Tools is a blog series on various tools we use in the office to help us accomplish our task, whether it’s software or hardware.

automagically
ADVERB
informal
(especially in relation to the operation of a computer process) automatically and in a way that seems ingenious, inexplicable, or magical.

Automagically is how we like your LexBlog blogs to perform. To achieve that we use numerous tools and tricks, the one featured this week is a nifty browser extension called Open Multiple URL.

Open Multiple URL enables the users to open up multiple sites simultaneously within the browser by simply pasting in URLs. It also has the ability to extract URLs from a whole bunch of HTML.

Admittedly, the open URLs function works better than URL extraction (got some false positives). In fact, you need to be careful with how many links you try to open at the same time. From my experience, if I open 50 to 60 URLs I will hear my laptop’s fans sounding like the engines of 747 during take off; anything beyond that will slow down my Chrome browser to the point that I begin to have flashback from the days of running Window 95 with 4MB of RAM. But your experience may vary depending on the performance of your computer. Just play with it and find out your machine’s limit.

So how is Open Multiple URL used in LexBlog? We use it when we need to do perform visual inspections on sites, which is becoming much less frequent than it used to be thanks to the wonderful codes written by LexBlog developers. But there are still occasions where it’s quicker to perform visual checks than have the developers write dedicated commands: double checking inactive domains to make sure no mistakes were made, visual checks on feature implementations or improvements that only affect only small number of sites, etcetera.

Here at LexBlog, we are all fans of technology. And as someone who witnessed the era of Betamax, 8tracks, and rotary dial phones I’m glad that manual process is involved not just to manage internal projects and provide external support, but also to ensures our clients’ blogs work Automagically.