Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am fit as a fiddle and ready to roll.
Thanks for asking.
Actually, I’m not entirely certain that
I am fit as a fiddle because I don’t know
what that term means.
I don’t know what the fiddle’s fitness
level is or how I would compare to that level
of fitness so I’m not entirely certain that
that was accurate.
What I am certain of however is we have a
great show today.
We are going to take a look at 4 browser extensions
that I use each and every day on Ask DottoTech.
You know our web browsing experience will
be far less rich were it not for these browser
extensions which we are about to look at today.
Now it doesn’t matter which web browser
you use.
I’m going to be showing you today in Chrome
but the same premises apply to Firefox, Safari,
to all web browsers.
Within you browser, you can add functionality
through browser extensions and you see mine
here on the upper-right hand side of my browser.
This is a quick pick area where I can quickly
jump in and use any of the different extensions
that I’ve added.
We add those extensions in a couple of different
ways within our web browser.
In Chrome, for example, we go into the Preferences,
go into Extensions there and here you can
either by scrolling down to the bottom you
can add new extensions by searching for more
and you can enable or disable the extensions
that you’ve installed.
Now you can see I have a lot of them.
That’s because I test out a lot of different
browser extensions and a few stay and become
part of my everyday work flow.
That’s what I’m going to share with you
today, the four ones that I know that I use
each and every day and we’re going to start
things out by looking at LastPass.
Now LastPass is my password manager.
Now LastPass is just one of three or four
great password managers you can choose from
and frankly, I don’t care which one you
use.
I care you use a password manager.
It is your first and best most important level
of security, having good robust passwords
for all of your internet browsing.
LastPass manages my passwords very elegantly
and allows me to create good cryptic passwords
that protect my privacy and security when
I’m online.
But the challenge of having great passwords
is how you remember them when you’re going
to log into these services.
That’s what LastPass does when we’ve installed
it here as a browser extension.
It continuously runs in the background, monitoring
our activity and when we visit a website that
requires one of our passwords to be used,
it pops up and says hey Steve, I’ve got
the password for that; want me to let you
in?
Allow me to show you.
Let’s jump over to Google.
I haven’t signed in to Google.
Now I actually have a whole bunch of different
Google accounts which makes it even that much
more confusing but watch how elegantly LastPass
deals with that situation.
I click on Sign In and Google pops up my different
accounts that I can sign in with.
I’m going to choose the account that I want
to sign in with but I don’t know the password.
I can’t remember it frankly.
But if I look here at the right-hand side,
I see the little LastPass icon.
If I click on that, it brings up my different
options for signing into my Google Accounts.
Now I’ve got more than one Google account
because I’ve got demo accounts and I also
have some family member accounts that I go
in and fix things up for them occasionally
when they break things.
So I’ve got a few different log ins here
but the easiest way and the quickest way for
me to now log in is simply clicking on the
account that I want to log in with, the ID
I want to log in with and sign in and LastPass
takes care of populating in the password and
taking care of it for us.
So now I’m in and I can head on over now
to Gmail, take a look and I can work within
this Google Account that I just signed in
with.
LastPass to me is an absolutely essential
tool.
Occasionally, you’re going to want to go
in and you’re going to want to manage your
LastPass account.
You can do that directly just by clicking
here on the icon and that brings you into
the management console to allow you to generate
new password or going in to look at your existing
ones, decide which ones might be stale that
you might want to change.
LastPass will do all of those sorts of things
for you.
It, to me, is an essential tool.
By all means, if LastPass doesn’t float
your boat, use DashLane or use OnePassword
or another of the great password managers
that we have but choose one and use one.
That is my plea to you.
The next tool, I have shown you so many times.
I’m not going to spend too much time on
this today but I can’t talk about browser
extensions without talking about the Evernote
Web Clipper, which is a tool that I probably
use more than any.
When I’m researching information online,
when I’m going through and trying to find
all the different stories and different details
for the videos that I create or for different
social sharing, I’m constantly clipping
and saving information from the internet and
I use the Evernote Web Clipper to allow me
to clip articles and save them to my Evernote
account so that I can use them a little bit
later.
This is my digital assistant.
This is almost my digital brain where all
of the different little bits of facts and
information that I need to store, I collect
using the Evernote Web Clipper.
Now I’ve done plenty videos on that so I’m
not going to spend too much time on the Evernote
Web Clipper other than to say is this one
of the four.
Now if you follow my newsletter or follow
me on social media, you might notice that
I might have a bit of a habit of making typos
and the odd spelling mistake.
It’s something that I quite frankly feel
quite bad about.
It’s a combination of reasons that I have
all of these issues.
One of them is that I’m just a crummy speller
but I’m also always in a rush.
We’re a very small team which is basically
me and another half a person sometimes so
when I send stuff out when I’m in a rush,
it doesn’t get proofread as well as it should.
That does embarrass me a little bit and frankly
some of the letters you sent to me are hurtful.
They’ve affected me in my happy place and
so I’m bound and determined to fix that
and this is the tool that is helping me more
than any.
I’ve used a lot of different online spellcheckers
and grammar checkers but Grammarly keeps bubbling
to the top and they’ve got this new extension
which is really making a difference for me
This Grammarly extension right here basically
monitors all of the different text fields
when I’m on the web typing in and it gives
me corrections.
Now I’ve used other tools that getting to
the corrections isn’t quite as elegant as
it is in Grammarly.
Allow me to show you because it is actually
pretty sweet.
If I just go into a document that I’m working
on and writing, we can see that there are
a variety of different spelling and grammatical
errors in this document.
This is what I like now about how Grammarly
works.
As I roll my cursor over the top of the spelling
errors, I don’t even have to right-click
on it, it pops up suggestions and it does
so very elegantly.
So I can just pop it up and I can see exactly
what it’s suggesting, select the correction
and then move on to the next correction that
I need to have.
Here we have a grammatical correction where
it says we should have a comma.
Now whether or not it’s a thousand percent
accurate as far as its punctuation suggestions,
occasionally you’re going to want to override
it, it does help and it gets you thinking
about the flow of text that you’re in and
it does it constantly.
That constant monitoring I start to rely on.
Now here’s where it’s becoming far more
valuable is when we’re doing quick little
posts into things like Facebook or Twitter.
So here I have a post that I’m preparing
in Facebook.
I’ve made a couple of errors on purpose
but you can see that Grammarly is going through
it.
It gives me actually a summary of the issues
right here but again, it allows me to roll
over the top and quickly make a correction
on both grammar and spelling right within
Grammarly.
Now if we need more correction, Grammarly
also has a web client that does far more than
this kind of quick tertiary checking of your
information but this saves me, increasingly
it’s saving me from embarrassment and just
making my communication seem that much more
professional.
Going into Twitter, we’ve got the exact
same stuff happening here and the exact same
interface.
The Grammarly web plug in is turning out to
be a boon for me.
So at three, we’ve got LastPass, Evernote,
Grammarly and finally I’m increasingly doing
a lot of sharing, especially on Twitter.
My Twitter presence has been growing a lot
over the last little while, mainly because
I’ve been doing so much work on Blab.
But I digress.
Consequently, I’m sharing far more information
than ever before online so I’m having to
short a lot of URLs and links or things that
I’m sharing and of course the standard for
doing that is Bit.ly.
Well Bit.ly has got a browser extension that
you can plug in that allows you to go into
any website.
So let’s just go to the DottoTech site.
Let’s go into our course.
Let’s go into the Slack Made Easy course.
If I wanted to grab this URL and share it
in a shortened form and I was just browsing
to Steve’s site, I can use the Bit.ly tool
here just by clicking on Bit.ly.
It’s very cool.
I’ve configured it so that it automatically
copies this new Bit.ly link to my clipboard
as soon as I click on that.
Now it will save this link here for me to
track the effect of the link a little bit
later and you can actually customize the link.
It gives you access to some of the most common
Bit.ly tools here.
But primarily using this browser extension,
you click on the Bit.ly browser extension.
Now next time you paste, or on your clipboard,
if you watch, you’ll see the Bit.ly version.
Actually, let me do it this way.
I’m going to go into Twitter.
Let’s go back to that post I was creating.
Let’s say I wanted to add a link.
You see now it’s adding the shortened Bit.ly
link to the page instead of the full URL.
This is a gain a tool that just saves me a
lot of time.
I used to go into Bit.ly, launch the website,
go in and create the link.
It was only a couple of clicks but now it’s
a single click and it’s done.
So it saves me over time an awful lot of cycles
and it also makes it more convenient so that
I want to share a little bit more as we’re
going on as well.
So those are my four tools that I use every
day browser extensions: LastPass, Evernote
Web Clipper, Grammarly Spell and Grammar Checking
and finally, Bit.ly link shortening.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
Now remember there are three ways to stay
in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to our channel.
The second is I encourage you to subscribe
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Then you’ll hear about all of our live events
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And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded
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If you want to find out what patronage of
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you to drop by and have a look at our Patreon
page.
Those of you who are my patrons, thank you
so much for your ongoing support.
Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!
