… that I couldn’t function without in my fannish life.
I recently did a huge clean out of all the extensions I’ve added to Chrome over the years, and only kept those I rely on a lot. Many of these I wish I’d found sooner, so I thought I’d share. I’ll assume everyone has an ad blocker and Tumblr Savior, and instead talk about ones that may be less well known.
Extensions for tab hoarders
There are lots of tab management extensions for people like me who have 1000 tabs open that I’m really going to read/watch/do any day now I swear.
My preferred solutions are not for proactively keeping tidy and organised, they are for occasionally trying to rein in the chaos because I can’t see what any of the tabs are any more.
There are lots of these, but this one works best for me: it’s easy to view all your tabs, sort tabs, rearrange tabs into windows, search tabs, close tabs, etc, especially as you can select multiple tabs to move.
But, you really get to power up your tab management when you add…
Tab Organizer already has most of this extension’s features, but for me it has one killer feature: Extract this domain. With one click, pull all the tabs from one domain (AO3, I’m looking at you) into their own window.
Unfortunately, Tab Sorter treats Tumblr and DW subdomains as separate domains, so for instance me.tumblr and you.tumblr won’t get extracted together. However, it works for enough sites that it’s easier to deal with the rest of the mess via Tab Organizer.
(You can do the same thing for Tumblr and Dreamwidth in Tab Organizer by searching, selecting all, and then choosing Move to New Window, but this does all that in one click.)
If you’re a tab hoarder, you also probably have a slow Chrome. Something like this helps a lot to keep Chrome from grinding to a halt. What I like about the Great Suspender is that all my tabs are still there, exactly where I left them, and I can reload them all at once if I want. It’s the least effort and the least intrusive of the options I tried.
Extensions which help with RSI
I’ve been fighting bad RSI for years, and it has been incredibly shit for the past year. Among the many, many adaptations I’ve made, these extensions are some of the most valuable, because a lot of my computer time is on the web.
There are tons of extensions that do these things in various shapes and forms. If these don’t work for you, there may well be a similar one that will.
So, what do you do on Tumblr? Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Also, AO3 and news sites: scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Or, page down, page down, page down. It’s pretty repetitive, and for RSI I find these sites the worst.
There are lots of extensions out there which will let you stop and start scrolling automatically. I like Simple Auto Scroll because it has three configurable speeds that you toggle through, so you can speed up until you’re at the right speed. The downside is you have to toggle through all the speeds to get the speed you want, or to slow down, but if you assign a keyboard shortcut to this extension, it becomes pretty painless. My speeds are configured for “dense article”, “AO3″ and “Tumblr”.
This is serious business stuff. Vimium lets you ditch the mouse and use the web almost entirely from your keyboard. You can move through your tabs, click links, open bookmarks, all of that, plus one of my unexpected favourites: scroll a half page up or down. It’s got comprehensive functionality and has a lot of configuration options, so there’s a learning curve, but if you want to go easier on your wrists, or if you just feel quicker on the keyboard, it’s worth the time to get used to it.
Most importantly for me, I now often use dictation to control my computer. Vimium is a tool that cracks open the mouse-centric web and makes it possible for dictation software to get in there and do stuff at my command. It’s like a superpower!
Because getting off the damn computer is a good solution when you’ve got RSI, I’ve tried a lot (””) of different ways to get stories from AO3 onto my Kindle. This one ended up being the best for me. It’s quick and direct, and if you choose Preview & Send, you can edit the title and author to include the info you want visible in your Kindle library (fandom, pairing, etc). It’s not perfect, but I just haven’t found a perfect solution for this task. This one has the least steps for a good enough result.
Now, I just need the Kindle to have the equivalent of tab management tools, sigh.
326 Miles 