Raise Your Marketing IQRaise Your Marketing IQ

Last week Lifehacker reader UnMicD offered a simple bookmarklet for searching Craigslist in our #openthread. Over at the Productive Geek forums, user Brady modified that bookmarklet to search file-sharing site MediaFire. The results: It’s a little like when Napster was good.

To create the bookmarklet (this is how you do it on Firefox—other browsers should be similar), just right-click your bookmarks toolbar, select New Bookmark, and paste the text below into the Location field:

You can name the bookmarklet whatever you like. Brady takes it a step further and assigned it a nice favicon using the Favicon Picker Firefox extension (which means you can skip naming your bookmarklet altogether). Once it’s all set up, just click the bookmarklet, enter your search terms, and see what you come up with.

This is by no means a new idea, of course—some folks have been using Google as their personal Napster for years (see number three).

Android: There’s no built-in means of syncing bookmarks to your Android phone, unless you open and enter each one. Interactive bookmarklets, too, are generally a no-go. With the MyBookmarks app installed, you can sync bookmarks and install (most) bookmarklets in Android’s browser.

To put it simply, you download MyBookmarks from the Android Market to your phone, then run it. You’ll get a long string of numbers as your unique ID, and have the option to wipe out all your existing Android bookmarks. Before you hit another button on your phone, export all your bookmarks from your desktop browser to an HTML file, enter in that numeric code your received on your phone, then upload that file to MyBookmarks’ webapp in your desktop browser. You can, of course, edit and remove unnecessary bookmarks from the HTML file, provided you’re handy with the syntax.

On your phone, you can now hit “Import your bookmarks from RerWare.com,” and it looks for the latest HTML file uploaded under your ID number. When it matches up, you can import them all at once, or approve each bookmark, one by one. When you’re done, you’re done—all your approved bookmarks and bookmarklets are loaded in your browser.

As far as which bookmarklets work and which don’t, those that mostly pass information between sites—Evernote, Readability/Instapaper, and translation tools—seem to work, while those that activate the browser’s pop-up input window seem stuck in the mud. Still, something is better than nothing, since Android’s browser doesn’t let you natively save bookmarks without some kind of http:// at the front, and most bookmarklets start with just javascript:.

MyBookmarks is a free download for Android systems, and it’s made by the same crew as the MyBackup tools, so it doesn’t seem like an attempt to steal your private bookmark data. Still, go ahead and edit out any bookmarks out of your export file that you don’t feel like making semi-public.

Know of a more elegant bookmark syncing solution for Android phones? Tell us about it in the comments.

Navigating to the directory where Firefox stores your profile has always been a bit of a pain, but the recent release of Firefox 3.6 makes finding that folder—and from there backing up your bookmarks, extensions, or entire profile—a breeze.

That’s because Firefox 3.6 added a helpful new about page for support and troubleshooting. Just type about:support in your Firefox address bar to give it a look. The new page separates a ton of useful troubleshooting information into sections, including Application Basics (name, version, profile directory, installed plug-ins, and build configuration, followed by all of your installed extensions, and then ending with your profile’s modified preferences. Mozilla put this all together as a helpful tool for finding important information for users elbow deep in troubleshooting, but as Nirmal over at Life Rocks 2.0 points out, it also serves as a great shortcut for quickly backing up your Firefox profile.

Just click the Open Containing Folder (or Show in Finder in OS X) button to go straight to the profile folder for that Firefox installation. Once you’re looking at it, backing up your profile is as simple as copying that folder. Windows users, you can also give previously mentioned MozBackup a look if you’d like help with the backup-and-restore process for everything from Firefox and Thunderbird to Songbird.

Does Facebook have a birthday present in store for us?

The site turns six years old today and a couple redesign shots have been seen in the wild. Drop.io founder Sam Lessin tweeted these screenshots. In them, search has taken more of a prominent look, moving to the center from the right.

Most of the bottom navigation has been moved to the left-hand bar. Ads and applications get their special bookmarks on the left-hand, which the company has talked about since last fall.

What’s new in Lessin’s version is that chat has been moved to the left as well. Instead of appearing in the bottom-right hand corner in a pop-up, your online friends will stay continuously visible on the page.

It doesn’t seem to be consistent though: another user, Laura Watkins, shared these screenshots. Chat looks like it’s in its original position.

Firefox: Mozilla’s out with the 1.0 of its Weave project, and it delivers on what it first promised—quiet, complete syncing of bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and even open tabs. It also heralds the coming of a really cool mobile experience.

If Weave synced your currently installed add-ons, you’d be up and running after a fresh Firefox installation in 2 minutes. As it is, Weave is still a very efficient and lightweight sync of your core Firefox experience, allowing you to maintain multiple Firefox installations across computers and operating systems. Xmarks does bookmark and password syncing too, and across other browsers, but Weave doesn’t offer site “discovery” services or other value-added stuff—just a way to automatically connect your Firefox browsers, and even browsing sessions.

That syncing of open tabs is where Firefox Mobile, just out in a third release candidate, will really shine. As Jay Sullivan told us, the idea is that the minute you step away from your desktop or laptop and wake your phone up, Firefox Mobile will pick up on the tabs you had open while you were sitting down.

Weave syncs through Mozilla’s servers. If you’d rather sync up your passwords and bookmarks to your own hardware or cloud space, Mozilla offers instructions on setting up your own server.

Weave 1.0 is a free download, works wherever Firefox 3.5 or higher (or Firefox Mobile) does.

RSS, Atom, and other XML-formatted feeds revolutionized the way we keep up with our favorite web sites, allowing us to use newsreaders to track updates rather than bookmarks and constant refreshing. The only problem: Some sites don’t have RSS feeds.

The Google Reader team addressed this problem today, adding a new feature to allow users to track changes to any web site—even those that don’t have their own feed.

These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org’s latest products, just type “http://www.google.org/products.html” into Reader’s “Add a subscription” field. Click “create a feed”, and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

Here are some more example feeds for sites without feeds that you could follow:

• Macy’s – special offers [view in Reader]
• NYU Computer Science homepage [view in Reader]
• Zillow.com homepage [view in Reader]

Granted, we’ve seen webapps that create feeds for feedless sites in the past, but the integration into a popular newsreader like Google Reader is a big step. And while most sites worth their salt have feeds coming out their ears, others—like Bill Gates’ recently launched Gates Notes—still don’t, making the new feature a welcome update for anyone who’s dealt with this frustration in the past.

One of the most common complaints about Google’s new Nexus One Android wunderkind is that it lacks native multitouch support, making things like resizing objects with a finger pinch gesture impossible.

That is, until now. Developer Taimur Asad has posted a set of instructions to install a multitouch add-on for the Nexus One that will enable the missing pinch-to-zoom and other coveted multitouch gestures in the Nexus One’s browser.

The caveats: you’ll have to be prepared to root your phone, which gives you complete access to the Nexus One’s file system akin to jailbreaking an iPhone. You’ll likely also lose your bookmarks and browser settings when installing the multi-touch code.

Still, if you successfully follow the instructions you’ll gain access to the sweet multitouch functionality showcased in the video below. Let us know if you have a chance to try this out.

[WARNING]: We’re posting this information for your edification only and cannot endorse rooting your Nexus One, as it may violate your warranty and could damage your phone. Proceed at your own risk!

[via Gadget Lab]

Tags: android, Google, jailbreak, multitouch, nexus one, Root, software

iPhones and iPod touch models can’t sync with Firefox bookmarks, but you can regularly push your bookmarks to them on a Windows system. The trick involves the Xmarks sync service, Internet Explorer, and a tiny system tray utility.

It’s not quite automatic, but the way blogger Shawn0 details his own solution for synchronizing his Firefox bookmarks to his iPod touch, it’s much better than a manual import/export of HTML files. And, as Shawn found out, some of the previous Firefox-to-iPhone solutions don’t work with the latest builds of Firefox (3.0 and newer, specifically). It’s not a tricky process, just systematic, and requires, at most, a right-click of a system tray utility (intended for Internet Explorer users of Xmarks) before you next sync your iPhone.

Firefox only (Win/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Unsorted Bookmarks Folder Menu adds a new folder to your bookmarks menu so you can get access to starred bookmarks without having to open the organize bookmarks dialog.

Once you’ve installed the extension, just head over to the Bookmarks menu, where you’ll see a new Unsorted Bookmarks folder containing all the pages that you’ve used the star bookmark feature to save quickly. It’s a very tiny extension that definitely won’t appeal to everybody, but if you frequently use the star bookmark feature and are tired of opening up the Organize Bookmarks dialog to find them—a pet peeve of mine, this might be the extension for you.

Unsorted Bookmarks Folder Menu is a free download, works anywhere Firefox does. Astute readers will probably point out that you can also double-click the Star icon in the address bar to easily move the bookmark to another folder while you are bookmarking in the first place.

Dear Lifehacker: I use Firefox and have my bookmarks toolbar on the same “line” as the back/forward buttons and Awesomebar to save space. However, my bookmarks always collapse into a drop-down list. How can I stop this from happening?

Signed,
Bookmarks Go Bye-bye

Hey there, Bookmarks,

I had the same problem not too long ago. I fixed it by creating a user script for the popular Firefox customization extension Stylish to set a specific width for the bookmarks toolbar so that it never collapses into a drop-down list. Here’s what the script looks like:

I set the width to 55 pixels, but you can change the actual width to whatever you need it to be. If you don’t have Stylish and/or don’t want it, you can take the last two lines above and paste them into Firefox’s userChrome.css file. Don’t know how to do that? See our previous post on maximizing your Firefox 3.5 viewing area for further instructions.

Hugs,
Lifehacker