Table of Contents

This browser extension is no longer supported. It was maintained from 2011 to 2016 but not anymore. Sorry.

Tiger

Tiger is a browser extension that lets you tag items (movies, questions, discussions, etc.) on the following sites:^[1]

• Archive.Org
• YouTube
• Yahoo Answers
• forum.WordReference.com
• www.GeoGebra.org/forum
• Stagevu.com
• StackOverflow.com
• *.StackExchange.com^[2]

The tags are stored on your own computer: nobody but you sees them. You don't have to be registered, or loggen in, at those sites to tag items.

The tags are displayed alongside almost every link to the item (e.g., in "Related" blocks, in the site's search pages, etc.) and are thus far superior to your browser's bookmarks.

Tiger grew out of my frustration at not being able to keep track of information on sites that provide a wealth of it.

Installation

Click on your browser's icon to install (or upgrade) the extension:

Firefox 3.5+	Chrome 8+	Opera 10.50+

Firefox users: You have to restart your browser afterwards.

Chrome users: Recent versions of this browser no longer let you install an extension just by clicking it. You'll have to download it to your computer (right-click, "Save Link As..."), and then drag it onto your "Extensions" page (see here).

Microsoft Internet Explorer isn't supported.^[3]

For news, see CHANGELOG.txt or the commit log.

Gallery

Tiger's features, and the way to use it, are best explained by narrating some screenshots.

The bulk of this page was written when Tiger had support for Archive.Org only, which is why this page seems to be centered around that site. But everything that's demonstrated here (with obvious minor modifications) is applicable to all the other sites Tiger supports. NEW: There's now a YouTube section.

Tagging items

When you visit an "item" (e.g., a movie, a forum post, somebody's bookmarks), you'll find a tags bar near the top of the page. You may tag (or untag) this item by clicking on the desired tag(s), and you can freely create as many tags as you wish (using the "New tag:" entry box).

Tagging is a matter of personal taste: how you name your tags and which items deserve a certain tag that's completely up to you. You make the rules.

For example, I tag every movie I watched with the watched tag. But those movies that I liked I also tag with watched, notable. Movies with an old spooky mystery house I tag with mystery house, and those also having a wacky maid that steals the show^[4] I tag under maid.

Needless to say, if you're using Tiger, you'll probably no longer have a reason to use Archive.Org's inferior bookmarking facility. Nevertheless, Tiger doesn't impose itself on you in any way, so you may continue to use Archive.Org however you want.

Search results

When you use Archive.Org's search facility (this happens virtually every time Archive.Org shows you a list of items), or when you view somebody's bookmarks, Tiger displays beneath each item its tags.^[5] This is a major feature of Tiger which greatly enhances your productivity.

As the screenshot demonstrates, I was looking for Sherlock Holmes films, and in the resulting list I instantly see which I've seen already and which have caught my eye before.

Browsing the tagged items

How do you browse all the items you've tagged under, say, sherlock holmes?

One way is to wait till you see this tag (e.g., in search results) an click it. But this isn't very practical.

The easiest way is to bring up Tiger's window. Click the Tiger button you see on the bottom left corner of the screen^[6]. A window showing a menu of the tags will open:

Clicking on a tag leads you to a listing:

You may click the headers to sort the list by that column. For example, if you have a 15 minutes break, you can sort the table by "Run time" to make it easy for you to locate the short films.

Of special mention is the "My rating" column. Its main purpose is to let you see, at a glance, which items you've reviewed and which you haven't. The intention here is to encourage social behavior by pointing out the items you neglected to review.

Contrary to what Archive.Org does, Tiger doesn't show you the "Average rating" number because it's largely useless (as it doesn't use a "smart" formula which takes into account the number of reviewers (a la IMDB's formula)). Instead, Tiger shows you the number of users who bookmarked this item, which is a better indicator for an item's quality.

You can also close Tiger's window by pressing ESC.

Searching within tagged items

If you're looking for a movie you've tagged before, and you know part of the name of this movie, then the quickest method to locate it is to use Tiger's own "Search" tab:

Gems

Gems are colorful stones you may place beside files.

Gems are similar in function to tags. Except they have color instead of textual label.

This is especially useful with radio programs that are composed of numerous episodes (as each episode is a distinct file).

You can place up to 4 gems near each file.

The meaning of the gems is up to you. I, for example, use:

• a blue gem to flag a file I downloaded;
• a green gem to flag a file I listened to;
• a red gem to flag an episode I especially liked;
• a yellow gem to flag some problem with the file (e.g., poor quality, duplicate).

Bonuses

Tiger enhances the pages a bit:

• Estimated run time: When a movie's "run time" is missing (uploaders should fill this data in, but many neglect to do so), Tiger guesses its length based on the size of its file(s)^[7].
• Bookmarkers: You're shown how many users bookmarked this item. You can easily reach the bookmarks of these interested users.

  This may be a way to find like-minded users whose bookmarks pages contain more items similar to the one you're watching.

• Quick links: Links to easily execute a Google/IMDB search on this item's title.

  Many lazy uploaders tell you to look in the IMDB page to see what the movie is about but neglect to provide a link. Now you're one click away!

• See whole thread: When viewing a forum post you're provided with a link that takes you to the root post.
• Greateful Dead posts: Posts from the Greateful Dead forum are highlighted in the "Recent Posts" listings, which makes it easier (for example) to ignore them.

YouTube

Most of the mentioned above is also applicable to YouTube. Here are a few screenshots special to YouTube.

As can be seen above, tags are also displayed beneath their items in all listings (search results, users' pages, front page, etc.).

Here a neat feature is seen: when you hover with your mouse on a thumbnail, a little red box appears in the top-left corner. Hovering on this red box opens up a preview with larger thumbnails (from the beginning, middle, and end of the clip).

This preview feature is a great time-saver: it's your weapon against users who "engineer" their thumbnails to titillate the user. This alone is a reason you might want to use Tiger.

An extra field, "HQ", is shown in Tiger's listing window. It stands for "High Quality." If the clip's resolution is at least 480 scan lines, it's marked with "HQ". If it's at least 720 scan lines, it's marked "HQ++".

Tiger detects links (and thumbnails) to YouTube clips by looking for HTML links containing the word "watch" in their URL and having certain CSS class names. This detection scheme seems to work quite well. You may notice that Tiger fails to detect some advertised clips; that's because they aren't really links to clips; this isn't a bug.

Yahoo Answers

Most of the explained above is also applicable to Yahoo Answers (with obvious adjustments).

A screenshot showing my Tiger window (click to enlarge; the fig leaf is "censorship"):

As you see in this screenshot, I have lots of tags. There's nothing wrong in that (their buttons do consume space on the page, but that's how I like it).

I'll seize this opportunity to give some tips about using a large number of tags:

• You'll have several tags that deal with the same topic. Make them start with the same word. For example, all my Israel-Palestine tags start with "ilpa". All my Judaism tags start with "j". I then type a dot, then the sub-topic. So I end up with ilpa.christians, ilpa.iran, j.interesting etc.
• If I especially like an answer of a certain user, I additionally tag by that user name. These tags I prefix with "user" or "u". E.g. user.affinity.
• Tags that start with "_" are sorted first alphabetically. This can be useful.
• I tag with _watch_ questions I want to keep an eye on in the very near future.
• I tag with ilpa.mine my own answers, if I envision I might want to re-use them.
• Especially good answers (that is, their questions) I tag with ilpa.notable.

You don't need to hunt for the tags with your eyes when you want to click any of them. Instead, hit the "/" key: most browsers would then enter a find-as-you-type mode (you probably want to hit the Home key in advance).

Tiger also enhances Yahoo Answers with two little features:

• On every profile page (expect yours) there's a "Google search this user" link. It's far from functioning perfectly^[8], but it's the only means you have of admiring a user who elects to hide his answers/questions lists. The results on that Google page are, by default, sorted by date and are limited to posts from the last month -- but you can alter this time-span by using the links on the left sidebar.
• Questions with no answers have their "0 answers" highlighted (bright yellow) in listings. This makes it easier to notice them.

StackExchange

You can tag not only questions but search pages and tag pages as well.

Each site on the StackExchange network is a distinct site: tags aren't shared among them.

Tagging in meta sites (e.g., meta.stackoveflow.com) isn't supported, and this to prevent confusion in case the user expects the tags to be shared with the main site (something which is not possible).

How Tiger works

Modern browsers allow websites to store data locally, on the user's computer. This ability is the basis for Tiger. All the taggings and the information about the movies (their title, running time, etc.) is stored on your computer.

One consequence of this everything-is-stored-on-your-computer philosophy is that if, for example, the title of a movie is updated on Archive.Org, or the number of users who bookmarked it changes, or your movie review has finally been processed by Archive.Org, you won't see this data immediately reflected in the listings Tiger shows you. To update the information Tiger knows about a movie, simply visit the movie's page again.

Tiger currently makes use of the not-so-efficient LocalStorage technology because it's the only one available on all (modern) browsers. Subsequent versions of Tiger will likely support WebSQL (Opera, Chrome) and IndexedDB (Firefox).

The Export/Import screens let you interact with Tiger's stored data. It is advised that you export your data once in a while and save it in a file as backup in case for some reason the browser's storage gets wiped out (this hadn't happened to me yet; but this could happen, for example, if you accidentally ask the browser to erase this data.)

Odds and ends

Renaming and deleting tags

You can rename or delete a tag by clicking on it (in the tag bar displayed near the top of the page) with the right mouse button. A dialog will pop up letting you type the new tag name. You may also merge tags.

Alternatively, you can rename/delete/merge tags easily enough using the Export/Import feature: paste the "Export" output into the "Import" screen, but before clicking the "Import" button edit the text: rename, or delete, or merge tags. Make sure to turn on the "Clear database before importing" checkbox.

Importing your bookmarks

If you have gazillions of bookmarks already on Archive.Org, you may use this tool to mass-import them into Tiger.

Archive.Org vs WWW.Archive.Org

In March 2012, Archive.Org started serving its pages from "archive.org" instead of "www.archive.org". The browser thinks this is a different server, so your old tags aren't accessible.

Don't panic: your tags weren't deleted. To migrate your old tags -- if you have any -- back into Tiger, please follow these steps.

Reporting bugs

Stumbled upon a bug? Let me know.

The source code

The source code can be found at https://gitorious.org/tiger.

Etymology

The name "Tiger" is derived from the word "tagger". It's not that I like ferocious animals.

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Troubleshooting

A Firefox (3.5) user has reported that the tags aren't saved when one exists (and restarts) the browser. Some possible causes:

• Make sure that, under Tools / Options / Privacy, you have "Firefox will: Remember history" set. If you configure Firefox to not remember the "history" (a collective term for a whole bunch of things), Tiger too will be affected.
• Perhaps you have some "privacy"-related extension installed that automatically and indiscriminately wipes out the browser's storage when you exit. There are quite a few paranoid extensions of this kind out there. Disable suspicious extension and try using Tiger again.
• Make sure you're not in "Private Browsing" mode.
• You might have other settings in effect that cause Firefox not to keep the history. To see if that's the problem, create a new "user profile". See instructions here or here or here (youtube). The settings for the new profile you create are initially the default, pristine ones. Install the Tiger extension using this profile and see if it works.

Footnotes

1. Technically, Tiger can support any site which is adequately described to it. Tiger currently ships with "descriptions" only for the sites listed above.
2. A few more StackExchange sites are supported: superuser.com, serverfault.com, askubuntu.com, stackapps.com, mathoverflow.net. Note, however, that "meta" sites aren't supported, to prevent confusion.
3. Sorry, but I don't quite have access to Microsoft's operating systems. (Tiger's code is probably compatible with IE 9+ but I won't be the one to pack it into a suitable extension.)
   
   (On the other hand, I may release a Safari 5+ extension if there will be sufficient demand.)
4. Patsy Kelly, of course :)
5. Tiger kicks in right after the text of the page has been completely transfered from the server. An implication of this is that you shouldn't expect to see the tags (or other embellishments) on the page while its text is still being downloaded. But it's really not as bad as it sounds: Tiger kicks in before images are downloaded, so the wait isn't long. A useful visual indication is this: When you see the Tiger button on the screen, you know Tiger has kicked in already.
6. This button can be seen in most of the screenshots on this page.
7. Tiger looks at the "512Kb MPEG4" file(s): every 4.2 MB count as 1 minute. Or at the "h.264" file(s): every 5.9 MB as 1 minute.
8. Have you ever tried "to google" your past answers? Then you already know it's almost mission impossible.