Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Sometimes, when I'm gathering links for a blog or projo topic, I wish I could save all the tabs in one window as html links, with page titles, already formatted as a list. It would save a lot of copying and pasting from tabs to the blog entry or page.

Searching for such a tool the other night, I found it. It's a Firefox extension: Screenshots are at Mozilla, but download the latest versions of CopyAllUrls here. (It works with Firefox 3.)

Here's a sample of links I grabbed with it; obviously, wordy titles will need some trimming:

Poynter Online - Romenesko

Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Editor & Publisher - Newspaper Industry Information - News Media Analysis - Newspaper Business News

Setup: At that page, click the install link: "CopyAllUrls 0.8.1 Download (for MS Windows, Linux and Mac OS X)." If nothing happens, you may see a band across the top of your screen that reads, "Firefox prevented the site (plasser.net) from asking you to install software on this computer." It means you've blocked popups. To allow this download, click the "Allow" button to the right of the band and click the install link again.

After the automatic install, restart Firefox and you'll see CopyAll Urls listed on the Add-ons page off the Tools menu. Select Options to customize it.

Configuration is simple but a little tricky, in part because the choices of how your link displays depend on your knowing the difference between $url and URL, $title and title. (With the $, you get the actual title and url; without it, you get the actual words "title" or "URL".)

Here's how to set it up to get all the titles and html links in a vertical list:

Leave the "sort order" set to "tab order," and just drag the tabs left and right to get the order in which you want the links to display.

If you want to put it into a formatting div that adds, say, bullets, or you want to skip a line between links, you may want to put paragraph tags around each link. Do that here:

Usage: To use the tool, open a new window in Firefox and do your search, opening the results in new tabs. When you're ready to publish, close the links you don't want to save, then type Ctrl-Alt-C (There's a context menu extension as well ; right-click on any page to see it.)

Simply Ctrl-V to paste the formatted list of linked titles into the page. (Beware: Typing Ctrl-Alt-V opened two more copies of each tab in my browser. Fortunately, there's an easy fix: Open the last tab in the original set, right-click and Close Right Tabs.)

Another way to use this: Collect links over time in a separate bookmarks folder. When you're ready, right-click on the folder in your bookmarks listing, select "Open All in Tabs, then use CopyAll Urls to grab all the links, formatted to paste into your blog entry or html page.