steve dotto here. how the heck are you doingthis 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 thatterm means. i don’t know what the fiddle’s fitness level is or how i would compare tothat level of fitness so i’m not entirely certain that that was accurate. what i amcertain of however is we have a great show
Android TV browser, today. we are going to take a look at 4 browserextensions 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 browserextensions which we are about to look at today. now it doesn’t matter which web browseryou 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 browserextensions and you see mine here on the upper-right hand side of my browser. this is a quick pickarea 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, forexample, we go into the preferences, go into extensions there and here you can either byscrolling down to the bottom you can add new extensions by searching for more and you canenable or disable the extensions that you’ve installed. now you can see i have a lot ofthem. that’s because i test out a lot of different browser extensions and a few stayand become part of my everyday work flow.
that’s what i’m going to share with youtoday, the four ones that i know that i use each and every day and we’re going to startthings out by looking at lastpass. now lastpass is my password manager. now lastpassis 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 andbest most important level of security, having good robust passwords for all of your internetbrowsing. lastpass manages my passwords very elegantly and allows me to create good crypticpasswords that protect my privacy and security when i’m online. but the challenge of havinggreat 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 continuouslyruns in the background, monitoring our activity and when we visit a website that requiresone of our passwords to be used, it pops up and says hey steve, i’ve got the passwordfor 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 wholebunch of different google accounts which makes it even that much more confusing but watchhow elegantly lastpass deals with that situation. i click on sign in and google pops up my differentaccounts that i can sign in with. i’m going to choose the account that i want to signin with but i don’t know the password. i can’t remember it frankly. but if i lookhere at the right-hand side, i see the little
lastpass icon. if i click on that, it bringsup my different options for signing into my google accounts. now i’ve got more thanone google account because i’ve got demo accounts and i also have some family memberaccounts 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 forme to now log in is simply clicking on the account that i want to log in with, the idi want to log in with and sign in and lastpass takes care of populating in the password andtaking care of it for us. so now i’m in and i can head on over now to gmail, takea look and i can work within this google account that i just signed in with. lastpass to meis an absolutely essential tool.
occasionally, you’re going to want to goin and you’re going to want to manage your lastpass account. you can do that directlyjust by clicking here on the icon and that brings you into the management console toallow you to generate new password or going in to look at your existing ones, decide whichones might be stale that you might want to change. lastpass will do all of those sortsof things for you. it, to me, is an essential tool. by all means, if lastpass doesn’tfloat your boat, use dashlane or use onepassword or another of the great password managersthat 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 onthis today but i can’t talk about browser
extensions without talking about the evernoteweb clipper, which is a tool that i probably use more than any. when i’m researchinginformation online, when i’m going through and trying to find all the different storiesand 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 webclipper to allow me to clip articles and save them to my evernote account so that i canuse them a little bit later. this is my digital assistant. this is almost my digital brainwhere 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’mnot going to spend too much time on the evernote
web clipper other than to say is this oneof the four. now if you follow my newsletter or followme on social media, you might notice that i might have a bit of a habit of making typosand 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’mjust a crummy speller but i’m also always in a rush. we’re a very small team whichis basically me and another half a person sometimes so when i send stuff out when i’min a rush, it doesn’t get proofread as well as it should. that does embarrass me a littlebit and frankly some of the letters you sent to me are hurtful. they’ve affected me inmy happy place and so i’m bound and determined
to fix that and this is the tool that is helpingme more than any. i’ve used a lot of different online spellcheckers and grammar checkersbut grammarly keeps bubbling to the top and they’ve got this new extension which isreally making a difference for me this grammarly extension right here basicallymonitors all of the different text fields when i’m on the web typing in and it givesme corrections. now i’ve used other tools that getting to the corrections isn’t quiteas elegant as it is in grammarly. allow me to show you because it is actually prettysweet. if i just go into a document that i’m working on and writing, we can see that thereare a variety of different spelling and grammatical errors in this document. this is what i likenow 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 veryelegantly. so i can just pop it up and i can see exactly what it’s suggesting, selectthe 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 whetheror not it’s a thousand percent accurate as far as its punctuation suggestions, occasionallyyou’re going to want to override it, it does help and it gets you thinking about theflow of text that you’re in and it does it constantly. that constant monitoring istart to rely on. now here’s where it’s becoming far more valuable is when we’redoing quick little posts into things like
facebook or twitter. so here i have a postthat i’m preparing in facebook. i’ve made a couple of errors on purpose but you cansee that grammarly is going through it. it gives me actually a summary of the issuesright here but again, it allows me to roll over the top and quickly make a correctionon 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 tertiarychecking of your information but this saves me, increasingly it’s saving me from embarrassmentand 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 grammarlyweb 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 doinga lot of sharing, especially on twitter. my twitter presence has been growing a lot overthe 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 toshort a lot of urls and links or things that i’m sharing and of course the standard fordoing that is bit.ly. well bit.ly has got a browser extension that you can plug in thatallows you to go into any website. so let’s just go to the dottotech site. let’s gointo our course. let’s go into the slack made easy course. if i wanted to grab thisurl and share it in a shortened form and i
was just browsing to steve’s site, i canuse the bit.ly tool here just by clicking on bit.ly. it’s very cool. i’ve configuredit so that it automatically copies this new bit.ly link to my clipboard as soon as i clickon that. now it will save this link here for me to track the effect of the link a littlebit later and you can actually customize the link. it gives you access to some of the mostcommon bit.ly tools here. but primarily using this browser extension, you click on the bit.lybrowser extension. now next time you paste, or on your clipboard, if you watch, you’llsee the bit.ly version. actually, let me do it this way. i’m goingto go into twitter. let’s go back to that post i was creating. let’s say i wantedto add a link. you see now it’s adding the
shortened bit.ly link to the page insteadof the full url. this is a gain a tool that just saves me a lot of time. i used to gointo bit.ly, launch the website, go in and create the link. it was only a couple of clicksbut now it’s a single click and it’s done. so it saves me over time an awful lot of cyclesand it also makes it more convenient so that i want to share a little bit more as we’regoing on as well. so those are my four tools that i use everyday browser extensions: lastpass, evernote web clipper, grammarly spell and grammar checkingand finally, bit.ly link shortening. i hope you found this video today to be useful. nowremember there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on dottotech. the first is pleasesubscribe to our channel. the second is i
encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter.then you’ll hear about all of our live events like our live blabs, our live webinars andtrainings that we have coming out. and finally, dottotech is a community-funded site supportedby you through our crowd-funding site, patreon.
if you want to find out what patronage ofdottotech entails and the perks that come back to you, which are indeed awesome, i encourageyou to drop by and have a look at our patreon page. those of you who are my patrons, thankyou so much for your ongoing support. until next time, i am steve dotto. have fun stormingthe castle!
