Firefox 7 is set to be released today, and with a big focus on performance, we thought it time for another round of browser speed test. We pitted the four most popular Windows browsers against each other in a battle of startup times, tab-loading times, JavaScript powers, and memory usage, with some surprising results. More »

We spend a lot of time talking about how to improve our own lives, but how about the lives of our pets? Today we're looking at ten great ways to improve the life of your cat—which has its benefits for you, too. More »

At its most basic, Network attached storage, or NAS, is a great way to share files on your local network. But it's also a perfect solution for backing up your computers, streaming media across your home network, or even torrenting files to a central server. If you have an aging computer lying around, you can turn it into a NAS for for free with the open-source FreeNAS operating system. Here's how. More »

File syncing is a godsend when you work on multiple computers or devices and want to make sure you have the most up-to-date files wherever you log in. While online services like Dropbox may be the most convenient options, there are plenty of reasons you may want to "roll your own cloud" and sync your files to your own web server or just on your local network. Below, we'll detail how to set up a Dropbox clone, complete with instantaneous, encrypted syncs, cloud backups, and file versioning, using cross-platform software GoodSync. More »

Last week we taught you how to make a web site from start to finish, including finding a reliable web host to host your site. Here's the complete guide so you have access to all the lessons in one convenient location. More »

More and more, the fragments of your life exist as particles on a disk mounted inside your computer—disks susceptible to temperature changes, power surges, fire, theft, static, and just plain wear and tear. Hard drives fail. It's a fact of computing life. It's not a matter of whether your computer's disk will stop working; it's a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life—and it won't, if you have a backup copy. More »

You find a lot of interesting articles as you browse the web, but you don't always have time to read them right away. Read-it-later services like Instapaper and Read It Later both help solve that problem, but rather than signing up for yet another service, you can actually turn your Google Reader account into a personalized read-it-later archive. More »

Chances are you've accumulated a few spare thumb drives over the years, choosing new ones thanks to better form factors and increased capacities. But what do you do with the old ones that are just lying around? Here are our top 10 clever, fun, and practical uses for your spare thumb drives. More »

Being a good host in the 21st century isn't what it used to be. Your guests have to deal with Wi-Fi passwords, confusing home theaters, and more. Next time you've got guests, blow them away with your sophisticated, 21st-century hosting skills. More »

Not everyone has the time or inclination to build and maintain a full-fledged web site. If you're just looking for a simple way to unify all your online profiles, these personal landing pages are a perfect fit. More »




Hive Five - FAQs Help and Tutorials - Web Design and Development - Relationships - Personals

Desktop applications have their charm, but most of your information already lives on the web. Ditch those clunky desktop apps for webapps without losing their better features—like notifications, shortcuts, offline access, etc.—and free up precious system resources along the way. More »

Ed. note: We love a good media center almost as much as we love automation, so self-confessed media geek Alex Ward's fully automated media center caught our eye. It's all the benefits of an awesome media center without all the hassle.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to use EventGhost to begin to automate your PC. Now we are going to take things a step forward and use EventGhost alongside a few other free programs to set up an amazing and fully automated Home Theatre PC.

If you have not read my previous EventGhost article I advise you to go and read it now as I am going to skip past the basics here.

Step One: Getting all the applications
To truly get this working properly you are going to need a few programs; they are all free and fairly straightforward to use (but I'm going to show you how anyway), so get to work on the list below and let me know when you have it all downloaded and installed.

XBMC – The excellent free to use media centre application
Torrent Episode Downloader – This does a similar thing to uTorrent's RSS downloader but I personally feel it does a better job and is easier to use.
uTorrent – You can actually use any torrent application provided it has the ability to move files to a separate location when finished.
EventGhost – Of course you already have this as you have hopefully gone through the previous tutorial.
The Renamer – A superb and easily automated tool for finding and renaming your TV shows, it can also be made to work with movies but there is a better tool for that.
Ember Media Manager – Automatically finds and downloads information for your movies.

Step Two:  Getting ready for XBMC
The biggest difficulty a lot of people seem to face when they first set XBMC up is getting the library mode to work; this is because XBMC needs to have a specific file structure in order to scrape (download information about) your media files.

Note: I'm going to work on the assumption that you have a hard drive set up just for your media, if you do not then create a folder on one of your drives and do all this in the root of that folder.

Firstly create the following folders:
TV Shows, Music, Photos, Movies, Unsorted Media

There are some things that XBMC does not scrape all that well or simply things you would like to be able to access in XBMC but don't really want it to be categorised as a TV show or movie, in this instance you should also create a folder for that (E.g., Documentaries, Children's TV shows, etc…)

Prepare your movies
The Movies folder should not directly contain any files; each movie should be in a folder which has the movie's name and year as its title. The movie file itself should be the movie's title, if it is a HD movie then you can also add that information to the file name:

E.g. /Movies/The Shawshank Redemption [1994]/The.Shawshank.Redemption.720p.BluRay.mkv

Setting up your TV Shows folder
The TV Shows folder follows a similar format; each show should have a folder with its name and year as the title and each series of a show should go inside a ‘series x' folder.  The name of each file should be the name of the show followed by the series number and episode number, if you wish you can also add the title of the episode:

E.g.  /TV Shows/Life on Mars [2008]/Series 1/Life on Mars – s01e01 – The Crash.avi

Make sure you format the series and episode numbers using the above example, this method always works for the main scrapers. The year is not essential for movies or TV shows, it just makes it simpler for the scraper to make sure it's downloading the information for the correct title.

Setting up your music folder
The music folder should contain a folder for the artist and then a folder for each album inside it.:

E.g. /Music/Fleetwood Mac/Rumours/

The year should not be needed for albums as it's rare that an artist will use the same album name more than once.

Setting up the other folders
Photos are simple to categorise as they do not get scraped—therefore you can put any pictures you like in there without worrying about file structure.

The unsorted media folder should be empty.

Copying your media
At this stage you are ready to copy your media to the folders. If you have thumbnail or fanart files already you don't need to copy them over (unless you know the scraper will have trouble finding them) as this will be taken care of later.

Step Three: Using Ember Media Manager to pre-scrape your movies

XBMC has a great scraping tool; however it is quite slow and if you re-install your media centre for any reason you will have to re-scrape all your files again from scratch. Ember Media Manager is faster and even better, it downloads all the needed files to the movies folder, so if you do need to reinstall, no re-scrape is required (plus it downloads trailers – which is just awesome).

To set it up, go to ‘edit > settings', click ‘Files and Sources' then ‘add source' and browse to the root of your movies folder. (This can be done during setup as well, so you may not need to do it now). I won't tell you which boxes need ticking as it is all about personal preference really.

Once that's done, return to the main menu and click ‘update library' (although I think this happens automatically the first time anyway). Once your list appears, select ‘Scrape Media > New Movies > Automatic > All items' and watch it find everything for you (Note: If you did not add the year to the folder names then you may get odd results on some movies using ‘automatic', use ‘ask' instead).

If you use the ‘automatic' mode then this should be the last time you ever see this screen as we will automate it in a later step.

Step Four: Using Torrent Episode Downloader (TED) to find and download your TV shows.
Before we start this please make sure you have your torrent program set up to send all completed downloads to your ‘unsorted media' folder. (Note: You can use your existing downloads folder if you wish, just make sure that it's only updated when the download has completed)

TED is a simple Java application which automatically finds your favourite TV shows and starts downloading them. It's fairly simple to set up, but here is a little tutorial anyway.

Once the program is installed, click on ‘add show'. You will then be presented with the ‘Add show' window. Simply select the show you want to download and choose the episode you want to download from (this doesn't work that well for older episodes).  Once this is done, select the episode and click ‘Edit show'.

The default settings are ok for the most part, however, I find that I get better results if I make a few tweaks. Firstly in ‘Feeds' click on ‘+' and add IsoHunt, select ‘yes' when the dialog box pops up and then click on ‘filters', change the top number to 300mb and the maximum size to 1200mb (this means you won't get low quality files and you might get the odd HD one—if you don't want HD, then set the max to about 750mb). Don't bother with ‘download in HD quality' as it's not perfect and usually results in no torrents being found for a lot of shows.

Once you have done that, just rinse and repeat until you've added all the shows you want.

Note: If you do not want TED to automatically open your torrent application (like if you download on a schedule) then you can change the options in Extra > Preferences.

Step Five: Use The Renamer to automatically sort and move your TV shows.
Sadly many files on BitTorrent have not been named with media centres in mind and most scrapers are rubbish unless the file names and folders follow their rules. Thankfully a fantastic application called ‘The Renamer' exists to solve this problem.

This program is very easy to set up and even easier to use. Firstly, click on ‘settings' then change your fetch folder to your ‘unsorted media' folder and the TV shows archive to your ‘TV Shows' folder.

Make sure the following boxes are ticked

s1e01
add "0" for Season (only the first time it appears)
include sub folders
Auto move after renaming,
Showname
Season
Episode titles
To TV Show Folder
To Season folder

And that's it!

Ed. note: If you routinely download subtitles for your television shows or movies, make sure to grab the subtitles before renaming. Subtitles packages are timing-based—down to the millisecond specific!—and one subtitle package for a TV show is not the same as any other package.

Step Six – Tie it all together with EventGhost

Ok, so far we've managed to get a series of systems together to download and catalogue our TV Shows and organise our movies to be imported into XBMC. Now it's time to make it automatic using EventGhost.

Firstly we need to install two plugins to EventGhost. ‘Directory Watcher' and ‘XBMC', you can find these in the ‘Plugins' menu (see the small image to the left). To ensure that your movies are scraped automatically as well, install two copies of ‘Directory Watcher'

Set the first Directory Watcher Plugin to look in your ‘unsorted media' folder and the second to look in your ‘Movies' folder. Then create a new macro called ‘move new shows'

Inside this macro set it to automatically launch the renamer (System > Start Application), in the command line box type ‘–fetch' and set the window options to ‘minimised' (this never seems to work for me but you may have more luck. Then – still inside the same macro – add another action below it, ‘Update Video Library' from the XBMC folder.

Now create a new macro called ‘scrape new movies', set it to open ember media manager and in the command line box enter ‘–newauto  –all' (remember this is only foolproof if you add years to your movie directories). Then – still inside the same macro – add another action below it, ‘Update Video Library' from the XBMC folder.

Finally add an event called ‘DirectoryWatcher.Updated' to the top of the first macro and one called ‘DirectoryWatcher2.Updated' to the top of the second and sav[…]

If your workplace or school's extra-restrictive internet filter has you pulling your hair out during the occasional browsing break, there's hope! Here's a quick look at how to get around heavy-handed browser restrictions with the open-source PHProxy.
Back in January we pointed you toward PHProxy, along with some instructions for setting it up on a web server; fact is, most people don't actually have access to a web server to run something like PHProxy. The solution: Install a local web server on your home computer, then run PHProxy from there. Setting one up is actually a lot easier than you may think.

A quick crash course on proxy servers: Let's say your dastardly workplace blocks you from reading Lifehacker. Many web filters block web sites based on URLs, so if Lifehacker were blocked, the filter would recognize the URL http://lifehacker.com and automatically block any connection. A proxy acts as a go-between for your browser and the web site you want to access, and as far as the web filter can tell, the proxy-employing user isn't visiting Lifehacker—she's visiting whatever the URL is for the proxy. And since we're setting PHProxy on your home computer, chances are slim that the web filter will block your home IP address (or URL, which we'll talk about more below).

When you're done here, you should be able to access restricted sites from anywhere by routing your requests through your home computer. First I'll explain how to install a local web server on your computer (for Windows and then Mac users), then explain how to install and use PHProxy from there, and finally I'll walk you through how to access your newly minted local proxy server easily from any other computer.

Download and Unzip PHProxy
Regardless of your OS of choice, the first step is easy: Head over to SourceForge and download PHProxy, then unzip your download to a folder and name that folder phproxy. Put it in a safe place, and we'll get back to it later.

Install a Local Web Server on Your Windows PC
In order to run PHProxy on your home computer, you'll need to install a local web server. You've got lots of options for doing this, but probably none easier than just downloading and installing WAMP—which stands for Windows (your operating system), Apache (the web server), MySQL (a database, which PHProxy won't actually use), and PHP (the popular programming language, which PHProxy is named for and written in).

Once you've downloaded WAMP, go ahead and run through the installer. It's a pretty basic install, and when you're done, launch the WAMP system tray application. After you do, you'll notice a new icon in your system tray (it's the one that looks like a speedometer). WAMP's running, but it's still not turned on. To put WAMP online, left-click the system tray icon and click Put Online.

Now, to verify that everything's working, left-click the WAMP icon in the system tray again and click Localhost—or just point your browser to http://localhost/. If all's well, your browser should load a page that looks like the one below.

Good work—you now officially have a web server up and running on your PC. You can skip the Mac section and head straight to the section on installing PHProxy to your server.

Install a Local Web Server on Your Mac
Above, Windows users installed a web server bundle called WAMP—in which the 'W' stood for Windows. Mac users, appropriately, have MAMP—Mac, Apache (the web server), MySQL (a database that you won't actually be using), and PHP (a popular web programming language after which PHProxy is named). So go download MAMP (it's a hefty 156MB download) and install it to your Applications folder (make sure you install the free version and not the Pro version).

Now it's time to fire up MAMP. Open the MAMP folder you dragged to your Applications folder, then double-click MAMP.app to launch it. On this first run, click the Preferences button in MAMP, click Ports, and then click the Set to default Apache and MySQL ports button. Hit OK (enter your password to confirm), then point your browser to http://localhost/ (or http://localhost/MAMP/ if you want to see the MAMP landing page). If everything's working as it should you should see a page called "Index of /" at localhost, or the page below if you go to the MAMP URL.

Good work, you're officially running a local web server on your Mac. Now to PHProxy.

Install PHProxy on Your Server
Now we want to install PHProxy on your server. I'm using "install" pretty loosely here; assuming you've already downloaded and unzipped PHProxy to a folder named phproxy, all you really need to do is copy that folder to the root directory of your local web server.

To find your server's root directory on Windows, just click the WAMP system tray icon and click www directory (which, on my Windows 7 installation, is located at C:\wamp\www\. Inside this folder you should see a file called index.php—that's the page that loaded when you pointed your browser to http://localhost/ above. Now simply take the phproxy folder you unzipped PHProxy to above and drag it directly inside the www folder.

Mac users, the MAMP root directory is located inside the MAMP folder at /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/. Likewise, just open that folder and copy the phproxy folder to it.

And... there you have it-you've officially installed PHProxy. To make sure it worked, point your browser to http://localhost/phproxy/. You should see the page below.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

To test it further, all you have to do is type or paste the URL you want to visit into the web address input box and hit Enter. Below you can see me visiting Lifehacker through my PHProxy installation.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

Depending on what your web filter is blocking, you can tweak the way PHProxy works—you can show or block images, allow or reject cookies and scripts, encode the URL you're visiting into a string that's complete gibberish, and more. Handy, huh?

Set Up Port Forwarding and a Friendly URL
At this point PHProxy should be working fine from your home computer, which is all well and good, but now we need to make it easy for you to access your local PHProxy installation from outside your home. To do so, we're going to have to set up port forwarding, then optionally we'll give your PHProxy server a friendly URL.

Set Up Port Forwarding on Your Router: When you try to communicate with your home computer from outside your local network, the request first has to go through your router—which then identifies which computer the request is intended for and sends it on its merry way. When you're running a web server on your home computer, other computers looking to communicate with that server will try communicating with it on port 80 (you don't really need to know what any of that means; web servers generally communicate on port 80, and that's what browsers try to access by default). So when your router receives a request on port 80, you need to tell it that those requests should be forwarded to your local PHProxy server.

Rather than detail the entire process, I'll point you toward our previous guide to accessing a home server behind a router/firewall. All routers are a little different, and that's a general guide, so if you want more specifics, try visiting PortForward.com, selecting your specific router model, and finding the instructions for setting up port forwarding with Apache (the web server).

If you've successfully set up port forwarding, you should now be able to access your home server by visiting your network's external IP address (this is the single address that identifies your home to all the other computers on the internet). Quickly point your browser to What Is My IP and copy the series of numbers following "Your IP Address Is:", paste that into your browser's address box, and hit Enter. If everything went according to plan above, your browser should now load up your local server. Add /phproxy/ to the end of your IP address and you should see the PHProxy homepage. Smooth.

Now that your web server is accessible to the outside world, you don't want to let just anyone access it, so at this point it's a good idea to password protect your server. We've already been down this road before, too, so rather than explain it all here, head to step three in our guide to setting up a personal home web server. (For a little extra help generating the necessary password files, I also like web site Htaccess Tools.)

Set Up a Friendly URL: You could stop at that point, but that series of numbers that makes up your IP address isn't all that friendly, and in fact, if your ISP assigns you a dynamic IP, it could change regularly. Luckily you can assign a friendly domain name to your home proxy server for free using DynDNS.com, a process that we've detailed in the past.

By assigning a domain name to your home server, you can create an easy-to-remember URL like mycrazyproxy.selfip.com, rather than typing in 76.189.XX.XXX every time you want to access your home server.

A Few PHProxy Pointers
PHProxy is an excellent tool, but you should also be aware of the concessions you're making when using it. For example, you should expect your browsing experience to slow down considerably when you're browsing through your home proxy. Remember, your requests are being routed through your home proxy server every step of the way, which puts a rather slow middleman (your home network) between you and the web sites you want to access.

Also, while PHProxy works like a charm for most plain old browsing, it can be tricky when it comes time to log into some web sites. For example, I could log into Twitter without any issues, and I was able to get to the static HTML version of my Gmail account and Facebook, but—though I was able to log in—I had trouble viewing either until I told PHProxy to remove scripts. In fact, I found that removing scripts was a good step whenever I had trouble with sites I wanted to log into.

[…]

E-book readers are popular for reading digital books, but they've got their limitations. If you have a netbook, you already have a powerful and virtually unrestricted portable e-book reader on your hands. You just need to know how to set it up.
(Photo remixed from nDevilTV and austinevan.)

Dedicated e-book readers do have certain things going for them; they're very light weight, have long-lasting batteries, and their digital, e-ink screens are easy-on-the-eyes. A big negative mark against them—in the minds of most geeks at least—is how dreadfully locked down they are. You can't tweak them, modify them, or use them as you see fit. Netbooks, by default of being an unrestricted personal computer capable of running any applications or reading any formats you care to throw at them, suffer from no such shortcoming. The following guide will help you turn your netbook into a comfortable e-book reader that—while it may not be as ultra lightweight and battery-friendly as a Kindle—will be infinitely more flexible.

Physical Tweaks and Tricks

Rotate The Screen: The tiny widescreen format of the netbook is, in the traditional orientation, terrible for reading e-books. It's squatty and doesn't do a very good job displaying large amounts of text at one time. Holding the netbook sideways in your hands like a book is the ideal way to maximize the screen real estate and read it comfortably.

Depending on your graphics chip and drivers, you may be able to rotate the screen orientation without any additional software by simply pressing CTRL+ALT+Left Arrow or CTRL+ALT+Right Arrow. While it's great to have a built-in solution without installing any additional software, it's a less than ideal solution. The built-in screen-rotation trick works great for desktop computers where you might be rotating a widescreen monitor into a portrait position, but it's not so handy on a netbook or laptop where the orientation of the keyboard and trackpad changes with the orientation of the physical screen.

Fortunately a lightweight solution exists. EeeRotate is a tiny application that combines the rotation of your screen and the rotation of the touchpad at the same time using a single shortcut. Once EeeRotate is installed pressing CTRL+ALT+Right Arrow rotates the screen and touchpad 270 degrees and CTRL+ALT+Up Arrow returns it to normal.

EeeRotate is a must have application for setting up your netbook as an e-book reader and we'd advise downloading it before proceeding.

Adjust The Screen Brightness: You should decrease the screen brightness to the lowest setting you can comfortably read it at. Not only will you extend your battery life but you'll decrease the strain on your eyes. One of the strong selling points of stand-alone e-book readers is that their digital ink screens aren't back lit and can be read under the same conditions that you would read a regular book.

If your netbook has the ability to turn off the back light altogether you can try it out. Your experience with no back light can vary wildly though. With my Asus netbook I can read it comfortably in direct sunlight just like I would read a Kindle but anything less than full and direct sunshine makes the back-light-off setting completely useless.

Use a Special Power Saving Mode: Reading a document for an extended period of time on your netbook requires little to not effort on behalf of the computer. You can maximize your netbook's battery life as an e-book reader by setting up a special power saving mode just for the times you're using it as an e-book reader. Just switching it to the maximum power-saving mode won't cut it, putting your netbook in maximum power save usually has featured not conducive to reading like shutting the screen off after short periods of inactivity.

Your netbook may have an advanced power manager installed, but to quickly tweak the power settings in Windows you'll want to open up the Power Options menu. Right click on the battery icon in your system tray or look under Settings -> Power Management. You'll want to tweak your power settings so that the monitor never turns off, the hard disks spin down after 5 minutes—once you load an e-book to read it's in the memory of the computer and you won't likely need to do any heavy hard disk accessing—and set the system to never go into standby mode. With the brightness turned down and the hard disk kept quiet, you should be able to squeeze out quite a bit of reading time.

Setting Up E-Book Software
What e-book software you end up using is entirely a matter of personal preference, and the dealbreaker might be as tiny as what key is closest to your thumb when holding the netbook in a comfortable position and what that key does—turns the page, pages down, etc—in a particular e-book application. With that in mind, we'd urge you give each of the following free applications a test drive to see which one is the most comfortable option for your netbook, how you hold it, and your reading style.

Kindle for PC (Windows, Free):
I'm highlighting the Kindle for PC software first for only one reason. If you want to semi-recreate the experience of having a Kindle without actually buying a dedicated Kindle, you can install Kindle for PC on your netbook. Unless you absolutely want that experience we can see no reason at all to install Kindle for PC. You cannot manage your personal library of e-books and documents with Kindle for PC, so you're essentially importing the experience of having a DRM-locked down Kindle onto your netbook. If you have a lot of e-books already and don't have a relationship with Amazon as your e-book provider, Kindle for PC was a no-go right out of the gate for me.

Calibre (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free):
Calibre is an open-source solution for not just reading e-books and other portable document formats but also organizing them in a meticulous fashion. Calibre isn't just a great option for viewing e-books in a vertical orientation on your netbook; it's a great option for organizing your collection, downloading news to read on your netbook-turned-e-book reader, and even syncing your collection to actual e-book readers if you decide to invest in one later on. Calibre supports nearly every portable document format out there, although less common formats like the CBR comic book container format require conversion—Calibre handles all the conversion in-program.

Mobipocket Reader Desktop (Windows, Free):
Mobipocket Reader has a similar layout to iTunes and gives you a more Kindle-like experience on the Netbook than the actual Kindle for PC software can provide. Where the Kindle for PC software falls flat and Calibre shines with organization, Mobipocket Reader stands out for having all the neat annotation, bookmarking, and interface tweaking aspects you find in the Kindle Reader but brought to Windows without all the DRM-hassle. If you've been pining for a Kindle but find the Kindle for PC experience to be lacking, it's worth checking out Mobipocket Reader for a bells-and-whistles portable reader. If you fall in love with Mobipocket Reader Desktop on your netbook you'll be pleased to know you can get versions for your Blackberry, Windows Mobile phone, Symbian phones, Palm, and several dedicated e-book devices.

You can, of course, use just about any software you want as long as it can run on your OS and works when the orientation of the screen is rotated—good luck with Adobe Reader! We couldn't get most e-books to display correctly once rotated—which is the beauty of using a netbook over a hardware and firmware-locked dedicated e-book reader.

The above tools will get you started with enjoying e-books on your netbook in a more pleasing orientation and format. If you have a favorite reader or tool for making e-book consumption on your netbook comfortable, we'd love to hear about it in the comments.

If you're looking for a way to organize all the information you find and research you do online, and you've had enough with bookmarking, copying and pasting, and cobbled-together techniques not cutting it, Zotero is a comprehensive information manager for Firefox.
Zotero is, at its heart, a citation manager. It was designed to facilitate research and to make organizing and including that research in essays and publications pain free. As such, it's an excellent tool for any scholar, researcher, or student to have in their toolbox. Its utility extends well beyond preparing to write a paper, however, as it allows you to grab nearly anything off the web and insert it into the Zotero system. The following video gives a quick overview of some of Zotero's features:

If the overview video caught your interest, read on and check out some of the other great screencasts to see the individual features in action.

Getting Items in Zotero

You can add items in a myriad of ways to Zotero. From within Firefox, just click the Zotero icon in the address bar, on the status bar, or hit CTRL+ALT+Z to activate Zotero. You can add nearly everything on the web from books—Zotero will add in all the information about the book automatically—to highlighted portions of web pages, to full out saving entire web pages for future reference. Unlike bookmarking a web page, Zotero saves the page just like you would save it to your computer. Thus when you go to reference it later on, even if it has moved or been deleted, you still have the images and text archived. In addition to capturing information from the web, you can supplement your Zotero archive by adding files right from your computer like images, HTML documents, PDFs, and more.

Organizing Your Research

Zotero allows you to organize your research into collections. The collections are highly flexible and an item can belong to multiple collections simultaneously. They use the analogy of the playlist—and it's fitting—you can "mix" your research into as many collections as you need. Your Zotero library is the master collection of all your research, and from that research you can pull citations, clippings, PDFs and so on, and create a collection representing your current area of interest or research like "19th Century Medieval Literary Criticism" or "Potential Markets for Growth". Collections are easily modified and even shared.

Word Processor Compatibility and Citations
Although Zotero was built to facilitate researchers using Firefox and working on the web, the system—through the use of plug-ins—allows you to work in your favorite word processor using Zotero. They've made plug-ins for Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and NeoOffice. If word processor support is a deal breaker for you, make sure to check out their word processor compatibility chart. Check out the Word integration in the video below:

As the video shows, inserting citations and even changing them in-text is easy. You're not just limited to citations in word processors however, you can drag and drop citations right from Zotero into any text box. Zotero comes with a built-in library of common citation formats like AMA, APA, Chicago Style, MLA—over a dozen by default. If that isn't enough you can dip into the style repository and select from hundreds of alternative citations styles. On the rare chance you can't find a citation style—and it would be rare!—you can hop over to the Zotero support forum and put in a request that they add it to the archive.

Syncing Your Research and Files

Nobody wants to lug around a computer or flash drive and risk losing all the research they've done. Zotero has multiple channels for syncing your data to ensure your research is safe. Zotero syncs itself to the servers, if you have it installed on multiple computers you can sync all the instances of Zotero through the Zotero servers, and to further replicate your data you can share it with friends through the Zotero group system so that your joint research is stored across multiple computers.

Zotero is a complex yet easy to manage research tool. Fully intended for academic research, you can use it outside of academia to manage your research on any topic from nearly any source on the web. Our overview here highlights some of the best features of Zotero, but a quick browse through the support section on Zotero's web site will show you even more capabilities and innovative ways people are using Zotero to help wrestle with the enormous amount of information web-based research provides.

If you have experience with Zotero or just have a research tip or trick up your sleeve, let's hear about it in the comments.