that I can have Firefox automatically load whatever is in Morning Coffee would rock pretty hard.

Anyway, let me know if this helps anyone by leaving a comment or shooting me an e-mail. I’d love to hear from you. Are there any ways that you’ve found to be more productive while tab browsing? Let’s hear your ideas!

Problem

I’m subscribed to a bunch of e-mail lists and other notifications of the sort that has come to be known as Bacn. There have been plenty of lively discussions about the problem of bacn and how to properly deal with it. The attitude I’ve adopted is that I don’t let any bacn enter my inbox. I have a filter set up that labels all incoming mail that I have identified as bacn (thankfully, bacn is much easier to identify than it’s drunken monkey uncle, spam) as such (’Bacn’ if you must know the actual label used) and then immediately archives it. This is handy because I can know that if I have something in my inbox, it’s probably something I care about right now (thank you, GMail, for your awesome spam protection). Despite bacn being something I’m interested in, without proper attention it’s alarmingly easy to have hundreds of messages pile up in a matter of days. Seeing that I have 200 items it my bacn box can be quite discouraging so I end up not reading any of them. This is what I’d like to solve.

Assumptions

I’ll assume that bacn is consumable media. If I miss some topic that get’s covered on css-d, I know that A) I can search for it later and B) It’s more than likely to come up again. If I get a notification that someone wants to become my friend on Facebook and I miss it, I know that another notification will eventually come through and I’ll go to the site and find a friend request. In other words, bacn is expendable to the max, it’s just something that can interest you in the moment and is probably enlightening at the same time.

Solution?

What I’ve come up with is something I know I could do in Mail.app on my Mac (if i used that anymore) but I have no idea how to do in GMail. I basically want to say the following: Delete all messages that match a certain criteria (label=bacn;date received prior to midnight this morning) at such and such a time or even on a recurring basis. This would be somewhat trivial in a desktop app but how to do it in GMail is truly beyond me. Possibly with Greasemonkey somehow? Anyway, this is where I turn it over to you. Any thoughts? Is this something you’ve figured out how to do? Let me know in the comments or via e-mail.