I have to say that LifeHacker is one of my very favourite sites to read. They often showcase the coolest things, things that make my life so much easier.

One recent hack, posted about only a couple of days ago, describes the Firefox Split Browser extension. Every now and then I want to be able to see two web pages side by side, without having to open a second browser. This is especially true when I’m blogging, because I tend to use the Blogger form (all of my attempts at finding a better solution ultimately end in failure), but I’m usually blogging about some other web page. Well, you can see the difficulty there, all that switching of tabs and such.

The Split Browser extension lets you go crazy with splitting. Right now, I’ve got two panes open, left and right, but I could go crazy, say, like this:

Imagine what I could do with a huge monitor! I particularly like how flexible this extension is. After installation, when you hover your mouse near an edge of your browser window, you see an arrow, which means you can make a copy of the current page to the right, left, top, or bottom of your current window. And you can keep splitting pages off. Plus, you can size each row, and each column inside each row. Finally, each window has its own little navigation bar, so you can paste in URLs, hit refresh, or even just close the panel.

It’s all very sweet, and I didn’t realize how much I needed this functionality until I read about it on LifeHacker.

I was just reading a post over at Lifehacker that talked about mouse-hacking tips for use with FireFox. I already use some of the hacks, such as the mouse gestures, and I’m eager to try another one, , that automatically copies any selected text to the clipboard. That one should work nicely with the CTRL + ALT + V global key for EverNote.

Anyway, at the end of the post, they asked for feedback on other mouse hacks, FireFox-related or not. Here’s what I sent in:

My tip: I’ve been using a shareware program called KatMouse for several months (found it online, I have no affiliation with it). Anyway, I got it to help me with one particular program (EverNote) because that program’s native scrolling left something to be desired. KatMouse allows me to scroll any window, whether or not it has focus. For example, this email is being written in a small window, sitting on top of my maximized browser. If I want to scroll the text in the browser, without having to lose the focus of this window, KatMouse lets me do that.

An additional benefit, which I didn’t realize when I loaded the program, was that clicking on the scroll button now rotates through my open windows, sort of like Alt-Tab. It’s quite a useful trick when I’m moving between two windows constantly.

I haven’t talked about KatMouse yet to you people, and today seemed to be a good a day as any :)

I’m always looking for new and better ways to post to my blog. I’ve just installed the Performancing extension for FireFox. According to their website, Performancing is

a full featured blog editor that sits right within FireFox…easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

It was a cinch to download and set up. It hooks seamless into my Blogger account, and even shows me the last ten of my posts. Be careful when clicking on those though - they can overwrite whatever you’ve got going on in the editor window. Ooops. Lesson learned.

What I like best about it is that the editor sits at the bottom of my FireFox screen, and is not affected when I change tabs. So, I can flip back and forth between interesting pages, getting links and quotes, without having to lose my train of thought in the blog. This also makes posting links and snippets a lot easier too. This is so much better than keeping my blog post in one window (a la Blogger.com dashboard) and flipping back and forth to source pages.

If you use Blogger, MovableType or Wordpress, and FireFox, I highly recommend this extension. The only thing it’s missing right now is a spell checker! Oh, and a way of saving to draft instead of posting automatically. But the ability to keep my post on top, while looking at various tabs in FireFox more than makes up for these minor deficiencies.

Whoo hoo! Finally! OneNote has great clipping support when you’re working in Internet Explorer, but no support at all for FireFox users. Now, there’s a new extension designed for FireFox, which will allow you to send a clip from FireFox to OneNote. Check out the description at The Office Weblog.