Saturday 14 July 2007

Taming the Fox

I don't know about you, but i am head over heels in love with the FOX. I was sold on the browser around 3 years ago by a Mac obsessed colleague of mine, but never really used it to its full capacity. It was a little clunkier then and i only really used it for tabbed browsing and a couple of SEO features that out performed both I.E and Netscape. Then I.E came out with tabbed browsing and i tried it out for all of 8 hours and then downloaded the lastest FOX. What i love about Firefox is its tireless evolution and ease of use, its a browser that you can really make yours, you can pimp it to your hearts content and i for one am i big fan of
downloading the latest add-ons, testing them out to see if they work for me and getting rid of what i dont need.

If you havent done this before you will firstly need to download Mozilla Firefox. Then from the browser you click on Tools - Add ons, this will then launch the Mozilla Homepage for addons and you can browse all addons from their. You can search for the tools using the titles i have shown below and i have also shown you the image tags for you to recognise them. Have fun with it!

Heres a few of the add-ons i use everyday


For SEO

I.E tab - This is really handy for site testing, you can switch between mozilla and I.E in one click by clicking on the icon in the bottom right had side of the browser screen. It basically lets you check how a site is rendering in engines and for the die hard I.E fans, it gives them the benefits of what Mozilla has to offer.

iWEBTOOL
This is a very handy little tool that gives you instant access to website link popularity-keyword suggestions-density checker-website download speed test-quick optimiser check for meta data etc, alot of if is pretty basic, but it is very handy indeedy.














SEO Quake
This extension is aimed mainly at webmasters and SEO managers, it gives you an instant preveiw of website performance from your search results, this is really handy for making mesurements against client competitor sites ie: inbound links, socail media tags etc. It gives a quick snapshot of how a site is doing and you can also adjust the displayed perameters depending on what work you are doing for a client.


For Search and tagging





Co comme
nt - I started to use this functionality when i was manageing client socail media, its a great way to keep track of any comments you make across the web, blogs or forums anywhere. You can also track replies etc, it is in Beta stage so it does have a few hiccups, but it is a good tracking tool.





ALL in one side bar
Click on the left edge of your browser window to open the sidebar and get easy access to all your panels. I use this in a way that i used to use tabbed browsing, but that had a tendancy to slow things down. I now drop all my clients websites into the bookmark side bar, all my daily blogs, SEO news sites etc and you can arrange it with titles etc to break it all up. It also allows you to flick quickly between your delicious - wikalong and Jeteye accounts without loosing anything your working on.




Image editing

Jet eye - I found this around 2 years ago in its beta stage and loved the ease of it, you simply open an account get a confirmation email and drag and drop any images you want into it, you can also tag these images and share them but i am still only using it to store my jpegs etc instead of littering the harddrive with them.














Themes



Pimpzilla - this is a very funky theme i had running for around a year, its filled with lounge lizard velvet, leopard skin back ground and Glitter and Bling!.





Metal Lion - This is a nice slick design and doesnt deflect from the dashboard. I think this isnt fadish and would more likely be a theme to keep.










This is the the Lion-blue version.





I hope that this was useful and for those that already knew i hope you enjoyed the pictures.




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