The best thing about making money online is that it is fun. You can do what you really enjoy and get paid for that!

So besides obvious making-money-from-your-website thing, what are other reliable ways to earn some extra cash?

(1) Get Paid for Reviewing Software

What kind of a geek are you if you don’t love playing with new software? I am sure you do. Have you ever considered getting paid for that?

Software Judge is the most popular site that allows to be paid (up to $50 per review) for software reviews. The rules are as follows:

• Review it as it is: the review shouldn’t be positive; it should be constructive and honest;
• Pick the software listed on the site;
• No more than 3 reviews per day.

You get paid the following ways:

• Digital freebies (e.g. free reg keys and free games);
• Cash via Western Union (if you have at least $200 in your account);
• Software exchange (if you have at least $20 you can exchange your money for any downloadable software listed on site).

(2) Get Paid for Bargain Hunting

Bargain hunting is fun and can save you a bunch of money. The key is to know how and when to track. It’s nice that active bargain hunters can now be rewarded with cash (because many people can be grateful to them for a timely spotted deal).

Buxr is a user-generated coupon code and deal directory that rewards most active and active users with daily and monthly cash.

The rules are pretty simple: the deal that gets most votes from other users wins the contest. The daily prize is $10 and monthly prizes vary from $100 to $200. If you refer friends to join the site, you’ll also get a prize:

The top 3 memberswho refer at least 5 ‘Good Members’ will be awarded. The first, the second and the the third place prize is $50.

(3) Get Paid for Consulting Others

Do you consider yourself an expert in anything? Do you think your advice may be useful? Let people pay you for it!

Ether.com offers you to get paid for your expert advice. I can’t say the site is too active and you will get hundreds of phone calls but you can try it.

Here’s how it works:

• Get your free Ether phone number;
• Set your rate per hour;
• Get pre-paid phone calls.

The site also offers "Call me" buttons for your website or blog as well as some advice on how to market yourself to get more calls. It also enables you to sell digital products via email and "Buy" button on the website.

(4) Get Paid for Reviewing Products and Completing Offers

Getting paid for reviews has double benefit: cash and the product itself you are reviewing. Here are some well-trusted sites that allow you to earn money by reviewing products (there are more of course, so if you personally tried and liked another one, please share):

• Cash Crate: Make sure to also check their Contests page for more fun;
• Gangster Greed pays money for completing (free trial) offers. Payout threshold is $10; Payouts on demand;
• Treasure Trooper: monthly payouts with $20 threshold;
• Instant Profitz.

Are you aware of more fun legit ways to earn money online? Share them in the comments!

Oh and those of you who are still in college should also check out our Ryan’s article om best websites for teens to earn money online.

Note: Internet is full of scams. If you come across any site that offers to pay you in cash, make sure to do at least some research: check scam forum and just Google it.

Disclaimer: I didn’t personally try all the sites listed above but I took time to research reviews by others before listing them here.

image credit: AMagil

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Mindopia – Check out Occupation Descriptions for a List of Different Careers (4)
• 5 Really Popular Online Job Application Forms: Burger King, Mcdonald’s, Wal Mart etc. (7)
• Top 5 Free Resume Hosting Websites (30)
• Top 10 Most Effective Job Search Websites (24)
• How To Use iGoogle To Get Ahead In Your Job Searches (2)

By integrating social websites within Google search results, we thus achieve two aims: we combine Google search which we love most of the times with social media users’ recommendations who rate each page. If we also combine data from several social media sources, we are most likely to find the best result quickly and efficiently.

Browser Bookmarks (XMarks)

Xmarks FireFox addon (formerly knows as FoxMarks): I’ve been using it for a while as that’s a cool way to synchronize your bookmarks among a few computers and also access them from anywhere in the world online. It has introduced quite a few cool features recently – and one of them is Google search results page enhancer. It places a little blue icon next to the result which was bookmarked most of the times.

If you click on the icon, you’ll be invited to find more info on the result which includes the page ratings, reviews and similar sites:

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon toolbar inserts StumbleUpon users’ ratings within Google SERPs results. Besides, it shows:

• the name of your friend who recently stumbled it (meaning that this information is provided by the most reliable source, i.e. your friends);
• the category it was discovered at.

Delicious and Digg

SEOquake is a feature-rich FireFox addon that can be configured to show how many times each page was saved at Delicious.com and how many times the domain was dugg on Digg:

Any other ways to see people’s recommendations within Google search results? Please share them!

Post image from netsimage.com

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Get Incredible Web & Image Suggestions With inSuggest (4)
• 17 Greasemonkey Scripts to Diversify Social Media Experience (7)
• Make Your Own FireFox Search Plugins & Other Tips (8)
• How to Expand Google’s Universal Search (20)
• Delicious Toolbox : Organize Your Web with Delicious (22)

Anyways, I have a few sites collecting awesome gadgets in my feed reader I’d be happy to share.

GeekAlerts is a blog run by Robert Birming who is doing a great job reviewing gadgets, design and consumer electronics – “giving you a daily dose of cool stuff you might not find elsewhere”.

GizmoDiva is one of my favorite gadget blogs because her collection caters for female geeks’ needs.

Gizmodo is a highly popular gadget blog and I know many people who love it but for me it has too much clutter, I prefer something more focused and on-topic.

ThinkGeek is an online store serving a market that was passionate about technology, from programmers, engineers, students, lovers of open source, to the masses that helped create the behind-the-scenes Internet culture.

PerpetualKid is another online store worth checking out if you are into geeky online shopping.

Curiobot is a growing collection of the most interesting things for sale on the internet. It is user-generated and therefore fun. I like that it only displays image thumbnails on the home page allowing to view more gadgets at a time. It also allows to view the whole collection at a time and sort it by price range.

Yankodesign features industrial design items, and despite this blog is less known than the above one, I love its style and selections.

GadgetReview reviews cool gadgets daily. Their reviews always contain detailed photos of the gadget in use and often a video featuring the gadget:

WalYou is a less-known gadget blog but it does feature some quite unique finds.

Geeky Gadgets: the only reason I have this site in my feed reader is its weekly round-ups listing past week’s gadgets.

Everyjoe’s Gadget Blog publishes multiple updates daily and also sums them up in a weekly round-up.

CraziestGadgets is another gadget blog and I can’t say there’s anything special about it, but I started tracking it after stumbling across “Youtube Addict Stickers” thanks to it:

And just a few awesome gadget lists I like enough to share:

• 20 Gadgets That Innovate Ordinary Things;
• 8 Awesome Upcycled Products for Gadget Lovers;
• Awesome Gadgets for Designers.

I am sure you have something to add – please do

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Review & Discuss Unusual And Cool Gadgets with Gdgt (7)
• 23 Sources Of User & Expert User Reviews (6)
• User Generated Content (Episode II) (2)
• Top 5 Websites To Learn How To Hack Like A Pro (44)
• Top 10 Cool Uses For Old Computers And Laptops (31)

People share thoughts, exchange opinions and reviews every single second. It is really hard to keep track of those conversations and sometimes you just need to.

Would you like to know what people are saying about the recent product or track your business reviews? This time I am listing most useful online tools that might help you to search multiple social media sites from one place (and sometimes with one click).

Spy

Spy (see MakeUseOf review of Spy) is fun to use. It updates in real time and if you are tired of working, you can just sit back and read the updates.

The tool also shows recent trends (as well as hashtags) and allows you to change the page background color:

SamePoint

SamePoint offers to search plenty of social networks. It has a handy interface allowing you to click through the tabs to get more targeted results: social media, microblogging, networks, images, etc. You can also subscribe to any search by RSS to track any changes.

It also offers real time tracking mode:

SocialMention

SocialMention (see MakeUseOf review of SocialMention) offers to search through blogs (Wordpress.com, Google Blog Search, Live.com, Technorati.com, Wikio.com), bookmarks (Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon), micro-blogs, comments (BackType), images (Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket), news (Digg, Reddit, Mixx), video (Youtube, Truveo.com, Pixsy.com), etc:

It also scores each query based on its social media presence:

WhosTalkin

WhosTalkin is the most comprehensive of all. It is divided into sections that includes blogs, news, networks, videos, images, and forums. Each of the sections has numerous options to click through.

The site also offers to install their Google gadget to bring the power of the social media search to your Google home page.

Of course, there are more social media search tools. I’ve only mentioned those that appeared useful to me.  Which tools are you using and would like to recommend?

Post image by striatic

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Track Keywords & Spy On Twitter Conversations with Monitter (6)
• 9 Steps To A Great Start In Friendfeed (12)
• Threadsy – Integrates Your Email and Social Networks (+Invites) (24)
• Send Tweets & Make Video With The New & Improved Twhirl (12)
• Search Google, Yahoo, Bing & Twitter From Your IM Program (16)

Today’s post is all about having fun with quizzes: just a few tools and tips to keep you busy in case you are bored (note: most of the online quizzes you’ll find are just for fun, don’t take them too seriously).

Create your own personality quiz:

Quiz school allows fun and easy-to-use tools to create your own personality quiz:

• Start with creating a title and a description for your quiz. Add relevant tags (tags will be suggested, just start typing);
• Add results: this is what a respondent will get at the end of the quiz. Choose “Add More Result Types” to create as many results as you wish.

• Customize the look and feel of your quiz: choose the color scheme or create a color scheme yourself. Add messages to go before and after the quiz. Set the quiz public or private, (dis)allow comments, etc:

• Choose your quiz category and proceed to the questions.
• Type your question, add possible answers and match each answer with a corresponding result:

• Share your quiz: embed it to your blog or favorite social media profile.

Search for quizzes:

Feeling like taking some random quiz but not sure where to find one? In these cases I usually use the StumbleUpon button and tag search or just turn to Google. Consider using creative search queries to let Google choose the topic for you. A wildcard (*) operator is great for that: use it to substitute one or several words in the query:

• what * are you;
• how * are you;
• “how many * can you”;
• “which * are you”, etc.

Make a difference:

Want to have some fun, train your brains and be useful? Try taking this quiz by Free Rice – for each answer you get right, they claim to donate 10 grains of rice throughout the UN World Food program to help end hunger. In this case, you can justify wasting your time by doing good. And it’s a challenge too: if you get it right, you get a harder question. If you get it wrong, you get an easier question.

Back in our early days, MakeUseOf already published a post about fun online personality tests. Check it out, while some of them quite sound, others pure speculation… but they’re all fun.

Any more tips to have fun with online quizzes? Share them!

Image Credit: peirnet.net

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Yahoo! Games: WordRacer is my Boggle Game of Choice (6)
• Wordle – Become Addicted To RSS Feeds The Fun Way (13)
• Word Bubbles for Dummies. Make your images speak with Kyolo! (10)
• Who are you? What your pig drawing, browser type, fav. drinks, etc. reveal about you! (6)
• Web2.0 Pranks (4)

To explain it clearer, Google tries to guess what other type of information the surfer would also like see based on his or her search query. For example, for “Britney Spears” you’ll see images and videos blended within the search interface and for “downtown Los Angeles” you’ll get local search results (i.e. maps.google.com).

The idea of pulling more data by one-click searching can be expanded. You do not have to limit yourself to the Google search engine only. This time I am listing a few cool FireFox addons that show you more relevant information based on your search query and provides you with more opportunities to browse through.

Add Multiple Search Engines to Google Search Interface

WebMynd offers to search a wealth of search platforms simultaneously with your Google search, by default: Twitter Search, Amazon, YouTube; but you can also add numerous other search options (e.g. Flickr, Wikipedia, Digg, LinkedIn, CNN, etc). The search results will appear right on Google’s results page in the right sidebar:

Additional great features of the page:

• send Tweets directly from your search results asking your friends advice related to your search;
• user-friendly interface: add/hide engines with one click, drag-and-drop ordering of pages.

Integrate Amazon.com and eBay Search:

GoogAzon adds the first ten search results from Amazon and eBay in a collapsed orange bar to the top of your Google results page (works also for Yahoo or MSN / Live search). The results include the title, price, and a mouse-over thumbnail image.

You can also quickly share the results with friends and access the actual Amazon / eBay search results.

Add Reference Information

Google Search Sidebar for FF3 (Greasemonkey plugin) adds relevant results from Wikipedia and Dictionary.com (as well as Flickr, and YouTube) :

See Your Browsing History

Infoaxe is a browser addon (both FireFox and Internet Explorer versions available) that will show your browsing history results based on your Google search term.

Note: it requires registration and access to your private data, i.e. browsing history.

See What Your Facebook Friends Have to Say:

SideStripe offers a handy Google Gadget that integrates with the Google search results page and searches your friends list for your search query.

The tool offers some more functionality (e.g. it invites you to ask your friends’ opinion on what you are searching) but I didn’t invite my friends to use the application, so I can’t say if it works. The search functionality works pretty well though:

Would you like to add more searching functionality or do you think “plain” Google is all you need? Do you use any tools that make Google better? Share your thoughts!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Track Facebook, Twitter, Flickr & Youtube Updates on iPhone (3)
• Shozu – The Mobile Social Networking Hub (12)
• Search Google, Yahoo, Bing & Twitter From Your IM Program (16)
• 3 Ways to See Most Favorited Google Search Result (6)
• Who Needs Photoshop When You Can Have Splashup? (21)

So what to do? I can’t afford the time to learn web design and turn into a professional web developer. Besides, I can’t do everything by myself. Luckily, I’ve recently come across a cool web development tool that allows me to tweak CSS on-the-fly and come up with the ultimate version I feel comfortable with.

The tool is a FireFox addon called FireBug and it is so cool that many web developers use FireFox for the only reason that it can be extended with FireBug. It’s an ultimate Firefox addon for web developers. So in this post I am sharing my amateur’s tricks of creating a web site design with FireBug.

Introduction:

Navigate to the site template you want to edit and activate Firebug: use F12 key for quick access.

You will see the tool open in the lower half of your browser window with 6 tabs: “Console”, “HTML”, “CSS”, “Script”, “Dom”, and “Net”. I’ll be talking about two tabs here: “HTML” and “CSS”.

CSS Tab:

Edit attributes and attribute values

To change an attribute or the value of an attribute, just click on it, and edit it right in the code. The effect of the change will be immediately visible in the browser window above.

Preview colors and images in CSS

Firebug allows amateurs like myself to better understand the CSS by showing me the preview of each visual property:

Easily figure out exact positioning, padding and margins

The tool provides wonderful support for changing numeric values. Simply click on the numeric value you want to change and change it with the numbers on your keyboard – see the effect immediately on the page above and modify the edit if needed.

Let the tool prompt you what property can be used

Highlight the property and use up/down arrow keys on your keyboard to list all allowed CSS properties in alphabetical order.

HTML Tab:

Learn each box properties on-the-fly (margin, border, padding, and content): open HTML tab + Layout to the right and click “Inspect” in the top bar of the tool window. Now you can navigate throughout the page and observe the following:

• each page element in the blue frame;
• the corresponding area in the source code highlighted in blue (HTML tab);
• the box properties visualized (Layout tab).

Firebug’s Layout tab gives you a visual breakdown of each box in the box model and the width of each edge. Additionally, it shows you the width and height of the innermost box, and the x and y offset of the element relative to its parent.

Edit any property right in the layout tab and see the changes live on a page:

A few helpful tips:

• Use Control+F12 (or Command+F12 on Mac) to open Firebug in a separate window.
• Maintain blacklists and whitelists: Firebug lets you keep a list of websites that it should or should not be enabled for. You can browse in two modes – either enable Firebug for all websites except those on the “blacklist”, or disable Firebug for all websites except those on the “whitelist”.
• Get some more help here: FireFox tutorial in simple words.

So as you have seen with FireBug Firefox addon you can create and customize website designs even if you are absolutely unknowledgeable in web design like myself. Of course, FireBug has much broader possibilities than described above, so I’d love you to share more tips and tricks of this awesome tool.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox (4)
• Top 10 Professional Sample Code Websites For Programmers (28)
• Notepad Programming on Steroids for Application Developers (19)
• How To Install Firebug on IE, Safari, Chrome & Opera (22)
• Top 5 Sites To Learn CSS Online (32)

What’s more, the search plugins option can be configured in multiple ways and few people are really aware of how much fun they can have with this functionality.

Here are some tips and tricks to show how you can play with your FireFox search plugins. Plus few links to make your own firefox search plugin.

Add a search engine to your search plugins

Normally you won’t have any problems with that. Just navigate to the site, click on your search plugins icon and the tool will invite you to add the site to the list:

You will be able to use the search engine after selecting it from the list. You will also be able to search any word on a page: select any word and right-click – you’ll be offered to search for it using the currently active search engine:

If you are not offered to add a site to your search plugins:

In this case, you can either search for it using a search plugins directory or create a search plugin yourself.

I have already described how to create a search plugin for any site:

In essence, the steps are as follows:

• Search the site;
• Copy the search URL string;
• Substitute the search term you used for {searchTerms};
• Complete the fields as shown above and you are done!

Alternatively, you may just create a keyword search for it. It takes about 5 seconds to do that.

What if the site you need doesn’t have the search platform of its own?

In this case, Google search is your best friend. I am sure you know you can search any site with Google (and Yahoo!). Just type [site:yourdomain.com search term] in Google or Yahoo and you will see the list of pages for your search term. Just copy the search URL, change search term for {searchTerms} and follow the guide above.

Now, the beauty of Google search is in its advanced search. With it you can create a search plugin for almost all your needs:

• Search multiple sites with one click – create a search plugin for the following Google search: [site:domain1.com OR site:domain2.com OR site:domain3.com]. You can add as many sites as you want and you will see search results from all of them (or any of them if not all of them contain the search term you put);
• Search for most recent entries – use Google advanced date search (that adds as_qdr= to the search results URL);
• Search for words in a title / URL – create a search plugin using the following search pattern [site:yoursite.com inurl:term] / [site:yoursite.com intitle:term];
• Search for specified file types – add filetype: to your search (examples of extensions you can use:pdf, html, doc, xls, ppt, etc).

What cool FireFox plugins have already been created for me?

Here are just a few search plugins I am using:

• Peers to see search results before even searching.
• Google without Wikipedia – to get rid of wiki results in Google SERPs (in case you are tired of seeing wiki results all over the search results pages).
• TinyURL – to quickly and easily create short URLs (if you are at Twitter a lot).
• Google unpersonalized search – to turn off personalized search in Google (in case you want to compare your personalized search results with what others see).

How do you use the search plugins functionality? What are your favorite ones? Please share!

Post image: picsearch.com

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Three Firefox Security & Privacy Add-ons that can Co-exist (23)
• SmarterFox Makes You More Productive in FireFox (5)
• Five Steps to a Better Search Experience in Firefox 3 (10)
• Change How Your Favorite Websites Look on Firefox with Customize Your Web (6)
• 5 Tools to Track How Much Time you Waste while Online (41)

Screenshots are “infographics” of today’s web – they make information easier to understand and guides easier to follow. You’ll see them on each and every blog – no wonder screen capturing applications are so numerous.

In fact, screen capture tools are so plenty that you may easily get lost which one to choose and why. That’s why I decided to make a simplified guide on which features to look for and which tools I personally find useful.

How To Make Funny “fake” Screenshots

SourceEditor is a nifty FireFox plugin that allows you to easily edit any page. No HTML knowledge is required – the process is really easy.

1. Install the addon (compatible with FireFox 3)

2. Navigate to the page you want to edit. [Example] Here is the part of the FireFox addon page that will be edited below:

3. Activate the addon by clicking its icon in the status bar.

4. Hover over the part of the page you want to edit (it will be framed as shown below):

5. Right-click on the framed area and choose “Edit Source”. The area will then become available for editing:

6. You are done! Now press “Print Screen” on your keyboard or use any screen capturing software you prefer and make a screen shot of the edited page:

Another FireFox addon that can do the same is feature-rich Web Developer FireFox extension but it requires at least some HTML knowledge. Choose “Edit HTML” under “Miscellaneous” menu in the toolbar and you can edit page:

How To Take Full Page Screenshot

PageSaver FireFox addon. It adds a small icon to your address bar that lets you easily choose the screenshot properties (alternatively you can access same settings by right-clicking on the page). It takes only a couple of clicks to take full page screenshots.

FastStone Capture is a desktop application for Windows which captures the scrolling window and instantly opens it in the built-in basic image editor.

We have previously reviewed Paparazzi! for Mac only that also allows to create full webpage screenshots.

How to Take Partial Screenshots

There are numerous tools that allows you to take partial screen shots of the page. My favorite one is Jing (which I found thanks to a MakeUseOf review). It works with Mac and Windows and has both free and paid editions. Its advantages over other similar tools include:

• High quality of the screenshots;
• Tools allowing to easily share the images.
• Easy-to-use basic image editing.
• Partial screen capture.

Just run the program, choose “capture”, select the area to capture, choose “Image” and you will be taken to the “Preview” window where you can preview, edit and save the image (all images are saved in the .png format; more options are available with the paid edition):

Flickr and WEBIMAGER is another free desktop utility that captures the selected portion of the screen and has other cool options:

• Upload images to your Flickr account;
• Use quick and basic image editor (resize, rotate, insert cursor);
• Quickly launch Paint for other editing options.

How To Capture the Mouse Cursor

Surprisingly and sadly the “Print Screen” keyboard button as well as most cool free screenshot making tools can’t capture the cursor. As a blogger I often need this feature to show the place on a page I am talking about.

One free desktop tool that captures the screen with cursor is IrfanView – it has only basic features but being simple and easy is what I most often want to see in any tool.

Please share your tricks to make awesome screenshots!

Great MUO posts for additional reading:

• Take & Manage Awesome Screenshots on Windows, Linux and Mac;
• 4 Cool Firefox Extensions To Capture Screens;

Image credit: penwith.gov.uk

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• ZScreen – Make Screen Captures & Upload To Imageshack (15)
• Yolink – A Search Accelerator for Deep Internet Research (7)
• WIN A Free One Year Subscription To Extensoft! (56)
• View A Multi-Page Article On One Single Page With PageZipper (14)
• Upload Images To Photobucket Using Firefox (8)

The concept is simple and genius: you can bookmark any page for further reference, quickly find it when you need it using the combination of tags you associated the story with; moreover, you can access your bookmarks from any computer because they are stored online and share your favorite web pages with anyone.

It sounds so simple and yet so convenient that it is hard to imagine someone not using it! Of course, like any service, it needs some tricks so that anyone can customize it to match his or her specific needs and personality.

Today I am going to share the set of tools that help me make the most of Delicious bookmarks.

Organize and access your bookmarks

1. The improved official Delicious FireFox extension offers the comprehensive collection of tools for easier access and better management of your bookmarks. With it you can:

• Bookmark to your browser and to your Delicious account simultaneously;
• Access your recent bookmarks from the toolbar;
• Bookmark any page with one click on an icon (either in the toolbar or in the status bar);
• Search, organize, sort, access your bookmarks from the sidebar;
• Sort your saved URLs by site, by date, by popularity (most visited), by last visited and alphabetically.

2. Add sorting capabilities to your online bookmarks – use Sort Visible Links script (you should have Greasemonkey Firefox addon to install it).

3. Delicer is a Delicious browser. Basically, it’s a desktop application that shows you the list of your tags in the sidebar, the list of your bookmarks for each tag (plus the date when it was saved) and the actual page if you click on a bookmark. The tool also allows you to :

• search through your tags;
• search for the selected tag on Technorati and Youtube;
• read Delicious Filetype (mp3, pdf, etc) and Media (video, audio) feeds.
• synchronize Internet Explorer favorites vs. Delicious.com

4. FavThumbs (no need to login – just give it any Delicious username) visualizes the bookmarks by showing you page thumbshots in a grid or carousel. It will also display the member’s tags in the sidebar for you to narrow the search:

Analyze your Delicious bookmarks

5. Revealicious is a web based tool that helps you better understand your own web preferences by organizing and visualizing your tags. One of its tools – Grouper – organizes your tags into 3 sections based on how often you use them.

Another tool by the same service called SpaceNav visualizes the relations between your tags: by clicking on a tag, you’ll see it represented in a circle and its related tags – in neighboring circles. By hovering over a circle, you’ll be able to see related tags highlighted in the sidebar.

6. Delicioussoup (this one is rather for fun than for enhanced usability) lets you analyze your bookmarks by visualizing tag relations in the form of soup blobs. Once you click on a blob, it will show you related tags / blobs and display its stats. For example, for ’shopping’ I got: “Shopping: Used 15 times, for 16 posts, has 12 related”

Search Delicious bookmarks

7. Built-in search is the best way to search Delicious by tags. If you need to search for several tags at a time, just type them all in a row without commas. You can also access Delicious search instantly with the search plugin that comes together with the official extension mentioned above.

8. You can also use this handy bookmarklet to access Delicious search from any page: Search Multiple Tags – prompts for you to enter multiple tag names to search for pages bookmarked by everyone.

To make this Delicious toolbox even bigger, why don’t you tell us in the comments what Delicious tools you use?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 17 Greasemonkey Scripts to Diversify Social Media Experience (7)
• Dump Delicious And Dig(g) Deeper With Twine (1)
• Del.icio.us – Save/Share/Search/Discover Favorite Links (8)
• 5 Tools to Harvest the Potential of Your Firefox Bookmarks (27)
• 3 Ways to See Most Favorited Google Search Result (6)

I’ve been searching for ways to enhance FireFox’s browsing history feature and have come up with a few extensions that also adds some fun to the process of checking back on your past findings.

Infoaxe

Infoaxe will ask you to create an account with them to record browsing history.

Your web memory is stored on the Infoaxe servers. This allows you to access your web memory from any computer. You don’t need the toolbar to search your web memory (although only if you have the toolbar will pages get added to your web memory).

Your memory is private to you and protected by your Infoaxe account and password. This ensures that your web memory is private to you even when you share a computer with another user.

They offer both FireFox and Internet Explorer toolbars. The toolbar will show you the extension status (”Record is on/off”) and will give you a quick access to the browser history search.

Infoaxe also integrates with Delicious allowing you to import all your bookmarks from there. Besides, it is integrated into Google search results showing your visited pages based on the Google search term.

WebMynd

WebMynd lets you play back and search your browsing history. The extension inserts a small tab in the FireFox status bar showing you the current status (”WebMynd Blocked“, “WebMynd Recording“, “WebMynd Stopped“) and a tiny icon linking to your web surfing history.

The browsing history can be played back in a grid or a reel. The interface is really clear but you can also look through the help pages for more information.

History Submenus

History Submenus is meant to improve the history menu and make it more useful. With it you will be able to view your history via History menu – the extension adds a submenu “Today” and lists all sites visited on the current day there:

ThumbStrips

ThumbStrips is a Firefox extension that creates a filmstrip of thumbnails so you can see your history and stop guessing at page names in the history sidebar. The addon can be accessed via the icon in the status bar. You can stop recording your history using the same icon.

The extension allows you to insert comments for any thumbnail to record your ideas for future reference. It also has a very handy search feature that works surprisingly well.

Unfortunately, all the above addons are far from being perfect. Both the searching and organizing abilities have been enhanced but still remain limited. Do you use any hacks to make the most of your browsing history?

Post image by Lordcolus

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Three Firefox Security & Privacy Add-ons that can Co-exist (23)
• SmarterFox Makes You More Productive in FireFox (5)
• Make Your Own FireFox Search Plugins & Other Tips (8)
• Change How Your Favorite Websites Look on Firefox with Customize Your Web (6)
• 5 Tools to Track How Much Time you Waste while Online (41)

Use these sites to warn prospective employees against joining the company. Or just share your experience with others and let them help you solve your problems.

Telonu is a new website that invites anyone to “Rave, Rant, and Rate” about their business thus informing prospective employees as well as providing co-workers a place to gossip anonymously.

WorkRant is a site that invites users to “release your job stress and have a workrant”. The site interface is dead simple. What’s really great about the site is that you do not need to register: just provide your name, location, job title and rant! Beware: the site is full of obscene words.

BossBitching is similar to the above one. You can post your sad workplace stories with no registration required. It remains unclear to me how to rate the stories though (each story has some ratings but I couldn’t find where to put them).

JobVent invites people to post negative (and positive) experiences on their job allowing thus for the stress release and also warning people who are going to start a new job. Company reviews are submitted along with ratings that are used to calculate the rank for each company submitted.

The site participants are asked to keep in mind that:

• no company deserves the lowest ratings in every category;
• negative ratings should be adequately grounded;
• profanity is not allowed;
• do not post names or initials, just the company name;
• each company can be reviewed only once by one individual.

Axelist invites people to share negative experiences with any kind of possible contacts with bosses being obviously the most popular of them.

Apart from the detailed complaint, the website provides some of the offenders’ details: their age and location. The site explains its benefits the following way:

File your complaint and watch Axelist expose and put your villain on the spot. We will post and promote your story and even go beyond the Internet to help you make your case.

HateMyJob category at a social voting site allows you to share stories about you getting fired or read other people’s negative experiences and thus release your job stress.

RateMyEmployer is a Canadian site offering users to rate their job places based on a number of criteria: values and corporate culture, work space (layout), teamwork and cooperation, schedule, work load and holidays. To rate or add an employer you even won’t have to register.

Criticat offers to “rate your company and share your workplace experiences”. Unlike others similar sites, it seems to promote a bit of a different concept that appeals to me: it offers not just to aimlessly rant but to try to improve the situation:

Do you feel you have a great solution to a problem in your company but not sure if everyone else will agree with you? Come to Criticat, create a poll anonymously, build consensus and cause the change.

JobBite allows you to post job reviews and rate your overall work experience and your salary. You are also invited to describe the workplace culture. The site requires no registration, so a job review won’t take you more than a few seconds.

HowsThatJob claims to provide “job reviews from real people”. The site allows you to post anonymous reviews with no registration required.

Note: I am not 100% advocative of the above services. My main concern is that they are completely anonymous and so easy to use that a company or an employer is in no way protected from unfair accusations. I am also not sure of the legal side of the issue: are these sites allowed to publish unconfirmed rants?

I am also surprised at the number of these sites that pop up. None of them have really risen to become a well-known leader so far. But they all seem to be fairly popular!

Would you use these sites? Please share your thoughts!

Post image credit: steynian.wordpress.com

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Top 5: Addictive and Challenging Web Games (15)
• The Best Online Flash Games (29)
• MUO Games – The Best Websites to Play Flash Games (24)
• makeuseof extra #8 (0)
• How To Quickly Hide Your Web Surfing From The Boss! (19)

Below I am listing the most awesome sources of both user and expert reviews you can use when trying to locate the best price and feature overview of the item you plan to buy.

User reviews:

• PriceGrabber offers a huge variety of handy features. You can compare prices, add and view others’ ratings and reviews. The site also has a great search platform allowing you to refine search by any product features and sort results by price or by brand.
• AlaTest offers both expert and user reviews. The best feature I adore is the “Review Analysis” that gives a brief overview of all reviews listed for the product. Here is a sample review summary for Apple iPod Nano:

• PriceRunner offers both users’ and experts’ reviews. “Expert” reviews stand for reviews aggregated from other product review sites (AlaTest, I4u, etc among them). The site also allows users to post video reviews and watch reviews created by other members.

• BizRate is one of the largest resources of user reviews. Overall ratings are represented by cute smiles giving you a quick idea of the item’s reputation.

Expert reviews:

• DigitalTrends provides well-detailed expert reviews in a number of categories: car audio, cell phones, laptops, etc.
• VNunet is another source for good expert reviews.
• CNet provides both expert and user reviews. The best thing about it is that you can find video reviews for almost any product. It also allows price and feature comparisons.
• T3 lists short reviews and summarizes them with “We Hate”, “We Love” and “We Say” points.
• LaptopMag provides mobile hardware and software product reviews.
• HowStuffWorks follows each review with expert ratings, scaling value, performance, usability and features.

• Star-TechCentral starts each review with a handy feature overview.
• PCWorld follows huge detailed expert reviews with user comments. It also offers a brief price comparison powered by PriceGrabber.
• Trusted Reviews offer quite a few high quality photos for each product review.
• TechRadar lists great hardware and software reviews. It also invites users to submit their own reviews and offers a wide variety of product photos.
• EverythingUSB (as the name suggests) reviews all things USB: USB software, USB hardware and USB deals.
• TechTree provides a huge database of expert reviews. The review starts with overall ratings and core features: good and bad ones. The reviews are followed by user comments.

• PCAdvisor provides huge reviews for hardware and software.
• PCMag Product Guides reviews new products, software and service providers.
• TechReviewSource provides long in-depth reviews.
• ComputerActive is a UK site providing short to-the-point reviews.
• PCReview is another pretty cool UK site decorating their reviews with large product images.
• PCAdvisor ends each review with a verdict which usually contains very useful information.
• LordPercy lists well-grounded expert reviews for most recent products in categories varying from software to GPS.

Do you know of any other sources for user and expert user reviews?   If so, please let us know about them in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Choosing A Laptop: 9 Great Review Sites (7)
• The 8 Best Book Review Sites (18)
• Review & Discuss Unusual And Cool Gadgets with Gdgt (7)
• HowTo: Sell Old Cell Phones and iPods (9)
• Compare Online Prices & Reviews On Your iPhone With SnapTell (5)

(1) it is a must to check the Upcoming ‘Most Diggs’ section as stories hitting the front pages are usually 24 hours old (so you risk missing some important news).

(2) Checking Digg daily may be addictive; on the other hand, you can just grow tired of it.

To prevent this, check out some cool entertaining ways to track Digg activity.

1. BigSpy (By Digg labs)

is the most fun way to spy on Digg’s submissions: the font size represents the story popularity:

Other Digg labs projects include:

• Stack visualizes individual users’ votes as Tetris-like falling bricks, creating a bar graph of popular headlines that grows in real time.
• Arc is a constantly growing circle around which stories are arranged as users digg them.
• Swarm represents how individual users cluster around popular stories: when the same user votes for two stories, a tentacle reaches out and tugs those “cells” closer together.

2. Diggtris

is an online Tetris-like game based on dugg stories. The size and color of the blocks depend on the category the story belongs to and the total number of diggs the story has.

3. Digglicious

keeps track of upcoming and popular stories at Digg, Delicious and Reddit. The best thing about the tool that it is easy and keeps all information on one page.

4. Comment Spy

tracks Digg comments and updates in real time:

5. Wheel of Upcoming

visualizes upcoming stories in the form of a wheel: you can rotate it back and forth, stop it anywhere, click and see the submission details.

6. DiggGraphr

represents each submission by a rectangle: the area occupied by each rectangle is proportioned to the number of Diggs relative to the other stories in that channel.

• By hovering over any rectangle you can see the story description;
• Clicking on any rectangle sends you to the submission page;
• Right-clicking lets you choose to either go to the submission page or to the story source page.

7. DiggTop

is a pretty cool desktop app that requires Adobe® AIR™ runtime. It gives a handy compact version of Digg (list of stories to the left and description to the right). You can choose to view the submission only in a few (or one) preferred categories or subcategories.

Mark mentioned DiggTop in his Digg tools article here.

8. Digg’s Top Stories

is a plugin for the Google Desktop Sidebar. It keeps track of the most recent hot Digg stories and displays the story title, short description and time it went hot. When clicked, the story description expands and the submission link appears.

How do you track Digg? Please share your thoughts!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Digg.com – Brings your Favourite News Stories to You (3)
• Create Your Own Digg-Like Social News Site With Slinkset (10)
• Ways to Stay on Top of The News (13)
• How to Track Breaking News Alerts Online With Twitter (5)
• Find Out What’s Hot Right Now On The Web With OneRiot (5)

Below I am listing 17 Greasemonkey scripts to diversify your social media experience (for Digg, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious).

Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon, which allows to edit the way web looks and works with the help of wide variety of already available scripts. To use the scripts you find here, install the Greasemonkey extension first.

Digg

(Use Digg scripts with caution as some of them can get you banned from the site)

• Digg Larger Images on Mouseover – enlarges images on Digg home page (including the users’ avatars) when hovered over;
• Digg AdBlocker (as the name suggests) removes adverts from Digg (or this one moves the ad spot down the page);
• DiggRatingExtender shows extended Digg submission and comment history: up and down diggs as well as the total rating. This might be really interesting to see how many people like / disliked the comment:

• Digg User Topics Cloud adds a tag cloud to each user’s profile based on his recent submissions (useful for evaluating if the person is worth a follow):

Twitter

• Twitter Friends Bio at a Glance – shows bio text, following count and a web link for all friends and followers on the Twitter friends list.

• Retweet This – adds a retweet button to the end of each twitter entry. The button opens in a new tab with the full retweeted message (including @member);
• Twitter friend name helper: suggests the friend name after you type @

StumbleUpon

• Stumbleupon Avatar Bubbles – adds some fun to StumbleUpon by allowing you to see larger versions of your friends’ avatars when hovering over;

• Preview StumbleUpon Posts – enables Preview functionality in StumbleUpon forums and contact pages and also warns you if you try to navigate away from a post without submitting it.
• SU Visual Editor Plus enhances the built-in SU editor by matching the background color, adjusting the its width and displaying images correctly;
• SU2Bookmarks (found under “You can also” section in the sidebar) scans your favorites and generates a bookmarks.html file. You may import this file into any web browser as a list of bookmarks. Favorites will be sorted in folders by their SU topic.

Reddit

• Reddit Zebra-izer adds color to Reddit rows for better usability:

• Reddit – Undeletion: recovers deleted comments and users on reddit.
• Reddit Filter Plus filters or highlights submissions by user, domain or keyword. Tired of some submission topics?  Or of some specific user’s submissions?  Or of some domain? Now you can filter those out! Alternatively, you can use any color to highlight submissions by any user, using any keywords or belonging to any domain. The script is easily managed right from your Reddit “Preferences” page.

Delicious.com

• Sort Visible Links (as you might have guessed) sorts your bookmarks by title, URL or popularity.
• Show Delicious Images: looks at each delicious image link and shows the image on the page.
• Fav.icio.us3 adds a favicon to each Delicious listing:

What Greasemonkey scripts do you use for your social media sites? Tell us the links to them in the comments so everyone can benefit!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Get Incredible Web & Image Suggestions With inSuggest (4)
• Delicious Toolbox : Organize Your Web with Delicious (22)
• 3 Ways to See Most Favorited Google Search Result (6)
• Stumbleupon Tools To Stumble Around The Web (14)
• Dump Delicious And Dig(g) Deeper With Twine (1)

Therefore optimizing my browser for search was the first thing I did when installing it. Since then I’ve been looking for more and more ways to access the search features easily and instantly in FireFox.

Now let’s see which methods I have come up with to make my FireFox search-friendly:

1. Install the Google Toolbar

The most obvious way to access Google search.

Besides allowing you to access Google search instantly, it also has a number of other handy features:

• search suggestions (based on your search history and/or popular queries);
• search multiple verticals (image search, news search, blog search, etc);
• search term highlight;
• spell check, etc.

Its major drawback is that it only allows you to search Google (and there are other search engines and sites you might want to search).

2. Take advantage of FireFox search plugins

You can search the huge directory of search plugins or create your own (and that’s where your own imagination is your only limit). Let’s take a quick look at how you can create your own search plugin for any search engine or site you refer to daily:

• search the site you are creating the plugin for;
• copy the query string;
• change your search term in the query string for {searchTerms};
• go to mycroft.mozdev.org and complete the form as shown below;

• test (install and perform a few searches) your plugin before submitting;
• click “generate” and you are done!

As you understand you can include any search parameters, use advanced search or play to your heart’s content to create the search that fully satisfies your needs.

3. Use FireFox “smart keywords” feature

(it allows you to search right from the address bar).

To create a FireFox smart keyword you need to:

• Search any site / search engine you are interested in [keyword];
• Copy the URL of the query string;
• Substitute keyword in the query string for %s;
• Go: Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks => New Bookmark;
• Create new search bookmark the following way:

Alternatively, you can go to YubNub, install its search plugin and either use multiple quick searches already created there or create your own ones using a simple wizard.

4. Use The CyberSearch FireFox plugin (download it here).

Another way to search from the address bar.  It supports multiple Google services and also displays your related search history (again, it’s limited to Google only):

To access different Google services, use these commands before the search query:

• gweb – Google general search;
• gloc – Google local search;
• gvid – Google video search;
• gblog – Google blog search;
• gnews – Google news search;
• gbook – Google book search;
• gimg – Google image search;
• gpat – Google patent search.

5. Tweak your FireFox about:config settings.

Yet another way to search from the address bar. (tip by FireFox facts).

• type into your address bar about:config;
• filter keyword.URL;
• modify the string in there and replace it with your preferred engine search string, e.g. http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=

6. Use Search Bookmarklets

Use search bookmarklets to access your preferred search engine by selecting any term on a page:

• Google;
• Google Blog search;
• Yahoo!;
• Exalead;
• Ask

or to easily switch between search engines:

• @Google – perform Google search;
• @Yahoo – try Yahoo search;
• @Exalead – search on Exalead.

7. Search Highlighted Words With Multiple Engines

Search the highlighted word using multiple search engines: KallOut

Kallout is a new awesome desktop application that allows you to search for any highlighted term (integrates with FireFox, Outlook, txt files, etc). With it you can choose between multiple verticals (general search, shopping portals, reference resources, etc) and search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live, Twitter, etc).

8. Search The Web (Or Any Website) With One Searchy

An experimental FireFox addon (thus you will have to login to install it). Just hit a shortcut (by default: Ctrl+Shift+K) and search without having to leave the current page. Search results will appear as you are typing your search term. To search any site, type @ before the search term and you will be shown results from the current domain:

Have I missed anything? Please add your own way to search with the FireFox browser!

Image credits: Fun with FireFox

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Zigtag – A Web App For Extreme Tagging (BETA Invites Included!) (4)
• Yolink – A Search Accelerator for Deep Internet Research (7)
• Welcome to My Firefox: Extensions, Themes, Setup (14)
• Tweak Your Daily Searching With These Browser Bookmarklets (9)
• Take Screenshots From Your Browser with Kwout7 (8)

If “yes” is the answer to both of the questions, then today’s post on what’s hot online and how to spot internet hot trends is right for you!

Use meme trackers to spot daily hot trends:

• Google Blogsearch that was turned into a meme tracker only a few months ago tracks memes throughout all topics and naturally has the biggest index to check.
• Megite separates memes into categories (technology, entertainment, business, science, etc) and often publishes completely irrelevant memes in each.
• Techmeme is the most popular technology meme tracker which is known to be the fastest to catch hot tech news.

Use blog search engines to spot daily hot trends:

• Technorati Popular gives the list of top searches and top blogs (that have become hot in the past 48 hours).
• BlogPulse key phrases allows for a “trend this” option that graphically represents the hot trend history.

Use search engines to spot daily hot trends:

• Yahoo Buzz. Besides giving a list of the most popular terms, the service reveals the daily buzz score (i.e. ”the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read“) and the move (i.e. how fast this has become popular).
• Google hottest trends gives a huge list of the most popular search terms. The best thing about the service is that it is constantly updated throughout the day.
• MSN A-list lists daily popular headlines, top videos and movies and even most searched people and sport stories.
• Aol.com hot searches shows you its “hot searches” of the previous day. They also add their own commentary to each search term explaining what the buzz is about.
• Top Ask.com updates you on the most popular terms in general search, news search and even on most searched movies (past week). It will also show you top advancing searches (those that are the fastest to get popular).

Use social media sites to spot daily hot trends:

• Check the front pages of social voting sites: Digg, Reddit, etc.
• Delicious displays the huge cloud of most popular tags. Popacular lists the most popular Delicious bookmarks (also works for Twitter hot discussions).
• StumbleUpon lists its popular tags in the form of two tag clouds: one is for most recent topics and the other – for most popular “all time”.
• PopURLs aggregates the list of popular discussions from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz and others.
• Flickr lists topics that have become popular in the last 24 hours, over last week or have always been hot.
• Deletionpedia (not exactly about the social media but still about discussions) offers you the list of most controversial (most discussed and then deleted) topics in Wikipedia.

Use Twitter tools to spot daily hot trends:

• Tweet Meme, as the domain name suggests, tracks and displays Twitter memes in a handy threaded style.
• Twit Scoop shows “what’s hot right now” in the form of a tag cloud and the “Hot trends” list.
• TwittUrly displays hottest memes in a Digg-like style (where Tweets = Votes).

Use ecommerce sites to spot daily hot trends:

• Amazon tag cloud shows which tags Amazon customers use to classify products.
• EBay pulse displays popular eBay searches.

Have I missed anything? Please add your method of spotting popular internet trends!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 5 Websites to Check Out Latest Buzz and Viral Videos (7)
• Find Out What’s Hot Right Now On The Web With OneRiot (5)
• Discover the Hottest Top Internet Searches with Chromomulator (9)
• Ways to Stay on Top of The News (13)
• The New RSS Feed Reader Wars! (41)

It is interesting to watch this web niche evolve. Social media has brought a new generation of green resources. You can now be a green news source yourself (by participating in green social networks), become a part of huge green communities (by frequenting environmental blogs) or even watch green news using Twitter!

Let’s have a look at a few examples of new creative environmentally friendly resources to help you go green.

User-Generated Green News:

I Do the Right Thing is a user generated resource where “you can get unfiltered information about the impacts of companies on” the environment.

The green stories are rated based on the impact they produce on the society and/or environment. The process of voting for the story is as follows: you should define the impact to be positive, negative or neutral.

The companies are also rated based on the overall score of all stories they were mentioned in.

Care 2 is a green social networking and bookmarking site allowing users to submit and vote for green tips, news and apps.

Besides being a great news resource, it offers quite a few cool green features: you can send “leaves” to the members inspiring you or find support for your own cause by starting a petition.

Green Deals Daily will appeal to all conscious online bargain hunters. The site allows users to submit, comment and vote for online green deals. What a treat for those who want to both save money and help the environment!

Best Green News Blogs:

Environmental Graffiti will appeal to all those who love beautiful imaginary. The site raises environmental awareness by posting impressive pictures of the Nature.

Tree Hugger is the most well-known green blog on the internet, I guess. Besides updating the blog with multiple news-worthy posts daily, the site also offers a very active forum, green guides and even a green job board.

The Good Human (as the name suggests) is more focused on the human aspect: what each of us can do to help save the green planet.

Green Options is an all-in-one resource of green news aggregating stories from all over the environmentally friendly sites and blogs.

Ecorazzi takes a more entertaining perspective by posting green gossip and sensational stories.

Viropop is good for all who loves online video. Besides being a green user-generated video-sharing community, it also maintains a green video blog.

Green Micro-Blogs

Lighter Footstep Twitter Profile will real-time update you of new green tips and articles.

GreenerIdeal is another cool green Twitter micro-blog to follow.

Ecopreneurist micro-blogs on news and advice on sustainable and social entrepreneurship.

GreenNews focuses on environment related news.

How green are you? Do you frequent green websites? Please share your list!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Tools, Apps and Bots to Improve your Twitter Experience (31)
• Scoopler – Cool Real Time Search Tool for Twitter (12)
• How to Track Breaking News Alerts Online With Twitter (5)
• How To Save Printer Ink & Make It Last Longer (18)
• 5 Ways To Reduce The Power Consumption Of Your Computer (16)

A bookmarklet can be a good alternative to a FireFox addon as it is easier to organize and backup (as a usual bookmark), faster to install (all you need is just grab a link and drag it into your bookmarks toolbar) and usually compatible with multiple browsers.

As one who searches daily (and I’d even say constantly), I am mostly interested in various ways to customize my searching and using search bookmarklets is one such way.

Easily switch between search engines: if you failed to find anything in Google, for example, switch to Exalead or Yahoo (all opens in the same tab):

• @Google – perform Google search;
• @Yahoo – try Yahoo search;
• @Exalead – search on Exalead.

Search for the selected text: select a term on a page and send a query to one of the search engines (opens in the same tab):

• Google;
• Google Blog search;
• Yahoo!;
• Exalead;
• Ask.

Search dictionaries and reference sources: select text on the current page and search its meaning and definitions:

• Wikipedia – find a wiki article for the highlighted term;
• Acronym finder – learn what a highlighted acronym stands for;
• Urban Dictionary – find a slang variation of the highlighted word;
• Google definition: highlight a term on page and get the definition from Google

Customize your Google search - just a few tweaks specifically for Google search (there might be more but I failed to find them useful enough):

• Gf=0: change number of search results to 100;
• filter=0: removes Google result clustering;
• Search within this domain – for sites that lack the search option of their own (based on Google site: advanced search operator) select a term and it will search for it in Google within current domain only.

Create your own search bookmarklet: use this cool tool that allows you to create a search bookmarklet and customize its behavior.

Note: the site allows to create a bookmarklet for an impressive number of search engines (many of them do not work though).

Sources:

• Search bookmarklets;
• Jesse’s bookmarklets;
• GoogleSystem.

Note: all the above bookmarklets have been tested on FireFox 3.0.4. Please let me know in the comments if any of them failed to work on any other browser.

Please share your favorite search bookmarklets that I missed out!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• View A Multi-Page Article On One Single Page With PageZipper (14)
• Safari Search Plugins Showdown: Glims vs Inquisitor [Mac Only] (13)
• Manage Your Bookmarks & Reading List with Instapaper (7)
• Making Use Of Some Bookmarklets (21)
• Make Your Own FireFox Search Plugins & Other Tips (8)

How can you make all your friends happy? Where can you find inspiration? How can you think of unique presents?

Luckily we have the internet today that can answer all your questions. Here are 50 resources for holiday gift inspiration:

Take Advantage of General Gift Guides and Wizards:

Christmas gift ideas for her, for men, for kids, for parents and so on.

• My Gift Guide is a social bookmarking site allowing its members to post and vote for gift ideas.
• Gift Girl helps to choose the gift by choosing the occasion, price range, the relation to the person.
• Savvy Auntie has developed a great gift wizard with sleek interface which turns the gift choosing onto real fun.
• FindGift.com offers an easy to use gift wizard that helps to choose a perfect gift for anyone.
• Surprise.com lists gift ideas by category, gift type, the recipient and occasion.
• Wellhaven.com gift ideas for “elderly citizens.”
• Gifts.com has a huge database of gifts for everyone and for any occasion. You can browse gifts by a recipient’s interest, by gender, by occasion, by personality, etc.

Giving the Social Media Way:

Send “actual gifts to virtual places” (remember how Pay Pal works? TigerBow does the same with gifts: send a real gift to an email address).

Earn $100 for Christmas presents by being greedy or needy.

Make all your FaceBook friends happy:

• SocialFlowers.com lets FaceBook members send each other flowers.
• Buy and send music (either in digital or physical format) to your friends via Music Gifts.
• Needdit FB application: send your FaceBook friends virtual Amazon presents.
• Free Gifts – a FaceBook app allowing you to send all your FB friends cute virtual presents.

Don’t forget about your Twitter buddies: Tweet Gift allows to send gifts to fellow Twitters.

Package and Decorate Gifts Creatively

• FTD.com sells professionally decorated gift baskets.
• NashvilleWraps.com offers a huge choice of gift packaging: gift boxes, candy boxes, paper bags, plastic bags, tissue paper, ribbon and bows.
• HarryAndDavid.com allows to decorate your gifts with beautiful towers, gift baskets, floral decor, etc.
• Delightful Deliveries offer a huge range of gift baskets for any occasion.
• Wrap Art offers plenty of unique ideas on how to wrap your gift creatively.
• DunWoodyBooth – creative gift packaging.

Choose Home Decor Gifts:

• Terry’s Village offers home decor, accents, holiday decorations and accessories to decorate your home for an occasion.
• Collections Etc.: unique gifts, home and garden decor, and house wares.
• Demdaco.com offers great home decor gifts ideas.

Let Your Gifts Make Someone Happy & Serve a Good Purpose

• JustGive.Org: the one-stop destination of “charitable giving”:
• Eco-friendly floral options: California Organic Flowers offer a huge range of organic flowers.
• TheFindGreen allows to both find great gifts and participate in a green initiative.
• Allgreen Wedding allows to choose among numerous eco-friendly merchants to buy green presents.
• ChangingThePresent.org offers to make gifts “that make a difference”, i.e. give a present and make a donation at the same time.

Personalize Your Gifts:

• Your Gift Label allows you to create customized labels for spirits.
• PoetryGift.com offers to personalize your unique gifts – love poems and personalized poetry for an anniversary, baptism, birthday, wedding, etc.
• PhotoWorks.com: shares personalized photos and books.
• Scrapblog.com: creates personalized scrapbooks with your photos, video and thousands of creative elements.
• Zazzle allows you to design your gift the way you like it.

Gifts For Reawakening the Spirits:

• Isabella Catalog: books, gifts and other inspirations.
• Do you have Catholic friends? Getfed provides a gift catalog for Catholic gifts, books, bibles, rosaries, artwork and church supplies.
• SimpleTruths.com: corporate gift books.
• Romantic gifts offers to choose among ” 450 love-enhancing items”.

Gift Cards, Greeting Cards, E-cards:

• Current Catalog lists greeting cards and also offers gift wrapping services.
• Gift Zinger offers to choose gift cards with the help of a handy gift wizard (based on the recipient’s gender, age, gift category and occasion).
• American Greetings offers a huge collection of free greeting cards.
• BlueMountain.com offers e-cards as well as beautiful printable cards.
• Plaxo allows you to edit their e-cards and gives helpful editing ideas.
• Invitation Box provides you with the whole wealth of ideas on creating a party invitation.
• LeaninTree.com: greeting cards, e-cards, and gifts for all your needs.

Collectibles and Hard to Find Gifts:

• Go Collect: a huge resource of collectibles – retired or hard to find products. You can browse through existing catalog or order any exclusive collectible.
• CollectiblesToday sells unique collectibles, jewelry and gifts.

Don’t Forget About Your Friends’ Kids!

• OneStepAhead.com offers huge choice of cute gifts for children.
• AnneGeddes.com – designer baby pictures and clothes – “the perfect gifts for new and growing families”

A Few More Gift-Related Tips:

• Check out this last year’s post on how to give both free and useful (life-improving) gifts;
• Learn how to organize your gifts (if you are going to give and receive a lot during the holidays);
• Buy nothing for Christmas and still give awesome presents.

Where online do you do your Christmas shopping? Any unique places you would like to add to the list?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 7 Online Wishlists to Help You This Holiday Season (7)
• Roblox – A Cool Lego-Based Free Virtual World for Kids (22)
• Preschool Online Games That Are Fun For Children (16)
• Parental Controls – Safely Restrict Your Kids’ Computer Access [Mac] (5)
• NeoK12 – Educational Kids Website that Teaches Your Children (5)

1. Your online resume should be indexed by Google (and get ranked on the first page when a search for your name is performed). A good recruiter or a potential employer is likely to search for your full name in Google before even interviewing you;

2. Your online resume should have your full name (and probably occupation) in the page title – this makes your resume listing stand out within Google search results;

3. (well, an obvious one but not all online resume builders allow for that) Your online resume should be properly organized and look neat.

While #1 seems the most important to me (as all other features are pointless unless your online resume can be found at all), I have found three free online makers that have good indexing and ranking abilities:

PeopleJar

This social media startup allows for plenty of self-promotional options (resume and portfolio hosting, samples of work showcasing, networking, etc).

How well are resumes ranked in Google?

• the site architecture (members spotlight, networks, etc) allows for deep Google indexing, so all resumes are very well indexed and ranked;
• each resume page title consists of the full name and the area of expertise (pattern: Your Name’s Makeup Artist Profile);
• search-friendly URLs (a profile URL contains the member’s full name) also contribute to better rankings.

How well are resumes organized?

• Each profile is broken into several sections (”General”, “Education”, “Career”, “Traits”, etc) that makes a resume concise and easily read and well-structured;
• Members are also allowed to upload videos and photos (for example, a makeup artist resume can be enhanced by showcasing the artist’s previous work photos).

Emurse

This online resume creator (reviewed previously at MakeUseOf) allows you to create very detailed and well-organized (and more traditional-looking) resumes.

How well are resumes ranked in Google?

• resumes are mainly indexed from the home page (which links to recent and popular resumes) – so unless linked from other sites, your resume can perform rather poorly in Google;
• the resume page title consists only of the full name (the format: Full Name’s Resume);
• each resume is hosted on a sub domain (http://fullname.emurse.com).

How well are resumes organized?

Like I said, Emurse builds more traditionally-looking resumes: more text and less design. Each resume contains plenty of information all displayed on one page – however HTML editing is allowed to make it look more attractive and eye-catching.

JukeDuke

While this resume maker does allow for a few pretty fun options (for instance, availability schedule), its features could have been organized better, I guess.

How well are resumes ranked in Google?

• Profiles are indexed via links in the sidebar (that contains too many links to allow for good indexing);
• Each resume title contains the member’s full name and location.

How well are resumes organized?

All information is performed on one page in blocks – which looks a bit fuzzy. You can try to change the look and feel of your resume – but even best resumes look a bit overwhelming to my mind.

Are you aware of more good resume hosting services? Please share!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Top 5 Free Resume Hosting Websites (30)
• 3 Useful Websites for Free Downloadable Resume Templates (11)
• Top 10 Most Effective Job Search Websites (24)
• Mindopia – Check out Occupation Descriptions for a List of Different Careers (4)
• How To Use iGoogle To Get Ahead In Your Job Searches (2)

Flickr advanced search allows for multiple search options: you can choose to search by tags or full text, media type (photos or videos or both); date, creative commons, etc.

The choice is really great but somehow using the built-in search platform is by far less exciting than taking advantage of numerous external tools that search Flickr creatively.

Search by color:

Flickr Color Selectr allows you to set color preferences by color picker or color properties.

Multicolr allows to mix up to 10 colors and selects images matching the chosen color palette.

Retrievr claims to search images by your “sketches” but all I managed to achieve was to find images by color:

Search by theme:

Tiltomo is an awesome “Flickr Playground” tool that lets you search by tag, color / texture and theme / subject. The service uses two test image databases, works fast and can be real fun to use.

Here is what the tool shows for theme based search for this image:

Search by tags:

PIMPAMPUM searches Flickr photos by tag and has a very easy-to-use flash-based interface: it will display photos in a string and show you the larger version once you click on it:

Findr performs image search by tag and also gives you the huge list of related tags to refine your search.

PiciShare is a Flickr search engine that lets you search by tags or full text; you can also limit the number of images per page and sort the results by relevance, date added or popularity.

Airtightinteractive.com tool displays the images based on your tag choice and also suggests more related tags:

Search by Creative Commons:

Compfight: besides tag-based search, the service lets you set the Creative Commons (’Off’, ‘Commercial’, ‘All’), Safe Search and “original photo” filters.

FlickrStorm allows to search by keyword and /or by Creative Commons. The tool also has a handy flash-based interface:

Search by username:

Interestingby.isaias.com.mx rates any username’s photos (I wasn’t able to define the popularity criteria though).

Search by location:

Flyr searches within geotagged photos and adds Google map link to each search result.

Geosnapper searches for US cities or zip codes and shows the place instantly on the map:

See random cool photos:

Photoree let’s you rate Flickr photos (for registered users) or just browse most popular photos chosen by other members.

Flickriver shows you most interesting photos added today / yesterday (the tool also lets you search by tags, username or group).

Girls on Flickr: shows you most popular girls’ photos sorted into the following categories:
pretty, beautiful, portrait, blonde, teens, black-white, sketch, hair, eyes, lips, hands, tattoos, glasses, skirts, shirts, jeans, shoes, uniform, celebrity, actress, model, super model, sports, fashion, cars, laptops, secondlife, interesting.

Which tools do you use to search Flickr? Are there any I missed out?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• What are you lookin’ at? Cool Sites To Feed Your Photo Fetish (8)
• Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs (37)
• Browse Flickr In Style On Your Desktop With Flickroom (9)
• 3 Steps To Find Similar-Minded People On Flickr (9)
• 10 Flickr Groups For Serious Shutterbugs (13)

How do you manage your wish lists? How do you make sure each of your friends and relatives will not be forgotten? How do you organize your own plans?

Let’s see how you can turn into a professional “gift giver” with these web-based wishlists that will help you organize things you want to receive, things you plan to give and thing you dream of but don’t dare to ask for:

BoxedUp has a clear interface and allows for a number of nice features:

• sort your products by Wishlists and by Status (”things I want”, “things I have”);
• add favorite places you like to shop;
• add friends and join communities of like-minded people.

What’s more, the service offers you the chance to create your wishlist flash widget to display at your site or page to let all your friends see what you want to get for the holidays.

GiftHat also has some similar basic features; though it lacks that pretty design of BoxedUp. The tool also lets you import your Amazon wish list.

Like GiftHat, WishListr also provides a convenient importing option (it allows you to import wishlists from Amazon and Delicious).

Your-Wishlist let you add products only from their own database but they have introduced a few fun options. For example, have fun choosing your wishlist theme and graphics.

GiftBoxHome is another good service that among other handy features also allows to set the gift priority.

GifTag offers a handy FireFox addon (which is required to add the items to your wishlist). The extension adds the product page screenshot and let’s you easily organize your multiple wishlists. Besides, it lets you quickly send the gift page to your friend (to make sure your friend knows what you want to receive).

Kaboodle is the most advanced gift organizing tool that also offers a FireFox addon. It grabs the product page information and leaves you almost no work.

It also allows you to sort the gifts by category (my favorite one was “If I Had One Million Dollars” one).

How do you get prepared for the holiday season? Have you already created your wishlist? How do you organize your gifting?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 50 Tools & Resources For Christmas Gift Ideas (14)
• Need a Personal Shopper? Amazon Watcher does the Work for You (4)
• Keep Track of Wish and Gift Lists with Kaboodle (6)
• Go Gift Shopping with Amazon Gift Central (4)
• Wootalyzer – Alerts You Woot! Super Sales and Other Sites (6)

Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.

1. PicItUp

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:

Impressive, isn’t it?

What the tool lacks: you can’t combine several colors to refine your search (for example you can’t search for a yellow-red palette) – you are only able to search for one color.

2. Multicolr

Unlike the above one, with the Flickr-based Multicolr (already mentioned at Make Use Of) service you can combine as many colors as you want.

Test it: choose several colors and watch how the image list changes with each color added (I combined red and yellow):

What the tool lacks:you can’t combine word-based and color-based searches with this service. You are limited with playing with colors only.

3. Etsy

Etsy, an online shop of handmade products, has developed color search for their own product database.

Test it: It’s real fun to play with. Just browse your mouse across the screen and watch various colors and same-palette products pop up.

What the tool lacks: here you are unable to either set the color option or the search term. Nonetheless the tool is such fun to use that you definitely need to try it out.

Now, what do you think could be possible practical applications for these tools?

Would you use them on a regular basis or are they just for fun?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• TinEye – Searching For Images With An Image (19)
• Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs (37)
• Instant Eyedropper Drops The Pain From Color Matching (12)
• How To Search For the Perfect Color Scheme (7)
• 5 Good Image Search Engines Apart From Google Image Search (39)

Both retailers and resellers (as well as their affiliates) are getting more creative offering easy-to-use web-based tools that update their users of the company news and recent deals.

Here are the four common methods :

Getting Updated via Email

Offering their customers or readers a newsletter subscription option is the most popular way to keep them updated of the site news.

With email alerts you never miss a deal as it will come right into your email inbox. You don’t have to remember anything. All you need to do is just to check your email regularly – which you most probably do in any case.

Do you like receiving plenty of email messages daily? At some point you think you can control that but in reality you end up subscribing to anything that seems useful. Besides, the majority of services maintaining opt-in lists stuff their newsletters with ads and promotions you never agreed to receive.

With email subscriptions I tend to be rather picky choosing those services that either don’t bug me too often (e.g. FreeShipping sends email alerts once per week) or those that allow me to choose the update frequency (RessellerRatings offer to choose between daily and instant alerts).

Some online services go even further allowing their users to track only selected product(s). Both BeatThat and PriceGrabber offer to create watch lists monitoring certain product prices and availability:

This option allows for full control of what you want to track. You will never miss the best deal for the product you are most interested in (example: get alerted only once the product price matches your preferences (e.g. gets below some line)).

Again, that’s a great option only if you don’t mind receiving (multiple) updates to your email inbox. However in this case you of course have more power to control how many messages and how often you are going to receive them.

Getting Updated via RSS Feeds

Most coupon code directories and merchant rating communities maintain a blog where they post the hottest deals allowing you to subscribe via your preferred RSS reader.

With RSS readers your email inbox is kept free from heaps of mail. Besides, with RSS readers your subscriptions are more organized (either by category or based on your personal preferences).

Unlike email newsletters, with RSS readers, you need to always remember checking it out. However, if you’re in habit of checking your RSS subscriptions regularly, that’s no problem for you. Other potential disadvantages are directly connected to your favorite RSS reader: some of them, for example, allow for limited space (e.g. with PageFlakes you are limited to your screen size to avoid scrolling).

Getting Alerted by Your Browser

Some shopping resources develop FireFox extensions that alert you to current deals once you visit the merchant’s website.

The updates are limited to the addon provider’s website database. If you enter an online shop that is not included in the database, you will not see any coupons, offers or price comparisons.

You are only alerted once you enter the merchant’s site: no multiple notifications when you don’t need them, no full email inbox, etc.

Example: PriceAdvance’s FireFox add-on that shows other sellers’ prices for the product you are viewing:

Getting Updated via Twitter:

Twitter has been the hottest social networking service recently. From “What you are doing right now?” concept, it has evolved into the rapidly growing business tool all the potential of which is yet to be explored. Dell , for example, uses Twitter to update their customers of recent deals and limited time offers (see: Refurbished Dell computers).

Due to multiple Twitter clients, this type of offer-tracking is by far the most customizable. With Twitter you can get updates to Google Talk, Jabber, Livejournal, to your FireFox, right to your desktop, mobile phones (if you are in the US, Canada, or UK), etc.

The only disadvantage I can see here is that if you are a Twitter newbie, you will have to learn to use it and choose among hundreds of Twitter clients, the one that best suits your needs – that might take some time but is definitely worth the effort! On the other hand, if you are an active Twitter user, you can’t afford following everyone you would want to; as in the end you will end up receiving hundreds of updates every single minute.

So which alerting method is preferable?

There is no definitive answer, I would say. Here is my personal take:

• I hate receiving hundreds of email messages daily;
• I can’t afford subscribing to all the RSS feeds I would like to;
• I can’t follow more Twitter users as I am already unable to keep track of all the existing Tweets;
• I can’t add more extensions to my FireFox as I already have too many of them installed by now;

So what to do? First, I can choose to stick to only a few really valuable resources (the ones mentioned above) and refrain from tracking any new ones until I am persuaded they are really worth it.

Secondly, like I said, I can stick to customizable services that allow me to set the alert frequency, watched product or merchant.

Last of all, I can keep track of recent hacks to find more better easier solutions: for example, Twhirl allows me be logged in to several Twitter accounts simultaneously – so I can maintain a separate account that tracks online deals and shut it down once I don’t need that.

Which alerting method do you prefer?  Is there any online shopping tool I missed out?   How do YOU keep track of the best online shopping deals?  Share your tips and tricks with us in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• The Top 10 Grocery Coupon Websites for Cheapskates (61)
• Browse Black Friday ads with BFads (5)
• 4 “One Deal A Day” Sites That Don’t Suck (30)
• Wootalyzer – Alerts You Woot! Super Sales and Other Sites (6)
• Watch Online Products for Price Drops with ShoppingNotes (9)