Using Ubiquity to "edit" web pages
I commonly take screen-shots of our web applications, and use them here within my blog. Occasionally when I do this, I want to hide or obfuscate certain pieces of information. For example, I may want to share a screenshot of a case from one of our production systems, or I may have some data that I use in my dev system, that isn’t exactly "professional", so I wouldn’t want the outside world seeing it. Or perhaps even a URL that I don’t want to expose. I used to do a bunch of work, and jump through some hoops in order to make everything professional, hide data, etc. But using Ubiquity, its really easy to change the page on the fly – no programming necessary.
For example, lets say that I start with this page:
I then invoke Ubiquity (ctrl-space), and type edit-page
I can now change the text, delete text, add new text, etc.
I can change the "case" to an "incident", change all of the names, change the status, etc.
Once I’m done, I invoke Ubiquity (ctrl-space), and type stop (short for stop-editing-page).
Here’s the result: the exact same page, only edited:
Notice that much of the text has been changed, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.
What I didn’t do was write or change any code, add anything new to the database, write any HTML, etc.
I simply edited the web page like it was a text document.
I think this is also useful for quickly making some text or terminology changes, and allowing your team, customer, boss, etc. to envision these changes, and all without lots of development work.
I love Firefox and all the available extensions, including Ubiquity!
What do you think? Have you found other interesting ideas for using the edit-page capabilities?
