One of the things that I liked so much about the Opera browser was that you were able to highlight a text link and right-click “Go to URL”. It saved the time of the old copy/paste. Then one day I found a Firefox Extension that allowed you to turn text links into real clickable links. My dreams had come true.

The reason why this was such an issue for me is that I tend to read a lot, and many times articles won’t directly link to a page because they are stingy about passing their PR link juice to another website. Especially you SEO website dorks. Certainly a good site owner who is stingy like this would just use the rel="nofollow" tag on their links, but alas they are lazy apparently. Anyways, there are quite a few message boards that don’t have the option to use links. So this firefox plugin is quite useful.

Linification

Linkification is a Firefox plugin as I described that would turn a link like this: www.jimimorrisonshead.com into a link like this www.jimimorrisonshead.com. If you had linkification on right now, both of those links would be clickable like this link for CAT5e is.

You can directly download the Linkification Add On right now, or go to the actual Linkification info page.

Once installed you will see a small icon on the lower status bar of your browser, or wherever you have it. The circular icon with the “L” in it has a few functions if you right-click on it. The first is that you can blacklist a site from getting Linkified. If you have a site that maybe you do programming on, it is rather bothersome to have links in your code linkified, so it is nice to be able to blacklist that site and not have to worry about it every time. This is a permanent solution unlike the other option available there. You can simply just turn of the links on a page that have been linkified as well in that menu. Two very handy tools that you will find useful once you start to use this Firefox extension.

The other is the options menu which has far too many features to go in depth with here. Just browse around the options and see the various features it has. A couple of note is that you can turn off auto-linkification, allow text links to be visited simply by double clicking on them with out actually having them linkified and even force the links to open in new tabs or windows. More advanced options are available as well and can be reviewed in the help sections.

Something else you may come a crossed is that people tend to link to images on sites like this often, but you have to copy/paste those to see them. It is also kind of a pain for you when you post on sites that have you upload an image and make it a thumbnail. I just want to see it. Take a look at the Text to Image extension for how to always show these images that are only a link as well.

Visit my Firefox Extensions pages for more.

How many of you actually utilize StumbleUpon for your websites? IF you don’t you are probably missing out on a ton of traffic, and frankly so am I since you aren’t Stumbling my posts ! haha

Anyways, when i write a post about giving someone a pearl necklace that you find rather helpful it would be nice if you happened to have a StumbpleUpon toolbar if you are using Firefox:

You can nab the toolbar here for Firefox and it will install when you restart the browser. You can get it for Internet Explorer as well on the StumbleUpon website here in the right hand column. If you like a post you can say you like it and submit it if it hasn’t already and when people Stumble to go to random sites that site pops up a bit since it is in the system now. The more votes it gets the more often people StumbleUpon it. Hey…I know toolbars get out of hand, but if you just turn them off when you aren’t using them they aren’t bad. I never have any of my toolbars on unless I’m using them other than my bookmarks. Easy to turn off. Just go up top and right click on one of you bars and uncheck the bad boy. Out of sight, out of mind I guess, but you get used to remembering it when you see my super sweet posts .

Just use it a bit and you’ll find some pretty interesting website Stumbling around. I’ve seen some pretty crazy stuff out there that I never would have run a crossed with out it. It’s very entertaining to play with I think.

This extension is pretty useful for people who like to post on most forums. There are still some out there that don’t allow images, which frankly I kind of like when there are tons of posts to go through on certain boards. Sometimes however those boards do have posts that require some sort of image display to make a joke and they don’t allow it. I’ve been using this thing for a few years and it works very well. When someone pops a link that you would normally have to copy and paste into the browser to view the image this thing shows it in a bit of a thumbnail that when you place the pointer over it enlarges the image for easy viewing, or double click it to have it pop out. It can be turned on and off very easily and has a little icon on the status bar at the bottom of your browser that you click to do this.

Download the Text to Image Add on and it is ready to go. Visit my Firefox Extensions archive for more useful add ons to the best browser in the world.

Of all the Firefox extensions I use this one will likely become one of my favorites and get used daily by me. Even though many have utilized some WordPress Plugins to allow us to Digg their stories, there are many bloggers that just don’t have the feature and we have to do it manually. Now we can do it for everyone we read and we don’t have to fill in all the extra fields at Digg like we used to when we saw a great story.

I can’t imagine you don’t use the Firefox browser, but if you don’t you can get it by clicking here:

To get the extension download it here. So the next time you want to pimp your site about the Best Diet Pills on Digg you can do so with much less effort. That is if you are using Firefox.

Devon Jensen created the handy Download Statusbar extension that just shows up in the bottom staus bar with no pop up. Useful? Yes.

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ‘subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

The initials “RSS” are variously used to refer to the following standards:

* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an “RSS feed”, “webfeed”, “RSS stream”, or “RSS channel”.

Source: Wiki

So what does this mean to you? In my case it meant that I didn’t ahve to go to 50 websites constantly all day because I could simply go there once and grab the RSS feed url from the site and put it into an RSS feed reader. I started out by using the Google Reader which is very nice and it can be added to your custom Google homepage if you so desire. Here is a quick tour of Google Reader.

Although Google reader is fantastic for me to keep up with all the news sources I read everyday, and is right on my Google Homepage where I can check my GMail, Yahoo! Mail, weather, etc., I still needed a bit more. If you use Firefox like many people are moving to you can download an extension that will run your RSS feed updates along the status bar at the bottom of the browser. I have situations online where I have to get to things fast, right when they come up so this is an absolute neccessity for me. This will be the InfoRSS extension that you need and you can find that download here: infoRSS extension download.

RSS is just one of those things that once you understand it you will wonder how you ever lived with out it. You can put thousands of feeds in here from sites all over the web and sort them with these readers very easily. Most sites will have an easily visible RSS button that almost always looks like this:

I would also recommend that if you do not have a Feedburner Feed that you get one instead of using the default RSS feed you get when you set up a blog. Feedburner has some amazing features that make our feeds look incredible and even allow us to do many extra things with them. The main thing that helps with Feedburner as well, is the fact that you can see the amount of subscribers you have for a blog by looking at your feeds on the site. It is great to see where people are coming from and how they have subscribed to your feeds. You can look at my RSS feed for an example and even subscribe to it too by clicking here. (Thanks for subscribing if you did.)

A feed can also be used where you see the term Atom. It serves the same purpose. More Firefox Extensions. Try and Ask Jason some tech questions too when you find that you are at a loss.

Just a very useful tool to keep track of some of the more important website ranking tools. The extension has a pull up menu if you click on the various buttons that show you all your indexing in the largest search engines, brings you to the Alexa traffic report pages, and many other great features.

The SearchStatus extension is definitely one of the more useful extensions on my browser right now.