Other Websites

Chivalry Sports

http://www.renstore.com The finest store in the world for meeting all your Renaissance and medieval needs.

Mo Hotta, Mo Betta

http://www.mohotta.com If you like hot sauces, check this out. Temperatures range from Lukewarm to Grim Reaper. They're not kidding about the high end; some of this stuff should be classified "For external use only!"

The Budget Traveller's Guide to Sleeping in Airports

http://www.sleepinginairports.net Probably more for the young and flexible, but a valuable thing to know for that time when you get stranded in an airport overnight by bad weather, bad connections, or bad service. (Why does an image of O'Hare come indelibly to mind as I type this?)

The Teacup

http://seattleteacup.com A great tea shop. I buy all my tea there online.

FreeoldiesThe Abandonware Search Engine

http://www.freeoldies.com Ever feel an urge to try some of the really old computer games from 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago? You can download all kinds of abandonwaregames that were removed from business distribution and abandoned by their authorsat this site. The oldest game is Adventure from 1977, a classic text-based game written when men were men and women were women and cars were cars and the railroads ran on time.

TvTix .com Free TV TicketsPrint Television Tickets Online!

http://www.tvtix.com A clearinghouse of information for getting tickets to tapings of all kinds of TV shows. Be a member of Jay Leno's audience! Watch people get the right question on "Jeopardy!" It's all here.

Finding Other Unusual Websites

You can find still more websites to waste your time by doing a quick search on Google for lists of links: try searching on " strange websites" or "unusual websites" or even "bizarre websites." All three turn up different lists of websites that are guaranteed to leave you thinking, "Boy howdy, there are some people who really need to find a girlfriend and get away from the darned computer occasionally!"

Chapter 5. Bookmarks and History

DO OR DIE:

Bookmarks of all shapes and sizes
Live news feeds
The Bookmarks Manager
Sidebars
HaI made you look!

Given that there are over 8 billion web pages out there, it's important to be able to flag the pages you like so that you can get back to them again. Firefox uses bookmarks (IE and Safari call these "favorites") to save web addresses. It's much easier to find the needle in the haystack a second time when you have a reminder of where it is. This chapter shows you how to find needles in haystacks over and over again.

Creating Bookmarks

As part of the Firefox installation procedure, Firefox gives you the option of copying bookmarks from your previous browser, so it's likely that you'll already have a few bookmarks waiting for you. But assuming for a moment that you chose to start with Firefox or that you didn't import previous bookmarks, the Bookmarks menu looks like the one shown in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1. The Bookmarks menu.

The default Bookmarks menu shows three things: the Bookmark This Page command, the Manage Bookmarks command, and an empty folder for the Bookmarks toolbar. The best way to see how these options work is to add a few bookmarks and experiment with them.

When you have found a web page you want to keep, you can create a bookmark simply by going to Bookmarks Bookmark This Page or by pressing Ctrl+D. The Add Bookmark screen appears, as shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2. The Add Bookmark screen.

Firefox uses the web page title as a proposed name for the bookmark. You can change this to something shorter and/or more memorable if you wish. For now, just click OK and ignore the other option on the screen. Firefox saves the bookmark in the bookmarks list, which is updated immediately to show the new bookmark, as shown in Figure 5-3.

Figure 5-3. The Bookmarks menu with a bookmark added.

FRIDGE

Most web addresses (aka "URLs" or "Uniform Resource Locators") aren't very easy to remember. We all can manage the easy onesflowers.com, alaskaairlines.com, and honda.combut start getting into websites with addresses like http://www.west.net/~ashleigh/currentpotshots.html and you can see why bookmarks are such a good idea. Even if you could remember that exactly, you'd never want to have to type it more than once.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, said that had he known how popular the web was going to be, he might have thought harder about the way in which URLs were designed. URLs are wonderful things for reading by computers, but they're somewhat less convenient for people.

Now, all you have to do to display the web page is to click the bookmark to display the web page again. As a matter of fact, you can right-click the bookmark and select Open in New Window to start a new instance of Firefox and open the bookmark in it. (Clicking Open in New Tab opens the bookmark in a new tab. Tabs are covered in all their glory in Chapter 6, "Harnessing the Power of Tabbed Browsing.")