How-to: Internet Explorer 7.0 menu

For those of you who now have Internet Explorer 7.0 (intentionally or otherwise), here is a tip to place the menu bar at the top of the window instead of under the browser controls (back/forward buttons & address).

I came across these instructions from Shauna Hensala & Betty Besson in the ITD/MIS Newsletter from the State of Wyoming MIS Support Center. I found similar instructions from Chris Hanscom on his blog, Unhandled Perception. Take your pick.

1. Close IE.
2. Open Notepad, copy and paste the following:
   
   
   Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser\]
   "ITBar7Position"=dword:00000001


3. Save the file as toolbar.reg.
4. Double click the file to merge it into the registry.
5. Open IE. The menu bar should be at the top of the window.

Note: If the menu bar is completely missing, right click on any of the toolbars, unlock the toolbars, and check the menu bar to make it appear.

How-to: Blog & RSS Feed Update

It's been a year since our first "official" post introducing the Law Library Letter. Looking back on the How-to on blogs and RSS, I decided an update was in order. It's obvious that the technology gods have ignored our pleas for slower change.

The concept of blogs has not changed much from a year ago. For a short reminder, a blog (shortened from weblog or web log) is a web site in which entries are posted and displayed in reverse chronological order. While many blogs have been created as online diaries or journals, there are also now millions of blogs provided in order to bring attention to updated information or to allow groups of people to discuss topics of common interest.

What has changed are the options for subscribing to RSS feeds, whether they are for a specific web site, blog, wiki, image service (the list goes on...). RSS, as I described in the one-year old post,

"stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. But unless you are a major techie, this means nothing. A more useful explanation is that through this technology, you can track a wide variety of online information, from Dilbert, to the very popular Wyoming State Law Library blog, to CNN. And you can do this without wading through relentless email messages or trying to remember to frequently check your favorite web sites. The information comes in as linked headlines accompanied by brief summaries or the first few lines of the information."

In addition to subscribing to a feed using an aggregator like Bloglines, you can now use your browser to view & track feeds. If you are using Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2, subscribing to RSS feeds is as simple as clicking a button in the browser. (You might be able to use more than these browsers, but I am limiting to these as two of the most popular as well as the browsers with which I have experience.)

Firefox adds an orange RSS icon to in the address bar to indicate if a site has an RSS feed associated with it. Make sure you set the feed options (Tools>Options>Feeds) for Live Bookmarks, Bloglines, Google Reader, etc. Then you can click on that icon to subscribe to whatever feed shows up in the Firefox address bar.

To learn more about the IE7 RSS subscription option, check out the Microsoft Team RSS Blog.

Shrink to Fit for Webpages, or How to Avoid the Right Margin Cutoff

The Wisconsin State Law Library sends out a monthly online newsletter with some great techie tips (in addition to lots of other good--but mostly Wisconsin-related--legal research information). Heidi Yelk wrote a particularly helpful tip for their April 2006 newsletter (http://wsll.state.wi.us/newsletter/0604.html) and has kindly given me permmission to re-post it for you all.

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Tech Tip in Brief -- Heidi Yelk
Shrink to Fit for Webpages, or How to Avoid the Right Margin Cutoff

Q: Printing from webpages should be easy, but lately I’ve been struggling with a problem I call, for lack of a better term, the right margin cutoff. This occurs when the page I am viewing looks normal on the screen, but when I print it, the last few characters of each line are missing, leaving incomplete words and phrases all the way down the right side of the page. Wasted paper and frustration ensue, usually in proportion to the size of the document. What can be done?

A: The most obvious solution is to comb the webpage for a “printer friendly” or “print this page” link. Many news outlets offer this option. It formats the text to fit an 8 1/2 x 11 page while also stripping away the banner ads and other unrelated content. But not all webpages have this feature.

Your next option might be to copy and paste the text from the webpage into a word processing program. And yet another option is to change the page setup to print using landscape, rather than portrait, orientation. But these last two solutions are really just workarounds that leave something to be desired.

There is something easier: “Shrink to Fit” for webpages. Several “alternative” web browsers, including Firefox and Netscape, currently offer this feature. As the name implies, text on webpages is scaled to fit the 8 1/2 x 11 page, completely eliminating the right margin cutoff. By accessing the “print preview” option in Firefox, users can easily control printing options and ensure that no text will be cut off the page.

This is an easy solution to a pesky problem, but it’s not yet available to the vast majority who use Internet Explorer. The good news is that the next version of IE (IE7) is currently in beta testing for Windows XP systems, and it will include Shrink to Fit printing as well as many other changes, presumably spurred by the success of Firefox.

How-to: Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts can save time and help prevent repetitive strain injuries. Here are some shortcuts for commonly-used browser and system functions. These shortcuts are based mainly on the Windows operating system, but I have included some notes for Mac users as well. There are many more shortcuts to available, including shortcuts specific to other operating systems (i.e., Linux) and browsers (i.e., Opera). For more shortcuts, run a Google search for “keyboard shortcuts”.

Notes for Mac OS X users:

• Mac OS X uses Cmd instead of Ctrl; Option instead of Alt; Return instead of Enter.
  
• The function keys (F1 through F12) are usually only applicable to Windows, since Mac OS X reserves these for other functions.

Browsing

	Internet Explorer	Firefox
Go Back to the last page	ALT + <--	ALT + <--
Go Forward to the next page	ALT + -->	ALT + -->
Stop the page from loading	Escape (Esc)	Escape (Esc)
Stop background sounds	Escape (Esc)	Escape (Esc)
Refresh/Reload the page	F5 or Ctrl + F5	F5 or Ctrl + F5
Go to your Homepage	Alt + Home	Alt + Home
Scroll down	Spacebar	Spacebar
Scroll up	Shift + Spacebar	Shift + Spacebar
New window	Ctrl + N	Ctrl + N
Close the window	Alt + F4	Alt + F4
Right click (context menu)	Shift + F10	Shift + F10
Increase the text size	Ctrl + +	Ctrl + +
Decrease the text size	Ctrl + -	Ctrl + -
Find on this page	Ctrl + F	Ctrl + F
Print	Ctrl + P	Ctrl + P
New tab		Ctrl + T
Next tab		Ctrl + Tab or Ctrl + PageDown
Previous Tab		Ctrl + Shift + Tab or Ctrl + PageUp
Close tab		Ctrl + F4

Windows: System and Programs

Open Start menu	WindowsKey* or Ctrl + ESC
Open Windows Explorer	WindowsKey + E
Switch between open programs	Alt + Tab
Delete item permanently (without placing it in the Recycle Bin)	Shift + Delete
Minimize all open windows	WindowsKey + M
Maximize all open windows	WindowsKey + Shift + M
Close window/program	Alt + F4
Open a menu	ALT + underlined letter in menu
Open File	Ctrl + O
Help	F1
Select all the items in the current window	Ctrl + A
Find & replace menu	F5
Copy	Ctrl + C
Cut	Ctrl + X
Paste	Ctrl + V
Bold	Ctrl + B
Underline	Ctrl + U
Italic	Ctrl + I
Redo the last action	Ctrl Y
Undo the last action	Ctrl Z

*WindowsKey =

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q126449
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/08/527702.aspx
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard