This week on the podcast I’m talking to Jerry Kidd, one of Make Use Of’s newest writers, about a great tool to help you sell your home online. I’m also looking at some Make Use Of articles about Bit torrent, bookmarklets, and syncing. Plus, a first look at the latest Twitter clone, identi.ca.
I’d love to hear from you. Send me your MP3 files containing comments about the show, reviews of your favourite websites or just general chitchat. I’ll choose a few to play on the show each week. Send them to podcast [at] makeuseof [dot] com.
As you have probably guessed this poll is about browser toolbars. Do you have any browser toolbar installed ? Which one? Why do you use it? Share it with MakeUseof readers.
Note that we have listed only the popular ones here. I am pretty sure there are other great little-known toolbars we don’t know about. We are here to find them out. So if you aware of any good toolbar that might be helpful to others please post it in comments.
You can select up to 2 options!
Hooeey is a free service which lets you track and organize the websites you surf, on any computer. It goes one step ahead of Google Web History and stores all of your web history online in your Hooeey account which then lets you access it from any computer. It can be a pretty cool service especially for those who spend a lot of time online doing research and may forget to manually bookmark the sites.
When researching possible stories, I sometimes use the Stumbleupon toolbar button but I recently came upon two other toolbar buttons which pretty much perform the same function. You may be interested in using them yourself for surfing the web.
Google’s “Picks For you”
This one won’t be for everyone’s tastes for the following reasons. First of all, you need the Google toolbar installed. Secondly, you need to activate Google search history. You also need a Google account but anyone with a Gmail account already has one of those. So you kind of need to be a bit of a Google fan to have all of that and you also need to trust them with your search history (so anyone that values their privacy may howl with protest).
Every day I find new Firefox tips and tricks that I didn’t know about and then I find out that other people didn’t know about them either. So here’s what I discovered recently to make you more of a Firefox power-user. Some of them are useful keyboard shortcuts to keep your hand away from that mouse, and others are just regular tips to optimize and improve your use of Firefox.
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
CTRL and K - moves your cursor up to the search engine plug-in box. Once you’re there, CTRL and the up / down arrows on your keyboard will jump from search engine to search engine.
I used to be a total toolbar nutcase. I would have three or four installed then wonder why it took forever for my browser to load.
These days I only have two toolbars (Google and Stumbleupon) and after a bit of tweaking, they are now both sharing the same bar on my Firefox browser. I only have what I need and the newly modified toolbar takes up very little space.
Got a blog ? If so this post is for you: 12 truly useful tools and widgets that can make your blog better. All listed services work on any blog, whether it’s a Wordpress, Typepad, or a hosted Blogger blog. Enjoy!
1. Amung.us - Amung.us is a tiny real-time traffic analytics widget for your blog. It tells you (and your readers) how many people are currently on the website, what pages they’re reading, where in the world they’re coming from, and more. See our Amung.us widget below:
Last time I discussed finding drivers for your software programs and also how to set up a printer on Windows. Well today I am going to get onto a more interesting topic - what to put on your computer. I know countless other blogs have done lists like this so this isn’t anything groundbreaking. But I know quite a few people at the moment who are buying their first PC and who are asking me “so what do I put on this PC-thingy-ma-jig then?”. Well, here’s your answer.
So for all the newbies, parents, grandparents, techno-phobes and computer doofs out there, here’s what should be on your computer.
After getting my blog installed on Wordpress, the next step was to consider how to properly market it and promote it. One of my many thoughts turned to StumbleUpon, that giant monster of internet traffic, which is properly utilised, can turn you into the next Seth Godin (with hair preferably!).
But you don’t have to be a blogger or webmaster in order to appreciate and enjoy Stumbleupon. Anyone can use the site to enrich their internet using experience. With lots of different categories, groups and tools, StumbleUpon can change the way you look at the net - even someone as jaded as me who sees countless new pages every day in this job and finds it hard to be impressed with the Next New Thing.
Never let it be said that we here at MakeUseOf never give you any freebies. We are in the process of developing a few free sweet giveaways for our readers and number one on the list is a custom search button for the Google toolbar (I know, you were expecting a bikini model and a crate of beer…..sorry!)
First you need the Google toolbar which you can download here (if you haven’t already got it of course). There’s a version for Internet Explorer and one for Mozilla Firefox.
As a big fan of “Show and Tell” at school, I thought I would continue the tradition by showing you some web-based applications that I use on a regular basis along with my favourite features, shortcuts, tricks and so on. We’ll start with Mozilla Firefox.
Every newbie Firefox user gets carried away and installs 50 extensions then wonders why the browser is as fast as a Microsoft security patch update. I was definately no exception and when I finally twigged on, I went on a mini-rampage, cutting my extensions to my top ten and removing unneeded functions.
THE TOP BAR
While every web publisher and website owner knows about it unfortunately very few users do. Alexa has some useful user oriented services that I personally use on a daily basis so I decided to review it.
Mostly Alexa used for quick checkup on popularity of a website. It provides users with such info as traffic details (rank of the website out of all active websites), incoming links(other websites linking to it), related links(related websites) and owner’s contact info. It can also be used to check on site’s credibility by looking at the number and relevance of incoming links and traffic rank. To get some idea check out alexa info on wikipedia.org here. The easiest way to benefit from this service, is by installing ‘Alexa Toolbar‘, which provides you with real-time info about websites as you visit them.
This is really interesting, widely popular and one of my favorite websites. It’s more like a social network of web enthusiasts where you can discover various websites that were recommended by members with similar interests as yours. The best part of it, is that you can use this service right from the browser toolbar which comes with it(pic below) .
