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Here’s a list of Firefox extensions I have installed, if you know of anything cool I’m not using drop it in the comments below:
Sphere ItA few weeks ago I saw a post on Sphinn about organizing your feeds with a three dimensional approach. I use something similar but with a trick I learned from GTD.
Organizing and Prioritizing Your Feeds »
Sphere ItMichael Arrington has a great post listing what web 2.0 websites he couldn’t live without. I don’t know that there are any sites I couldn’t live without but there sure are a few I use that make my life and my day more productive. I’m also not going to limit myself to web 2.0 sites, but here are the sites that help me GTD:
What Websites and Programs Do You Use to Get Things Done »
Sphere ItSo after coming back from a vacation after SES I was reminded bandwidth and download speeds are still very much an issue.
Why You Still Need to Be concerned with Bandwidth and Download Speeds »
Sphere ItOk I’m going to be testing out twitter at SES if you think you might want to connect with me twitter is an option. Here’s what you need to do.
1) go to twitter and sign up
2) go to my profile and add me as a friend
3) next week send me a direct message (the link is in the right hand box) the direct message will come straight to my phone
4) You won’t be able to send me a direct message unless I’ve reciprocated your “friend add” (you might want to do it before I’m actually at SES, hint hint)
5) If I know who you are, have seen your nick or you can get me into an exclusive invite only party (and you mention that) you stand better shot of me adding you back than someone I’ve never heard of or from
6) Yes that does indeed make me a socialite search party whore, so just deal with it
Sphere ItLook I’m already annoyed at reading the regurged news, but there are some feeds I have to subscribe to, but dammit google reader when I mark it read I’m done with it, don’t show it to me as new again. I’ve marked some feeds read half a dozen times already today, stop wasting my time doing the same thing over and over, I have better things to do. You’ve got more brainpower than it took to send a man to the moon, fix the damn problem or I’m dropping you.
Sphere ItIf you’re looking for yet more ways to hone your cyber stalking skills to lazer pinpoint accuracy, are willing to be a participant in in my laboratory experiments, or just want to do it because all the other cool kids are, go be my friend over on twitter.
Sphere ItOne of the things I try to tell many clients to try is experimenting with video, however they, usually shy away citing the production costs. However if Google can get away with a low production value combined with humor I think everyone can
Sphere ItI’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes on and off for the past few days and have to say it’s incredibly cool, wicked, and way powerful. Problem is if you aren’t a programmer it might as well be written in Woodland Elvish, cause you’ll never figure it out. I’m no master programmer but I get by and that thing just has me confused as all get out. Reminds me of Google Co-Op when it first came out, so needlessly un-user friendly only a unix admin could love it. Thank $Diety they replaced it with custom search engine which is so simple a trained monkey could use it. So c’mon somebody write the Yahoo Pipes for Non-programmers guide, I’ll personally digg it and throw some link love your way if you can help me understand it.
Update:
Added for people curious what I’m talking about look at the Techcrunch pipe and Digg user Pipe in My Pipe Account
Sphere ItIf you’re a wordpress user you probably know the incoming links section of your admin page. It helps you find out who’s linking to you. However every so often you may see some old posts from your blog, or someone else’s blog pop up, I’ve often wonder what causes it. After spending few days watching it I think I figured it out.
Technorati, Wordpress and Related Posts »
Sphere ItSo I’ve been living in a brand new Gmail account for almost a month now, and I’ve grown used to it but I, see a problem on the horizon I’m going to run out of space.
Sphere ItI’m testing the Sphere it Widget Plugin, you’ll find it down at the end of each post with a little sphere icon. You may have seen this on sites like TechCrunch, GigaOm. To see it doing it’s thing visit Google’s Policy on No follow and Reviews is Hypocritical and Wrong
I’ve also gone through and cleaned up some of the widget buildup that was going on down there. Let me know if you see any problems or what you think of it.
Sphere ItNow that I’ve almost completely surrendered to web based Gmail I’ve adjusted my work habits to allow me to get the most out web based life (yes Matt Cutts you were right ), I’ve even gotten over my me, me, me instant gratification and am using Google Reader. However one thing I really miss is my LinkedIn toolbar for outlook.
Sphere ItI’ve been playing with GMail and Google Reader lately and becoming more accustomed to the AJAX/Javascript interfaces. Which got me to thinking how good are they at separating humans from clickbots.
Are Ajax Applications Immune to Clickbots »
Sphere ItI’m getting pretty in depth in studying the tools and services Google makes available to people with Google accounts. However I came across something today that made me wrinkle my nose and look down over the top of my glasses like my Grandma did when she knew I was telling fibs.
Google and Personalized Search - Collective Data Borg »
Sphere ItLate last year Darren Rowse on Problogger had a post about How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog. The post discuses how going viral can increase your reader/subscribers over time which build in long term defensible traffic. The graphs he used were hypothetical but accurate. Last week I created the situation so thought I’d show you some real stats.
Going Viral to Build Defensible Traffic »
Sphere ItI’ve mentioned CrazyEgg here before but the more I play with it the more I like it. I placed the script on a landing page for social media story today. The way the text was formatted the link wrapped onto two lines. in the clickmap it showed two distinct “hot spots” on the same link. I initially assumed the hot spots were a simulation. I wrote to Niel who got back to me extremely quickly and said it’s actually tracking X-Y coordinates of where people really clicked. That totally rocks. Go sign up, it’s totally free to try.
Sphere ItI’m a big fan of delicious I use it all the time, and I use regularly to bookmark almost everything. However today I wanted to bookmark something in the New York Times I knew I would want next year. The problem is the NEW YORK TIMES IS STUPID and they put things behind the walled garden after two weeks unless your name happens to be GoogleBot and your IP resolves to Mountain View (You Know I really hate that they get away with that cloaking bullshit and nobody gives a crap or does anything about it, but I digress). So I tried to think of a way to save the page so I could come back to it. I thought Yahoo 360 had a way to save pages but I logged in and couldn’t find it. I tried saving it in my experimental google account but it only saved the bookmark, not the full page. In the end I ended up just printing it, but that’s so 20th century. I know there has to be a way to bookmark it and save the real page somewhere before it goes into the vault of CLOAKING SPAMMERS.
So how do you save pages?
Sphere ItSince I wasn’t in Chicago last week for SES it gave me an opportunity to catch up on my podcasts. I was listening to Shoemoney on Net Income and he had Neil Patel on talking about Crazy Egg. CrazyEgg By Niel Patel »
Sphere ItAll right so I’m deep in a test of using the Google Customized homepage and Google Reader. If anybody out there in Google Land wants to hook me up with the GMail Mail Fetcher thing it would be pretty helpful.
Gmail: Help Center - How do I set up Mail Fetcher?
Sphere ItSince I had a few requests for bookmarklets I use here are a few. If you like them click on the link and drag it to your bookmark toolbar. SEO Bookmarklets »
Sphere ItI’m testing using a Google personalized homepage on a second laptop with a 15.4″ screen on 1280 resolution. To give me more screen real estate and make it more like my personal dashboard how about moving the search box up to the left in the corner. It would only give me a few lines but it would really help. Now if you wanted to go all crazy and give the user total control let me kill the main search box masthead, leaving just the single line in the upper right. Then create a small search widget that I can put anywhere I want on the page, man that would totally kick ass … yes I am completely serious. Since I’m totally talkin’ crazy, build a widget for google analytics I can add in, and maybe one for Google Adwords and Google Adsense too.
I’ve only been using it a few hours and really linking it. If I wasn’t worried about all that data being mashed together and used against me, I might even use it for my main stuff … sigh
I am serious about those suggestions though, not just being a pain in the ass …
Sphere ItIf you play on Digg or Netscape and use firefox you may tfind these two new extentions pretty cool. They help you keep up with your friends activities, seeing stories they submitted and voted for.
Netscape Friends’ Activity Sidebar
Sphere ItIf you happened see any of the site review clinics at pubcon you might have wondered how do people look things up so quickly. Lots of people use bookmarklets for quick and dirty type searches. For example say you wanted to to know who a site links to using the new MSN [linkfromdomain] command. So go to your bookmark toolbar and create a new bookmark in the location field enter this value:
javascript:location.href='http:/'+'/search.live.com/results.aspx?q=linkfromdomain%3A'+document.domain.replace('www.','');
To use it visit any domain and click on the bookmarklet it should redirect you to that MSN with a linkforward search executed for that domain.
Sphere ItSteve Rubel has a smashingly good bit of conversation bait today with The Imminent Demise of the Page View
The page view does not offer a suitable way to measure the next generation of web sites. These sites will be built with Ajax, Flash and other interactive technologies that allow the user to conduct affairs all within a single web page - like Gmail or the Google Reader. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. The widgetization of the web will only accelerate this.
Sorry Steve I’m gonna call you out on this one. Why Advertisers Love Flash and Ajax, and Why it’s Really Stupid »
Sphere ItJim Boykin and the crew over at WeBuildPages have been pretty busy working on a redesign and fine tuning some of their tools, and Jim asked me to take a look at a few of them. Internet Marketing Tools Review »
Sphere ItThe thing I love about Firefox is extensions, I can customize my browser to work with the extensions I find most useful. However when they upgrade I go through the headache of incompatibility. I thought I had waited long enough but I guess not and spent two hours going through configuration hell today. Don’t Upgrade to Firefox 2 Yet »
Sphere ItEveryone who’s looking to bring traffic to thier website is pretty focused on social bookmarking right now. However one of the things a lot people miss is making it easy for their readers to do this. So here a tutorial on how to implement some social bookmarking into your site just like the picture below.
Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets »
