Day: January 23, 2009

Fireshot FTW

I’ve had the Fireshot screenshot extension installed in Firefox for a long time now, but I mostly used it just to take the occasional shot of some web page or another in my browser and never really investigated its feature set. Holy cow.

Like a lot of screenshot utilities these days, Fireshot will take a screenshot of a webpage, including the portions not visible on the screen. Nothing real special there.

What kicks it up a notch is that Fireshot can take a full screen shot of every open tab! Hell yeah. Yes, I have a series of 27 or so pages I want to take a screen shot of every day. So, open a new Firefox browser, open all those pages, bookmark them as a group, then its just a matter of opening that bookmark and telling Fireshot to please take screenshots of all of them. Gone in 60 seconds.

Why No RSS Feeds for Amazon Wish Lists?

Maybe I’m just out here on the cutting edge and no one else in the universe would find this useful, but I’m always amazed that Amazon doesn’t have RSS/Atom feeds for wishlists. I could subscribe to all of my relatives/friends wish lists in Google Reader and give Amazon yet another opportunity to suck up my hard earned cash.

But, alas, no. I gave up on Amazon Wish Lists awhile ago and was using TheThingsIWant.Com which pretty much sucked except that it had RSS feeds. But now it appears to be down for the count (offline the past few days).

Companies seem to omit services like this because the knock is that the average user has no idea what RSS is, much less why they’d want to use it. Which is true enough, I guess, but there are plenty of Amazon-related sites geared to non-technical users that at the moment are forced to scrap wish list information from Amazon. Why hamper the development of such services by not offering native RSS/Atom feeds?