Make Screencast Videos In Firefox with Capture Fox

Capture Fox is a nice little add-on that turns your Firefox browser into a one-click screen video recorder. The extension is available for Windows XP as well Vista.

Capture Fox can record all your activity inside a Firefox window or even the entire desktop screen and will save it as a video file. The program can also capture audio from your microphone.

After installing Capture Fox, you’ll find a button in the Firefox status bar that serves both as the Start and Stop button. And while the recording session is on, you can check the duration of the screencast from the status bar itself.

While this is no replacement of Camtasia or other standalone screen recorders, it is still a good option for recording quick videos of your Firefox screen without firing an external program.

Create a Web Page with your Contact Information

Schmap is like your virtual business card – key in your contact address, website URL, phone number, email or any other details that you want to reveal in public and it creates a personal web page for you with all this information.

You can ever grab a personal URL for your contact page and it looks the same on desktop browsers as well as mobile phones.

Schmap uses Google Maps to display the location. If privacy is a concern, just enter your city or country in the address field or you may even leave any of the fields blank.

To get your contact page, visit schmap.me.

The service doesn’t require any registration but if you need a provision to edit your contact details later, they provide a secret URL for that as well.

Did Google Toolbar Break your Firefox Address Bar Search?

When you type something in the Firefox address bar, it automatically performs a Google search if the phrase you typed doesn’t match a web domain. The situation is slightly different with OpenDNS but can be reverted with a simple hack.

Now, for some unknown reason, the default search function of the Firefox address bar broke after installing the Google Toolbar (version 5.0).

The searches from Firefox address bar were getting redirected to some server at linkhelp.clients.google.com and then to opendns.com.

Not sure whey Google changed the defaults but here’s a a simple fix for the above problem:

1. Type about:config and click ‘I Promise’.

2. Type keyword.URL in the Filter field and change the values as shown below:

* Before: about:neterror?e=query&u=
* After: http://www.google.com/search?q=

How to Make a Site Map with WriteMaps

WriteMaps is a web based tool that you helps you quickly draw a conceptual diagram of your website.

You may also use the tool to plan the layout of an upcoming site or for generating the sitemap of an existing website as in this example.

The tool has a very intuitive interface and the favorite feature is that you can share sitemaps online (each sitemap gets a unique URL) or you edit them with co-workers.

Now unlike your WordPress plugins that create sitemaps exclusively for search engines, the sitemap written inside Writemap is fit both for human and search engine consumption.

The downside is that this tool may not be fit for large websites as you have to create pages (nodes) manually.