FAQ

Trailfire is an easy way to organize and share things you find on the web. Mark a page that interests you by clicking a button in the toolbar then mark another page by clicking the same button again. Trailfire stitches them together to form a “trail” of marked pages. Leaving comments in the “marks” adds your ideas to each page along the trail. Without doing anything else we put your trails on our discovery site and make them searchable from Google. If you'd rather keep them private you can do that too.

Use the sidebar to guide you while browsing, it will constantly suggest pages related to the one you are looking at. Or search Trailfire from the sidebar and find what others have marked. Then mark what you've found. Show your friends what’s hot on the web. Extend the narrative of your blog to other web pages. Collect your research and notes. Compare prices and coordinate buying decisions. It's all about creating your own slice of the web and sharing it with others.

Whenever you find something interesting on the web, you place a "mark" on the page. A mark lets you add comments or content anywhere on a web page. As you mark more pages under the same name they get linked together into trails. That's all you need to do to get your trails published to the Web for anyone to find through the search engines like Google. But you can also send them to someone in an email or grab the URL to a trail and post it in a blog. Anyone can follow the trails you have laid down.

Trails are all over the web and right there in your browser:

• On Google. Google and the other search engines know about every trail created. As you search on Google look the trails to show up, it means someone is willing to share the fruits of their research with you.
• In the Guide. Once you have the Trailfire sidebar we will constantly suggest related pages to the one you are looking at. It is like having other users help you do your research wherever you browse.
• On blogs and Digg. More and more bloggers and Diggers are leaving links to trails.
• On Trailfire.com. The Trailfire site is actually a sophisticated discovery engine. Go there to find out what is new and hot on any subject.
• Just by browsing around. With the Trailfire extension installed you'll discover other people’s marks all over the Web. You'll be able to see what people really think about any page.

No. Anyone can view our trails without signing up or installing our software. Just follow the trail link and you'll see the marked page.

Yes. You'll want to join so we can automatically store your trails.

Once you've joined Trailfire, you can get the software from our download page. The registration process will prompt you to download.

You can view and create trails in both IE (Version 6 or later) and Firefox (Version 1.5 or later) on a PC, Mac, or Linux machine.

Yes. Sign up, download, and make as many trails as you like.

Please give us any feedback or bug reports at our feedback page. Your input is greatly appreciated.

A mark is like a sticky note you put on a web page. In the mark you can leave a comment in the form of text, links, or even multimedia. Marking a page leaves the mark but it also keeps track of the pages you mark back on the

When you install our software in IE or Firefox, you'll see some new buttons added to the toolbar, just below the menu bar. Click the mark button and a mark will be added to the page you are looking at, ready for you to edit. Add whatever you want and click save. You can also resize the mark and drag it to wherever you like on the page.

Text, links, images and some formatting information-its all there in the WYSIWYG mark editor. You can even embed audio, video, and Flash animations by clicking "source" on the mark editor and entering HTML tags directly or by copying from sites like YouTube.

At the top of the mark click the Edit button then click Save when you are done. To delete one of your marks click the Action menu and at the top of the mark and choose "Delete mark".

On the mark, click the Email button and enter the email address or Trailfire username of a friend or you can choose to open your own email program and send the link from there.

A trail is a collection of marked paged. You can follow a trail to see each page with the marks attached. Another way to look at a trail is on its summary page. This is a page on Trailfire that shows a condensed list of all the marks in a trail. To go to the trail summary click the trail name in any mark.

Click the arrow buttons to go to the next or previous mark in the trail. Click the trail name to see the whole trail in a summary page on our site.

Create two marks with the same trail name, and they'll automatically be linked together.

Create a new mark and give it the name of an existing trail, and it will automatically be added to the end of the trail.

Yes, you can reorder the marks within a trail from the Trail Summary page. Get there by clicking the trail name in one of your marks or right-clicking the mark in the sidebar. Once you get to the Trail Summary page simply click the up/down arrows to move the mark towards the start or end of the trail.

Yes. Go to the Trail Summary page by clicking on the trail name in a mark then change the name of the trail or edit any of the other properties.

You can use tags to organize your trails or find trails that others have marked. Tags are like categories that you define. When you are marking pages go to the mark’s Actions->Tag trail menu item and add anything that you think describes your trail. Tags are seperated by commas and can be phrases so you can tag something as “My Recipes” by enclosing the phrase in double quotes. You can also edit your tags by changing them on the Trail Summary page.

Trailfire tries to auto tag your trails but you can apply your own custom tags in any way you wish as is described above. If you want to get only your trails that have been tagged “food, cooking” just go to your user page and click on those tags in your user tag cloud. This will produce a list of your trails with those tags.

When you first get install the browser extension trails you create will be visible to all users. If you want them to be private, for your eyes only, go to the Trailfire menu and choose "New trails default to private". From then on your trails will be created private. Of course you can always switch a trail from private to public or vice versa by going to the Actions menu of one of your marks and choosing "Make trail public/private".

You can also share public or private trails with friends, via the Email button on a mark or on any Trail Summary page.

If you've followed a trail recently, it will still be in the history in your Trailfire sidebar. You can also go to your "My Stuff" page on our site and find it there.

Yes, you will start seeing marks left by other Trailfire users wherever you go on the Web. If you would rather not see other marks you can turn off this feature in the Trailfire menu by deselecting "Show everyone's marks in pages".

You use the Contacts tab of your My Stuff page to keep tract of other users that you want to collaborate with. When you see a user who makes interesting trails go to their user page and click the Add to Contacts link. That will set it up so you can see when they add trails or marks (see the Activity Tab below) and you can add them to groups or give them the ability to edit some of your trails. Contacts are the starting point for most of the collaboration features of Trailfire.

The Activity tab appears on you My Stuff Page. It is a central dashboard for all the things on Trailfire that you are watching. When a contact creates a new trail, a new mark is added to a favorite trail, or someone comments on your trail, you will get a notification on your Activity tab.

Most of the things on the Activity tab will come with a way to remove them. For instance when you find out that someone has added a mark to a trail you are no longer interested in it will come with a link to remove it from your favorites-just click it and you are done. If you want to stop seeing what one of your contacts is doing go to your Contacts tab and uncheck the Watch checkbox. That leaves them as a contact but you will no longer be notified about their activity.

Favorites let you read and keep current with other users' and specific trails. Favorite trails and users will be shown on your My Stuff page in the Favorites tab. You can add to your favorites wherever you see trails (from the mark's Actions menu or on a Trail Summary page) or from a User's page on Trailfire.

Anyone, they are public.

Any Trailfire user can favorite any trail she is allowed to see. Also anyone with an RSS reader can subscribe to your trails.

Every public trail has a corresponding RSS feed, available from the RSS buttons on the profile page. Anyone can add these feeds to an RSS reader, and use the reader to keep up with those trails.

Sometimes you want to keep things semi-private and let only one person or a group of people see it. You can do this by changing the trail visibility. Do this by choosing a Share option from the Mark menu or by picking an option on the Trail Summary page. Go to the Advanced setting and click it. This will open a panel that lets you choose just who you want to see the trail and who you want to be able to add to the trail. This way you and your friend can shop for a present without letting anyone else know. You can both add to the trail and no one else will see.

Many trails are made so anyone can add to them. You can do this to one of your trails by going to the Trail Summary page and choosing the wiki trail option. This will allow any user to add to the trail. Likewise when you follow a trail that you can add to it will show up in the sidebar with a little pencil marker meaning that you can add to the trail. If you want to contribute to the trail just add it as a favorite, then the next time you mark a page the wiki trail will be in your drop-down list of trail names. Choose it and your mark gets put in the wiki trail.

No. What you mark with Trailfire is yours alone. We don't save any information about you that you don't ask us to and you control who sees what. Check our Privacy Policy for the details.

By default, trails are public. You can make a trail private from your My Stuff page. In that case, only you can see them. There are many different settings to control who can see and edit you trails. Check the Collaboration section above.

Not if you sign out of your Trailfire account when you're done. In some cases, you may also have some temporary security cookies, so you should close the browser as well.

No. We hate spam as much as you do and will never be party to it.

On our site, go to your My Stuff page and then click on the "User profile" tab and the edit link. On that page, you'll be able to change your email and add information about yourself.

The page described above allows you to upload a picture for your avatar. It lets you customize you user page and the way your marks look.

Anyone can see your profile, but they'll only see those trails that you've made public or shared with them.

Once you've installed our software (and after restarting the browser), you can open and close our sidebar by clicking on the Trailfire button in the toolbar, selecting "View Trailfire Sidebar" in the toolbar dropdown menu, or enabling it in the browser's View menu, under "Explorer Bar" (IE) or "Sidebar" (Firefox).

The sidebar shows three tabs. The Recent tab has your recent history of trail navigation. If you follow a trail or edit one it will appear in this tab of the sidebar. The My Trails tab in the sidebar shows all of your trails. The Guide tab shows marks and trails that relate to the page you see in the browser.

The Guide tab shows a list of marks and their enclosing trails that relate to the page you see in the browser. Trailfire automatically finds related marks while you are browsing. If you get to an unmarked page you may have to request that Trailfire analyze it for suggestions by clicking the ‘Guide Me’ button. The Guide works on the trailfire site also. The next time you are looking at a Trail Summary page notice the ‘Similar Trails’ list on the right hand side. Every public trail on Trailfire is connect to others by subject. By marking a few pages and creating a trail you will get suggestions for other trails on similar subjects all automatically. It is like getting help with your research from everyone else.

For every collection of trails you will see recent and popular users also. Also the site Search returns a list of users and trails that match your search words.

To get the URL for a trail you can go to any mark's Actions menu and choose "Copy trail link" or "Copy mark link". This will put the URL on the clipboard so you can paste it anywhere you would like. You can also find trail and mark URLs on the Trail Summary page and by right clicking in the sidebar.

If you have a blog which lets you create a link by adding HTML insert the following text.

<a href="trail-or-mark-URL">Text for your link</a>

If you are using trackbacks to bring traffic back to your blog and want to use a trail link instead of a direct link to the site follow this form:

<a href="trail-or-mark-URL">Text for your link</a>
<a href="URL-of-the-trackback-blog"; style="visibility:hidden">Hidden text</a>

If you have a blog which has a WYSIWYG editor like MySpace just use the trail or mark URL as the link value.

When you mark something it is often useful to grab an image or link off the page and copy it to the mark. The next time you go to the Trail Summary it will have all the images and links you clipped along the way when you created the trail. In IE you can select text, a link, or image by dragging the cursor over them. Then copy and paste them into the mark in edit mode. In Firefox you can do the same but you can also drag an image or other object off the page onto the mark in edit mode.

When you are editing a mark you will see a set of buttons which are part of the WYSIWYG editor. Click the link button and paste into the dialog the URL you got for the trail or mark. When you save the mark the link will become active.

Click the Add Image button at the top of the WYSIWYG mark editor and enter the URL of the image you want to insert. An easy way to get your image hosted is to use a service like flickr.com.

To put HTML into a mark click the "Source" view of the WYSIWYG editor. Now you can enter the allowed HTML tags such as the following:

<embed src="URL-to-your-audio-file">

When nothing will do but a video in your mark you can use the same technique as with embedding audio by using the source mode of the WYSIWYG editor. In this case you may want to use a service like YouTube.com to host your video. If you just want to use a video already on YouTube go to the video's page and copy the text they supply in the "embed" box. Then paste it into your mark. It will look something like this:

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ROXTq5Z914w"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ROXTq5Z914w" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

The actual snippet of code you get from YouTube.com contains a property setting wmode="transparent". This is not supported in marks so you will have to remove it as we did in the example above. Several other Flash based applications including the odeo.com audio player use this parameter too and it will therefore have to be removed from their snippets too. If you would rather use the standard media player and you know the address of the video you want to use you can put the following much simplified tag in your mark:

<embed src="URL-to-your-video-file">

This window contains the javascript code for the Trailfire extension. It can be ignored.

If you want to comment on the blog or news site in general you can mark the front page. If, on the other hand, you want to comment on a specific post or article then leave your mark on the permalink or single article page.

Trailfire loads the javascript for the extension the first time you launch the browser. This may take several seconds but you should not experience this delay again, at least until you reinstall or upgrade.

This can be caused by an intermittent connection to the Internet. If restarting the browser does not solve the problem and other pages load fine in the browser you may have a problem with your firewall. Try the following actions:

• ZoneAlarm: Open ZA control center (double click icon in SysTray) and choose the "Privacy" tab on the left. On the "Main" tab, under "Cookie Control", choose "Custom". On the "Cookies" tab uncheck "Remove private header Information". Click "OK"
• Sunbelt Kerio: Open Kerio control center (double click icon in SysTray) and choose the "Web" tab on the left, then click the "Site exceptions" tab on the top. Click the "Add..." button, and type "trailfire.com" for the server address. Click "OK", then "Apply". Restart your browser, and you should be able to login.
• Norton Internet Security: Run Live Update to ensure you have the latest code. If the product is more than a year old and has not been renewed, update to a newer version. Or, open NIS control center (double click icon in SysTray) and expand "Norton Internet Security" on the left. On the "Status & Settings" tab choose "Security" and click on the "Turn Off" button.