Blogging Sueblimely

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As I have had to reinstall my Firefox profiles I took the opportunity to tidy things up a bit and install updated extensions, it is a good opportunity for me to share with you what I find useful for browsing, blogging research and organization.

Unless listed as otherwise all of the following are Firefox extensions. For most of the list below I could only point you to the current extension version downloads. This of course may change in the future - so if the extension is out of date for your version of Firefox or no longer exists then do a search from the main Firefox Add-ons window.

Addins marked with * are those I have not tried myself because I do not want to add any more unless I think they are absolutely necessary.

Blogging and Feed Reading

• Text Formatting Toolbar * - allows easy formatting of posts on forums, blog comments and wikis. It supports three formats: BBcode (bulletin board) like used on most forums, HTML, and the format used by Wikipedia.
• ScribeFire blog editor
• Web Mail Notifier *- handy to get immediate notification of blog comments etc..
• BlogRovr - RovR fetches posts from your favorite blogs about anything you’re browsing, and shows you summaries you can open read posts without leaving the web page you were on. Twitter about the pages you’re on from the toolbar, with the link added automatically.
• Google Reader Watcher *- checks your Google Feedreader for unread news.
• Sage Feedreader - I used to use this all the time until I began collecting (I get very behind in reading) copious amounts of feeds and started using Feed Demon instead. There are a few other feedreader addins for Firefox - if you prefer one of these over Sage I would be interested in hearing about it.
• Wizz RSS Newsreader- I have read good review for this one.
• Feed Sidebar - show your Firefox Live Bookmarks in the sidebar.
• Yoolicit Toolbar - pinpoints and takes you to sites that are specifically relevant to those you’ve bookmarked - a bit like the Stumble feature of Stumbleupon. Youlicit site to create your account
• To Read Later
  - bookmark webpages you want to read later by simply clicking on this toolbar button .
• Firefox Universal Uploader *- upload/download to and from Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, Box.net(1GB of free space), Facebook, Webshots and OmniDrive

Designing

When designing or altering design elements in your blog it is very useful to have ways of viewing or editing the CSS and html code before you commit to saving it to your theme. If you are a beginner, being able to view how your own blog or other websites are made up is a good learning strategy. Even for the more experienced it handy to be able to view bits of code on other sites or to edit your own.

• Scrapbook - excellent for quickly downloading your theme/template.The saved page is converted to html it is very handy for styling your page or extras you add. - I am intending to write a tutorial on this as I find Scrapbook invaluable and use it a lot.
• Web Developer Toolbar - Lets you interact with your page code and styling in multiple ways. I wrote a post about this last year - Blog Toolbox 2 - Web Developer Toolbar
• View Source Chart - a nifty little tool which I used a great deal when learning html and CSS. This extension allows you to view a color coded chart of a webpage showing how the different elements relate to each other: I have created a source chart page showing the source code for one of my post pages:
• Firebug - view and edit a page’s CSS, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax. A great extension although I find everything I need and more in the Web Developer Toolbar.
• MeasureIt
  - a ruler to measure elements of a webpage.

SEO

• Sparky - Alexa Toolbar
• iWebTool Toolbar - 30 Webmaster Tools including Backlink Checker, Google Pagerank Checker. Alexa Traffic Rank, Reciprocal Link Checker

Social Networking

• Facebook - search, get Notified, connect with friends, share content Facebook Toolbar, Facebar and Facebook ShareThis
• StumbleUpon Toolbar
• Digg Toolbar
• Digg Sidebar- shows you the Digg stories in real time in the Firefox sidebar.
• Jaikungfu *- enhancements for Jaiku users
• LinkedIn Companion for Firefox
• Orkut Helper * various features for keeping up with Orkut.
• minggl - interact with multiple Social Networking Sites
• Operator toolbar - interact with semantic data on websites - hcard, vcard, microformats. Handy for using the new hcard/vcard feature in MyBlogLog - I am in the midst of writing a post on this subject.
• Twitter Fox - notifies you of your friends’ statuses of Twitter.
• Shareaholic - share, bookmark and e-mail web pages.
  Supported services: bzzster!, digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, google bookmarks, healthranker, magnolia, mixx, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, streakr, truemors, tumblr, twitter…
• Share this - send messages to FaceBook, AIM and regular email simultaneously and without signing in to any other account and post directly to Facebook Homepage
• SiteSays - allows you to post and view comments about sites as you surf in a small window in the corner of your browser. It is a novel way to collaborate and interact…
• gTalk Sidebar * - installs gTalk to your firefox sidebar
• Chat applications - Gabbly Chat and Yaplet Sidebar
• Me.dium - but not your average extension. Chat with friends who are visiting the same webpage.

Social Bookmarking

• diigo Toolbar - interact with your diigo account. diigo allows for automatic bookmarking to other bookmarking sites too.
• GBookmarks via Right Click
• Delicious Delicious bookmarks sidebar - I found this slowed my browsing down so try not to use too many other addins if you really want to use this one.
• SimpleDelicious - another method of working with Delicious bookmarks.
• Onlywire Bookmark a page to various social bookmarking sites at once
• GBookmarks via Right Click *
• Smarky *- manage Simpy bookmarks
• Faves *- for your Faves (formerly Blue Dot) bookmarks
• Furl Interact with the Furl bookmarking application
• Blogmarks toolbar buttons
• magnolia bookmarklet to add to ma.gnolia bookmarks
• If your bookmarking service is not here search the Firefox addins bookmarking category and you may find some tools.

Researching

• warichu bar * - add notes to webpages and discuss the page with others who have added an annotation. I would be interested in hearing the opinion of anyone who has used this. Also available for IE
• Yoono As you are browsing Yoono instantly suggests what others have discovered:
  websites, people and articles and includes a “one-click grab and share” for videos, photos and texts.It also includes a tool to keep your Yoono scrapbook and bookmarks synchronized across computers. Useful for researching and keeping up to date.
• EverNote Web Clipper *- I have not tried Evernote as I am still awaiting an invite - it is still in beta. The extension adds a “toolbar button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to the EverNote Application as a new note.”
• Zotero - collect, manage and cite you research sources Homepage
• MyStickies
  - add notes and tags to pages for reference when you next visit
• Fleck - Save the best of the Web - annotation tool - bookmark websites including your own sticky notes. Fleck Homepage

Useful

• All-in-One Sidebar - always one of the first extensions I install - makes it so much easier to use bookmarks, browse history, deal with your extensions ….
• Tab Mix Plus - another must have for me - to choose my preferences for how links open in tabs
• IE Tab - Good when working on your blog styling - allows you to see what your page looks like in IE
• Extra Toolbar buttons
• Roboform Toolbar - save and easily insert site login details - you need to download the Roboform password manager program to use this. Free version only allows a limited number of saves - I bought the pro version and use it extensively. Roboform Homepage
• iGoogle Sidebar *- view you iGoogle page in a Firefox sidebar.
• Febe - back up your Firefox extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, cookies - you can set up an automatic scheduled backup
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
  - Sync bookmarks across computers. this is a popular extension although I have not had success with it - probably because of the amount of bookmarks I have.
• Google Browser Sync - if you use more than one computer this you can choose to sync bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords. - Requires a google identity (gmail address) When you set up for the first time you will be asked to create a pin number which you need to remember for setting up other machines to sync.
• If you do not want the full features of Google Browser Sync GMarks syncs and manages only your Firefox bookmarks.
• PlainOldFavorites * - use your Internet Explorer Favorites in Firefox.

Extensions can slow down your browser and cause crashes so try to use them in moderation. I am an extension addict but because of painfully slow browsing I now have 3 different profiles which I can run at the same time using the Profile Manager extension. Please see my post Speed Up your Firefox Browsing for more details.

If you do install all these extensions you may like to add another - PageAddict which lets you know how much time you have spent on websites and if you have an aversion to MySpace try the AmIOnMySpace.com? which will alert you if you have accidentally happened across a MySpace page. Happy browsing.

Do you have any favorite Firefox addins? Please do tell me about them.

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