PixieBrix: A artful device that allows you to tailor any web site on your staff
This Chrome extension will increase productiveness by making your staff’s favourite internet apps much more well-suited to their wants. Ready to have your thoughts blown?
Alphavector / Shutterstock
This wacky ol’ World Wide Web of ours has loads of good issues going for it, however customization is not precisely its core power.
For probably the most half, the net is what it’s — a take-it-or-leave-it form of affair. And particularly when your online business leans on a lot of browser-based instruments and companies, as so many corporations do nowadays, that may actually restrict how helpful and environment friendly of an expertise you and your teammates can have.
That’s exactly the issue a startup known as PixieBrix got down to resolve. PixieBrix enables you to take complete management of the net and make it work any manner you need. That means you possibly can simplify frequent web site interfaces to remove distractions and optimize your atmosphere, for one — however much more powerfully, it means you possibly can add parts into web sites and switch any customary website into your individual customized, company-specific workspace.
Sound wild? It is. And we have simply barely scratched the floor of what this factor can do.
A complete new option to work on-line
At its core, PixieBrix is a browser extension that integrates deeply with Chrome and permits you to combine and match quite a lot of “bricks” — or constructing blocks, in a way — to alter the way in which just about any web site appears to be like and works. Each brick performs an motion, something from highlighting parts on a web page to making a prepopulated e mail. Many of the bricks automate duties and/or combine with fashionable enterprise companies, too, resembling Asana, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zapier.
It’s a lofty idea to wrap your head round, and it is best to grasp with concrete examples. So let’s get proper into the enjoyable half and discover a number of the particular methods PixieBrix may give you the results you want — beginning with a number of the service’s premade “blueprints” that make web site customization particularly straightforward:
- Using the service’s “Send to Slack with web page title” blueprint, you possibly can add a easy button onto any web site that allows you to share the positioning’s URL and title immediately into any of your staff’s Slack channels — with none secondary steps or further effort required.
- If your organization makes use of Jira, the “New Jira concern from chosen textual content” blueprint will add a particular command into your browser’s right-click menu for creating a brand new Jira concern from no matter textual content you’ve got chosen in your display — with a dropdown menu that even lets you choose the particular venture and add in further contextual information on the spot, with out ever leaving the positioning you are viewing.
- The “New Trello card” blueprint does the identical fundamental factor however with playing cards in Trello.
Brittany Joiner demonstrates the way to use the “New Trello card from chosen textual content” blueprint.
Those are the PixieBrix equivalents of plug-and-play customizations. Where the service’s actual energy comes into play, although, is whenever you begin digging in and getting your arms soiled with your individual made-from-scratch modifications.
The internet, your manner
Fair warning: This a part of PixieBrix is not for the faint of coronary heart. But for anybody who’s comfy with fundamental low-code tinkering, it is not too terribly technical — and in an organization context, it’d possible be an IT particular person doing the preliminary setup, anyway, after which sharing the outcomes with groups (extra on that in a second).
Once the PixieBrix extension is put in in Chrome, you possibly can entry its management panel by opening Chrome’s developer console — which is most simply achieved through the Ctrl-Shift-I (or ⌘-Shift-i) shortcut. You’ll need to ensure the console is docked on the backside of the display, which you are able to do by clicking the three-dot menu icon in its nook.
Then, you’ll merely discover the PixieBrix part inside that space, and also you’re off to the races.
The most vital piece of the puzzle is the “Add” command on the left aspect of the PixieBrix panel. Click that, and also you’ll discover a listing of parts you possibly can add into no matter web site you’re at present viewing.
JR Raphael/IDG
The PixieBrix “Add” command allowed me so as to add this button (a plain-text button, on this case) proper into the Computerworld web site. (Click picture to enlarge it.)
And that’s the place PixieBrix begins to indicate its true efficiency-enhancing muscle. Let’s take a look at some examples of the types of productivity-minded modifications you possibly can make on, say, LinkedIn:
- You may use PixieBrix’s “Button” possibility so as to add a native-looking button into the highest of each LinkedIn profile that grabs the particular person’s or firm’s title from the web page after which fetches Google search outcomes associated to it — and/and even sends that very same information right into a shared doc or chat channel — as a easy level of reference.
- You may create a native-looking button wherever on LinkedIn that’d extract sure bits of information from the web page after which put it aside all into particular columns of a shared spreadsheet — if, say, you wished to have a easy one-click option to create a group of promising job candidates and cling onto all of the related information from their LinkedIn profiles.
- And you possibly can use the “Sidebar Panel” choice to create a collapsible customized sidebar that exhibits you each information article particular publications have written in regards to the firm or particular person whose profile you’re viewing — as an illustration, each article that’s appeared with their title on computerworld.com.
PixieBrix
This particular sidebar robotically retrieves each article written in regards to the LinkedIn web page’s topic on Computerworld and shows that information in an easy-to-access listing. (Click picture to enlarge it.)
And all of that’s nonetheless simply scratching the floor of what PixieBrix can do. The service is within the midst of including much more capabilities, with an expanded array of interactive parts for areas like that sidebar panel and a recent spherical of funding to help that progress.
A team-based philosophy
The important problem with PixieBrix, as we alluded to a second in the past, is that establishing your individual web-wide customizations isn’t precisely probably the most intuitive course of. I think about myself pretty tech-savvy, and even I felt somewhat overwhelmed attempting to navigate the service’s internet of choices and variables.
But right here’s the vital factor to recollect: In an organization context, each common schmo wouldn’t be stepping into the nitty-gritty of this setup. Instead, it’d be centralized — and somebody from IT would possible do the preliminary configuration after which use PixieBrix’s staff administration dashboard to make sure customizations out there for particular folks or departments.
And that’s one thing PixieBrix makes extremely painless. Once you will have no matter customizations your organization requires all arrange and prepared, it’s actually just some fast clicks on the PixieBrix dashboard to deploy all or any of these profiles to anybody or everybody in your online business.
PixieBrix
PixieBrix makes it straightforward to handle and deploy customizations to people or groups inside a company. (Click picture to enlarge it.)
And that’s the place PixieBrix makes its cash, by the way in which: While the service is free with sure limitations for people and small groups, you must begin paying when you attain a dimension of six customers or extra — $10 per consumer per thirty days for the starter-level Pro plan or $30 per consumer per thirty days for the absolutely featured Business plan.
For the ability to bend the net to your will and make your whole firm’s instruments extra constant and related, which may simply be a worth value paying.