BlogAllAlong

I came across this list of 50 recommended Firefox loyal users, or Mac Chrome to-be ones. And while I haven’t gone through all of them, the ones that caught my attention, or I am enjoying already are:

1- ColorZilla: One of the reasons I still open Firefox is to get the color of a certain element on a web page.

2- DownThemAll: The best download manager I have for downloading multiple files from a site at once, and with full bursting speed. Don’t expect to enjoy convenient browsing however meanwhile :).

3- Firebug: if you’re a web developer, this is simply a must. period.

4- FireFTP: Convenient and quick way to FTP to your server from within the browser. Though for large files, I would pick a stand alone FTP client.

5- Fireshot: This doesn’t only make taking screen snapshots easy. It allows further editing and annotations. For bloggers, and debuggers who want to share screen erros extremely useful. No need to launch a separate app to do little photo editing. There is a Pro commercial version of it as well.

6- IETab: This is a common statement. I only open IE when Firefox can’t open the website. Well, this plugin allows you to keep IE shut down for good.  It would simply open the IE window inside a Firefox tab, allowing you to even do Microsoft update through it.

7- Web Developer: Set of tools for web developers to help altering, editing, and viewing various types of page info, like image sizes, element names, etc. You can even do resize for pages, and go through the CSS files and edit them. 

8- Pencil: Sketch and prototype tool to create mockups of screenshots. While tempting, it didn’t work for me as I hoped it would. Try it out and see.

I wouldn’t prepare a top 50 Firefox extension list my self and leaveout Cooliris. The extension that would transfer your browser into a 3D Wall easy way to navigate the web. Extremely useful for photos and videos, though have been crashing frequently with me recently. By my whole PC isn’t really in one piece anymore.

Don’t ignore the remaining items, and don’t get tempted to try them all. Never feed your browser more than it can eat :)

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The Experimental Flickr Color Picker: Simply, pick the color you like, and get related photos from Flickr :)

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As I was talking to my inlaw yesterday about the Cisco Teleprecense, and as I was joking about it, I realized it’s seriously bringing a whole new dimension of problems to Kuwait. Imagine this. Every holiday season big fights arise about banning celebrities from coming to Kuwait. Kuwait has authority to ban them from coming. But what if I use Teleprecense for virtual live show? Now the singer technically didn’t come to Kuwait, so what are you going to do about it?

But let’s be frank here, no matter how good, people like to see celebrities in flesh and blood. There is however another thing similar and more serious. Some popular Islamic figure have caused recently big debates about coming to Kuwait, and how they should be banned. Away from politics and religion, now what if those banned people start giving their Islamic lectures through this teleprecense, and there is no law against it. There is no law that says you cannot download and listen to this lecture, and this is just a very advanced video version of it.

New laws need to be in place that controls and governs those areas, and clarifies them. I’m not suggesting here to ban or fight this wonderful technology, not at all. But such new game changing technologies should have clear laws governing them, otherwise we will end up with same Bashar & Jassem jailing story for a comment on their site, as they were mistreated like a published newspaper. Or when it’s too late, MOC will come up with similar law to VoIP, saying this is a crime!

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For the first time in eight years, IE browser users percentage dropped to less than 70% (Thanks to IE 7) as Firefox soared above 20% for first time for a whole month. Chrome has it’s 0.8% share as well, and surprisingly, their launch did not stop Firefox from their expansion.

Guess it is a happy new year for Firefox then :).

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If you’ve been recently to some of Amazon’s product detail pages, you may have noticed the new “What We Think” box on the right side. It’s a new box for quick summary review from Amazon about the product, listing the good, the bad, and some quick numbers. While this feature is still not always available, when it is, I see it pretty useful for an initial judgment. You will most likely want to look at end user perspective if the product is reviewed well by Amazon, but not otherwise.

The fear of neutrality in the review exists ofcourse, but so far I have not noticed it. Another thing is, Amazon does not seem to be making this review about their own Kindle product. Makes sense doesn’t it?

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For those who missed it…

I just hope our parliament doesn’t find about this and spend millions on it for class segregation. Man how we misplace technology

Popularity: 6% [?]

When starting an online business, large or small, it’s important to know what the media, blogs, and other sites are saying about you. For first, this will help you understand and address user needs and concerns, and you can also take an extra step to try and reach out offering more support and thanks for the helpful review you get.

There are many online reputation tool to use and track anything about your business or brand. For a self entrepreneur however, savings in the starting phase is pretty important, or if you’re just starting a non or low profit blog but are interested naturally in anything said about your blog, and Wordpress Incoming links doesn’t always work as you hope for. For that, Google Alerts may be the best and easiest thing to get started in minutes and for FREE.

Simply login to your Google account, go to the Google Alerts page, and fill up the fields as follow:

1- Search terms: Normally your brand name. For example “BlogAllAlong OR BlogAllAlong.com”. OR is a logical operator here.
2- Type: I would suggest you chose comprehensive to include News, Web, and Blog results.
3- How Often: I select once a day, but this is up to you and how serious your business is. Usually, once a day is good enough.
4- Deliver To: I chose email, you can select also Feed option.

There, now you have daily email alerts of articles about your site or blog. Ofcourse, you can always use it to track your own reputation (if you are such a celebrity ;).

Popularity: 6% [?]