TIP: Two Firefox Add-ons Great for Twitter

Many utilities and add-ons are written specifically for Twitter, but there are two Firefox add-ons–not Twitter specific–that I find invaluable as timesavers.

When reading an article online, I often want to select a quote from the article and reference it in Twitter. The standard mode is to copy the quoted text and then go back and copy the URL. A utility made for remedying this situation is QuoteURLText. Highlight the text, but rather than copy, right-click and choose Quote Text. This extension not only copies the highlighted text from the web page but also the URL; when pasted, both appear together. It saves me an extra trip back to the browser each time.

Add to that Firefox’s ability to select multiple non-adjacent words or phrases on a web page using the Control key, you have a very flexible tool for sharing your internet  readings. While I prefer keeping the settings simple, the program does have more extensive options for gathering more info:

Another add-on is gTranslate. When you find a tweet in an unfamiliar language, highlight the text, right-click and choose Translate. A new tab with translated text appears. Even if I am using another program like Twhirl to follow Twitter, it is a quick jump to the browser to bring up Twitter and utilize the right-click capability of gTranslate:

I used to avoid non-English bloggers, but now I am much more willing to broaden my horizons by following these blogs thanks to the ease of using gTranslate.

Both are simple programs, but great timesavers nontheless–definitely worth a look.