Floss weekly and a really cool Firefox feature.


I was just listening to a new podcast called Floss Weekly with a guy named Chris DiBona (who works for google) and long-time radio guy Leo Laporte (who does a whole slew of podcasts including This Week in Tech). Floss stands for free, libre and open source software and the show focuses on topics related to this. I just listened to episode 2 where Leo and Chris interviewed Ben Goodger. Ben Goodger is the chief engineer for Firefox, the wonderful open source browser that everyone should be using. If you are not using Firefox, why not? Get Firefox!
The show is definitely geared toward the more geek minded. If you don’t already know what slashdot is you probably won’t be that interested in this show. However, at the end of the interview Leo asked Ben what his favorite unknown feature of Firefox was. If you are on any web page with a search box, such as the one in the side bar of this blog, you can right -click on the box and on the context menu you will find an item labeled “Add a keyword for this search”. If you select this a dialog will pop-up where you can enter a label and keyword and save it. For example I set a keyword for the search box on this page and called it “sam”. Now if you go to the address bar and type the keyword and search term it will automatically search for that term on the page linked to the keyword. For example if I type “sam drm” it now automatically searches my blog for posts with the term drm. You can do this for any searchable site, like google, yahoo or imdb. If you set “imdb” as a keyword for imdb.com, and then enter “imdb donald sutherland” in the address bar, it will search imdb for Donald Sutherland. Very cool feature.

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