The Netizen's Journal

In the never-ending browser wars, Opera has one amazing feature that none of the other browsers have. Being creatures of habit, we have a handful of favorite websites that we visit on a regular basis. And everybody loves time-saving devices, so Opera built a speed-dial tool into their 9.5 release. In a 3-by-3 grid, you put websites that you are most likely to visit when you open a new window or tab. A screenshot of the website makes it easily identifiable, and the simplicity of the interface make it very easy to use. The end result is a fantastically quicker way to open up your favorite websites.

But my preferred browser, Mozilla Firefox, doesn't have this tool, except in an extension, and we all know how many system resources those Firefox extensions use up. So I built my own implementation of the speed dial tool.

The problem was simple: I wanted a light-weight way to do the same thing as Opera's Speed Dial. My options were also simple: build a light-weight extension for Firefox, or build a website to do the same thing. Since I had neither the knowledge or inclination to build an extension for Firefox, I decided to build a simple-yet-powerful speed dial interface that deployed on a website.

Reinventing the wheel? Nah. Improving it!

With Opera, your speed dial information is stored on the local computer. This means that if you have multiple machines (a workstation and a laptop, for example), then you have to enter the bookmarks once per machine, and any time you make a change, you have to reflect that change in the other machine(s). But with StickLinks, it's all stored in one place, so you only have to enter it once, and then load the pad on the machines on which you want to use it. This also means that you can use your pad on public computers - just load the pad with the name of the pad and password, and voila! you're looking at it.

Also, with Opera's speed dial, you can naturally only take advantage of it with Opera. Another neat feature of StickLinks is that it doesn't matter which browser you prefer, you can still use it.

A few problems

An essential part of StickLinks is the screenshot to make it easy to quickly identify the website. But it's not possible to take screenshots of websites with Javascript, so I had to use a third-party screenshot service. There are two problems with this. If you are on a corporate network, for example, Thumbalizr may not be able to load any internal websites that you want in your pad. And if it can't load it, it can't take a screenshot of it. So internal websites are not as easily identifiable. And for websites that you have to log in to, you won't be able to see the same things in the screenshot as you do when you're logged in. You can't very well tell Thumbalizr to log in before it takes the screenshot, so you're stuck with the screenshot of the public page.

Everybody loves an efficient interface

Even I was pretty pleased with the interface I built. At one point, Google prided themselves on the fact that users spent mere seconds on their website. That meant that their product was doing its job. I wanted StickLinks to be the same way. For that to happen, I had to make it easy to read and easy to use. Feature clutter was one thing I needed to stay away from, as well as visual clutter. It took a lot of trial and error, but I was finally able to come up with a way to include all of the features I wanted, and keep it organized and easy on the eyes. I tested it out by pointing people to the website and seeing if they could figure it out without any instructions. I have yet to hear a report of confusion or difficulty using the website.

Psst psst tell your friends

I think I've built a pretty decent product. I use it all the time, as do a few of my family members - but I'd like to see what other people think. Eventually, I'd like to have other people using it with the same regularity as myself. If you like it, tell your friends - and tell me, too. It's always nice to hear that other people appreciate your work. And if you don't like it, please don't tell your friends - but still tell me. I want to make it better, and I've got a few ideas knocking around, but any suggestions you may have will be greatly appreciated.