Gorkee

When I was a young and absent-minded college student, I began the process of writing lists on a piece of paper in the hope that the process would help me keep organized. The night before, I would sit down and plan out my entire day, listing everything I needed to do. The lists helped me to stay focused and accomplish my tasks. Basically, I was a nerd.

But a very productive one…

After college, I no longer kept such detailed daily lists (by then I had a girlfriend and there was no need to fill all my waking hours so I wouldn’t have to think about how pathetic my life was) and started to use sticky notes, instead. Since I was always around my computer (sometimes I would even wear the dang thing), it was quite convenient. When things came up that I couldn’t work on right away (perhaps my girlfriend wanted me to clean the toilet or make a beer run), I would write the item down on a sticky note and stick it to my trusty monitor. Then I could deal with the issue when time freed up (which sometimes, was never - my girlfriend likes a clean bathroom, and her beer). It was great fun - like playing with stickers with words on them - but unfortunately, I reached the point where I could no longer see my monitor.

The next revolution arrived when sticky note applications started to come out for the desktop. On Linux I use an application called KNotes and on the Mac, one called Stickies (sounds a little gross, but they’re quite cute). Both work well for me and I still use them daily. However, like their previous counterpart, they also started to take up too much room and make things (like my awesome desktop picture of a starship, where I’m sole commander and chief) disappear. So began the next revolution:

Sticky notes for individual web pages in Firefox!

Researchers, programmers, web developers, authors, construction workers…Listen Up!

How many times have you wanted to put a sticky note on a webpage to remind you to do something later on? For instance, you could put a sticky note on digg.com, ebay.com, yahoo.com, youtube.com or myspace.com so that the next time you visit the page, the note pops up and tells you that you should really be doing something more productive than looking for love. Unlike the paper version, these sticky notes will not fall off, even if you clear your browser cache.

The Internote extension for Firefox lets you put sticky notes on any page you visit, and they will be there when you return to the page. Now that’s love! Since it’s an extension, it won’t work across computers, but it’s still quite useful.

Here’s an example of a sticky note you might want to use:

Once you install the extension, you’ll notice the little yellow icon in the status bar. Can you see it? You can add a bigger icon to the toolbar if you want (I’ve often been told that bigger is better). Clicking once will produce a new sticky note, and right-clicking it will give you the menu so that you can get to the manager and complain about the food.

In the Internote manager, you will see the list of all the sticky notes that you’ve left, and change and/or export them.

This is really quite a useful little extension and it helps me stay focused when I’m visiting particular websites for that day. All those dancing, cavorting figures and useful quizzes and ads telling me I can find out who has a crush on me can be quite distracting, you know. So it’s good to have something keeping me in line! Now if only those notes had a whip…

Download Internote Extension from Mozilla Add-ons