OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

You know I love cool add-ons for Firefox, and I think I wrote about Speed Dial here several weeks ago.

Well, I liked it a lot, until I used it a lot. It makes rows of thumbnails for you so that you can see sites you visit every day. You don’t have to go hunting down the bookmark, you just click on the screen and voila! You’re there. Saves a lot of time.

But with Speed Dial, the thumbnails didn’t come up a lot of the time. And if they were there when you started out, they’d disappear. Another thing that bugged me is that you couldn’t name the site and let Speed Dial get the thumbnail for you also It was one or the other. So, when the thumbnail disappeared, you were SOL. You’d have to rest your cursor on the square to see the URL.

Not so with Fast Dial. It totally rocks. Not only does it hold your thumbnails, but it allows you to name them as well as allow Fast Dial to get your thumbnails. So, if for some reason, one disappears, you can still see the name of the site. But, what’s really cool is that they don’t disappear! At least none of them have gone AWOL all week. I’m thrilled.

You can get Fast Dial and try it out for yourself here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5721

Love it, love it, love it.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Well, I’m not totally sure it’s new, but it’s really awesome.

If you don’t have “Speed Dial,” go and get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810

Here’s how it works…

There are sites you go to every day, right? Some sites more than once. If you have an enormous bookmark file, as I do, it gets rather tedious hunting for those bookmarks time and time again. Well, Speed dial  puts them all on one browser tab for you.

You just program in the sites that you visit by adding a URL. Speed Dial comes up with a thumbnail for you. You can add as many sites to it as you want to add, and you can make speed dial your home page, if you want, but it also has a small icon that you can click to get there instantly.

When you do, you see thumbnails of the sites you visit often. Mine has AWeber, StomperNet, The ListBuilding Club, this blog, Blogging4Boomers admin, AdWords, SEOBook, and others. And it’s so cool. When I want to create a broadcast message for my list, I just jump onto AWeber by clicking the thumbnail. I love it!

I got a few other add ons last week, too:

Bookmark Duplicate Detector: Who needs more than one bookmark for the same site?

Shareaholic: Allows me to Twitter, Digg, and other sites with the click of my mouse.

Foxmarks: I’ve had this one a while, but it’s really cool. It syncs up my desktop bookmarks with my laptop whenever I turn my laptop on. If it were only that easy to sync up all my files without paying through the nose, that would be sweet.

ColorZilla: Allows me to get R,G,B and HTML color codes, just by placing my mouse on a color I want to duplicate. I love it!

But I also love Pixie by Nattyware. It’s a tiny little program that does the same thing as ColorZilla, but you can use it outside your browser. Get it at http://nattyware.com

For someone who went into Firefox kicking and screaming, I couldn’t be happier with this browser. The only trouble is that IE doesn’t always display code the same way; so, when I’m developing a page, I have to remember to check it in both browsers to make sure it looks the way I want it to in IE.

Grr… I forget a lot.

But, there’s another add-on called IE Tab that you can get that allows you to switch rendering engines with a click. You don’t have to open a new browser, and I’m lazy. It rocks.

Anyway, I’m not just a convert anymore. Now, I’m a damned evangelist for Firefox. If you don’t use it, start. You’ll be amazed at how much better it works and how you can adapt it to do just about anything you want.

Popularity: 40% [?]