But first, why would someone want to create a shortcut to a website on their desktop? To open that site in the web browser of course. It does not really matter if it is a link to Facebook, eBay or your favorite tech news site. You can basically create a shortcut to any website on the Internet.

The easiest way to create a shortcut to a web page is the following: Open the website in the web browser of choice, locate the favicon in the address bar and drag and drop that icon to the computer desktop.

Once you let go of the icon on the desktop, you will see that a shortcut has been created. A click on the icon opens the website in the default web browser. That’s actually only true if Firefox, Chrome or Opera have been used to drag and drop the icon to the desktop to create the shortcut. Users who do that in Internet Explorer will notice that the shortcuts will always open Microsoft’s web browser regardless whether it is the default system browser or not.

That’s where the handy portable software HTMtied may be used. The program basically allows a user to convert any Internet address or multiple addresses into small web shortcuts. These always open in the default browser on double-click but can also be dragged and dropped into a browser to be loaded.

It is probably easier to create the website shortcuts directly in another web browser that saves them in the universal format though.

Visit a website that displays a flash game on its website. Right-click a free area of that page and select View Page Source from the right-click menu. You could alternatively click on View > Page Source in Firefox. Internet Explorer uses right-click and select View Source while Opera users right-click and select Source.

Search that source for a url that ends with the swf file extension (search for the term .swf). This is the location of the flash game on the server. Copy that address and paste it into the browser window again. The flash game should load just fine. Go to File > Save Page As in Firefox and the flash game should be saved on your hard drive.

Drop the file into your favorite browser to play the game. To make it easier you could assign a software to swf files which would have the result that you only need to double-click the flash games to start them. To do that right-click the file and select properties from the menu.

Now click on the change button and select your main browser as the program to open swf files with. I have created a small video that explains the whole process.

Now seriously. Have you ever received a document (a clean one) with an extension you never heard of and didn’t even know what application you were supposed to use to open it? That’s not a problem any more due to applications and online services that can understand varied file formats and display the contents of those files for you. Of course, you can’t edit such files with viewers because their only purpose is to display the contents of the document. But hey, better that nothing, ain’t it…

Let me introduce 2 ways of viewing contents of a document with an unknown extension:

1) Install a single program to rule all the document extensions you can ever happen to meet (alright, maybe not absolutely all of them but pretty much most of the common ones). I’ve tried a freeware tool called TextMaker Viewer and it does it’s job well. It’s a simple document viewer without useless functions but it has everything needed to fulfil it’s purpose. It supports 10 of the most common file formats which should be quite enough for average use. According to the coders, Linux version is under development.

2) Don’t install anything while keeping the possibility to view common file types through your browser. Zoho Viewer is an online service that does just that. You can either choose a file from your local computer to be displayed or enter URL of an online document you’d like to read. You can even print the document or obtain a code allowing you to embed it somewhere else on the web. No annoying ads, clean interface, 15 file types supported.

The advantage of the second method is that you do not have to execute the file to view its contents.

If you do that regularly this becomes a tedious time consuming process. I like to automate stuff like that. Autofill Forms is a Firefox extension that lets you fill out web forms with the click of the mouse / pressing a keyboard shortcut. It is possible to create profiles in case that you are using more than one identity on the Internet or use the extension for work and spare time.

You can fill out a lot of variables like name, username, street, city, phone and several others with the option to add new ones to that list or edit existing fields. This is important because the extension uses possible form field names to identify forms on the website.

By default it assigns the birthday to forms that have the name byear, birthyear, birth-year or dob-year. It would be possible to add ‘date of birth’ to that list and every other phrase that comes to your mind.

It is possible to set rule priorities and add site specific rules. Profiles can be exported which is excellent if you work with different computers. The default keyboard shortcut for filling out a form is ALT + J.

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Autofill Forms

• perform a search, for e.g. mp3 at mybloop
• right-click a result and copy the link
• paste the link into your address bar

• change ?id= to /view/
• a save to box should appear and you can save the file to your hard disk.

You only have to make sure that no other player plays the mp3 files directly in your browser. For Firefox you select Tools >> Options >> Downloads >> View & Edit Actions. Change the Action from e.g. mp3 files to “save them on my computer”.