Heidi Olson

I’ve become a big fan of “toread+“. I have it in my toolbar in my Firefox 3 browser.

When I’m researching a topic I usually start with a search in a search engine and begin to gather websites that contain interesting and relevant content. I open links as I find them in new tabs in my browser. At some point I get overwhelmed by the number of tabs or I find a sufficient amount of information that I’m looking for and then I start to sift through it. Most often I find myself spending way too much time on it and decide to move on to another task before completing my research. I don’t really want to muddle up my bookmarks with links to these open tabs since I probably won’t need them more than once or twice. I could move them to my delicious.com social bookmarking account but once, again, they aren’t necessarily topics that I want to keep and the links may not have relevance to others who are following my newly added delicious feeds. I may not have had time to determine if they are really good resources and want to be reminded to look back at them. I also don’t want to spend too much time finding these links again as I probably want to get back to the topic within a day or two.

This is where” toread+” comes in. Like I mentioned before, I have it showing as a link on my toolbar so while I’m on a web page that I want to be reminded of I can click the link and I can send myself an email that has the web address listed in it. I also have the capability to add a short comment about the link so I can customize the email’s subject line.

This also works well for me when I’m in a meeting/conference/class/presentation and someone mentions a web address that I want to get back to when I have more time to spend on it. I can send myself an email reminder and then determine how important it is to me to keep at a later time. I normally don’t keep one of these emails in my inbox more than a day or so. I find time to determine the webpage’s importance and then move on and delete it or give it permanent home in one of my other social tools.

For me, using email to manage things like this has been working well. I know that some people prefer not to fill up their inbox with a lot of messages so this tool might not appeal to them. I’m able to keep a pretty clean inbox and archive (or trash) most of my incoming mail, move tasks to a todo list (I use todoist), send bookmarks to delicious, or categorize my messages.

For more information look at: http://toread.cc/howtouse.php

There’s also a tool called Read it Later – I haven’t tried it yet but I’m thinking about installing it and seeing if it has more features that work with my work style. In fact, I found several references to it yesterday and used my toread+ tool to send myself a couple of links as email reminders!

Extensions or Add-ons for the popular browser Firefox are being added every day. Many of these add-ons add functionality to enhance how you use the browser and are task specific. Some of my favorites include Colorful Tabs, Resizeable Text Area, and add to del.icio.us. These extensions allow me to visual, change, or quickly accomplish things I do on the internet.

I just ran across this add-on called Speed Dial that lets you see thumbnail views of multiple website on one page. Its like a visual bookmarking system, in a way. But if there are website that you go to everyday (or very often) this might be a quick way to see them. Of course, the most efficient method to see if there is new information being added to a website would be to subscribe to the websites’ RSS feed and refer to your RSS aggregator as a one-stop notification. Here’s a short video explaining what a RSS is and how to use it.

When you download Speed Dial to Firefox, a new button is placed on your toolbar and opens your speed dial page. There is also a drop down list that lets you select individual pages or groups and change the Speed Dial options.

Adding websites There are several ways to add websites to your speed dial: you can use the “Set as Speed Dial” option your bookmarks menu, or by right clicking on the website you want to add, or by editing the speed dial options.

Keyboard Shortcuts By pressing the “Control” key and a number you’ll access the website assigned to the Speed Dial entry with the same number in the current window. If you add the “Shift” key it will open in a new tab.

Groups You can set up your thumbnails into groups of websites to further define specific topics of websites.

I keep my UA resources in one group and the blogs and content areas I write to or monitor in another group. I could also see the use of using speed dial when I’m researching a topic and want to review and look back at multiple websites. Sometimes the names of the websites, since they might be similar, get confusing and a visual guide would be very handy.