radioEARTH - A portal for radio listeners and radio professionals

What's the best browser and configuration? Well, everyone has different requirements but we all share certain needs and from that point of view, I can recommend what I think is the "perfect" setup. What I'm going to describe to you is my browser setup and why I think it works very well.

First, I use Firefox for almost all my prep. It's free, it's tabbed, it's fast, and it has a myriad of add-ons or extensions.

Here's what add-ons are loaded in and why:

AI Roboform toolbar - I've used Roboform for years. There is no better password program and a lot of sites I go to require them. It saves me time and continues to be improved. A free version of Roboform is available but is also limited in how many passwords it will hold for you.

AutoCopy - If you're like me, you copy and paste a lot of text. Some pages I print off in full, but others I just copy text to a general prep document. AutoCopy lets you just highlight the text. Once you do, it's copied. You don't have to press CTRL-C to copy. That little step reducer gives your fingers more rest time and saves time.

ColorfulTabs - One reason I use Firefox is because it's a tabbed browser and that way I can click on a bunch of links as I scan a page and then individually look at each one. ColorfulTabs automatically colors each tab a different color and makes them easy to distinguish.

Converter - You're reading an article that is using metric instead of America units. You don't want to read it to your audience and say it in metric. You either pull out a software converter, or use the radioEARTH toolbar to quickly go to the radioEARTH Converter page. OR, you use this add-on. By right clicking on a page in metric and selecting "convert the entire page" it will magically convert from metric to American or vice versa. What a time saver!

FireShot - Sometimes there's a graph or something that isn't easily copy/pasted and you don't want to print out the whole page just for one thing. Enter FireShot. It takes a screenshot of the page, let's you copy all or part of it, save it, email it, and any number of other things.

ScrapBook - When I'm prepping, I often want to save a page to come back to but don't want to actually bookmark it. By using ScrapBook, I can save the page into a smaller collection and when I'm ready go back and read or print it.

TinyURL Creator - If you have anything to do with maintaining a website, webpage or if you Twitter there are times when you come across a page with a long URL that you want to pass along to your listeners. Twitter automatically will truncate long URLs into a TinyURL except if your Twitter entry including the URL you want to post exceeds the Twitter character count. TinyURL Creator lets you create a small url from whatever page you are on with a couple of mousclicks.

I have found all of these add-ons or extensions extremely useful in daily prepping. If you have a particular Firefox add-on you think should be added to this list, please email me at coreydeitz@gmail.com.

- Corey Deitz