Stephan Miller

13 Oct, 2008

My FireFox Addons

Posted by: Stephan Miller In: Firefox| Widgets, Gadgets, and Extensions

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I like testing things by seeing if they will break. You might find me running nine different programs on my computer at the same time. Every time processors became faster and more efficient, I just loaded them up more.

I had a tendency to do that with Firefox also. This is one reason I run multiple browers: Flock, Firefox and Chrome. Flock is the one I use most of the time and it is one with the most addons. If you are not using Firefox or Flock, you are missing out. Change now or the rest of this post is not even worth reading. Browsers with addons take away the need for a lot of extra software.

Blogging Tools

kaalga

This one uses the Yahoo Search API to find sites you can link to from within your posts. When you open up the posting page to your Wordpress blogs, it starts working.

You can also add your blog url to the plugin, so that it will not only search for links from other urls but also specifically search for related posts on your own blog. It is a very simple looking plugin with a lot going on under the hood.

What I used to do: scan my archives page for past posts I could link to. What I do now: use kaalga. I usually try to link to as many of my own posts as I can, especially when I am linking out a lot in a post. Save some of that juice.

Zemanta

This one will find sites to link from inside your posts, pictures from various images sources like Flickr, related posts from your choice of sources.

The reason why this description is so short. I wrote a whole post on this one because it has so many features.

Social Media Tools

Delicious Bookmarks

I use delicious for bookmarks. Folders only go so far. With the speed of new information, the only way to keep the research for your posts is to archive it and use tags to pull the information out as you need it.

ShareAholic

This one has a few links to submit stories to social media sites. it also analyzes how many times the page your are on has been bookmarked at delicious or Dugg.

Social Media for Firefox

If you want, you can set this plugin to automatically analyze every page you visit. It will tell you if the page has been submitted to Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon or Digg.

TwitterFox

About the easiest and most unobtrusive way to keep in touch at Twitter. Tweet any link while you are on it and get notifications of new tweets. It could have you using Twitter too much, if that is possible.

TinyUrl Creator

And easy way to create a TinyUrl for the page you are on. Just right click on the page and choose it from the menu. It automatically adds the resulting TinyUrl to your clipboard.

SEO Tools

Alexa Sparky

I know. Alexa data is worthless, but within the same niche, it usually give some sort of indication of relative traffic. And this is not the complete toolbar, just the number and a tiny little graph of the traffic ranking over time on the bottom bar of your browser.

Link Diagnosis

This one adds a link to your right click menu that will analyze the current page at Link Diagnosis. It will take a while, but the results will amaze you. Stalk your competition and find out how they get their links or analyse your own sites.

Rank Checker

This tool will check your rank for a list of keywords in various search engines. It is always good to know where you are so you can get where you want to be.

SEO for Firefox

This one has a lot of SEO tools built in. It pulls the data right from Google and Yahoo’s results pages. You can right click on a link and find the PageRanks, Age, Links to the page, Technorati links and on and on.

SEO Link Analysis

This plugin gives you a lot more useful information while you are using Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer or Microsoft’s Webmaster Portal.

SEOpen

This one is a pretty simple toolbar that gives you useful SEO information on the currently open web page. It does it manually. You have to click, but this saves processing power.

Web Design Tools

Firebug

If you do any type of design work, get this. Before I had this tool it took me twice as long to modify or create new Wordpress themes.

Web Developer

This one adds a toolbar and a lot of very useful tools. The one I always use: ruler. It will measure the size of anything on the page in pixels.

General Tools

All-in-one Sidebar

Make the Firefox Sidebar easier to use and force popups like the downloads window into the sidebar, if you want.

AutoFill Forms

Kick ass tool. Don’t pay for Roboform. This one is sweet. Fill out any form on a page with one click. Have unlimited profiles so that you can fill each form with different data. I have a profile for each blog, for commenting. No, not the body of the comment. My name, email address and url. I click the button and just type the comment. This is also a good tool for using my link lists. Create a profile for your site and then click down my lists, hitting the AutoFill button to fill out the submission forms.

GreaseMonkey

This one doesn’t really do much. The userscripts that it loads can do a lot though. It runs userscripts which do such things as open posts in a frame inside Google Reader, add links to Friendfeed for other social networks and much, much more. There are literally thousands of userscripts.

Scrapbook

Think of this one as Google Notebooks or a clipping service that stores all the data on your computer. I bookmark pages I want to come back to. When I am sure I will need the information, I will use Scrapbook and save the whole page.

Linky

Do amazing things with links on the page like opening then all at once.

Xinha Here

Tired of hand coding html in web forms. This one will do it for any form you run into. It is a WYSIWYG html editor that works with any web form.

Chunk-It

An awesome research tool that I just found. Saves time in searches and with crawl ahead from links in pages you are on and give you the content in the sidebar.

About Flock and Add-ons

The flock website is pretty vague about which addons will work with it’s browser. All the one’s above do. I just started installing addons on Flock and about 95% of the addons for Firefox will work. If you browser goes crazy, just uninstall the last add-on.

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32 Responses to "My FireFox Addons"

1 | Miguel Wickert (9 comments.)

October 13th, 2008 at 12:12 pm

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Nice selection, I have many of the same. The “chunk it” is one tool I’ve been heard of before. I might have to give it a spin. :) Do you have a list of the different plugins used on the site?

2 | Stephan Miller

October 13th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

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I will at some time in the future when this blog is up to date for two days before there is a new Wordpress version, if you know what I mean. :)

3 | netta (2 comments.)

October 14th, 2008 at 7:10 am

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Excellent info. Thanks — I won’t use all of them, but there are a few here that will make blog life a little easier. And I’m all for that.

Thanks again.

4 | Da brush (1 comments.)

October 14th, 2008 at 4:23 pm

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Nice list, I find very useful myself the Web Developer addon

5 | Web-Betty (4 comments.)

October 14th, 2008 at 6:22 pm

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Great post. Now I’m going to have to split my time between blogging and checking out all these cool add-ons!

6 | Stephan Miller

October 14th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

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Thanks for coming by. If anyone has their favorites, be sure to list them. :)

7 | revenue (1 comments.)

October 15th, 2008 at 10:20 am

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Great list for me i like rankquest,stumble plug, and youtube viewer are my favorite :)

8 | Dennis Edell (68 comments.)

October 15th, 2008 at 11:42 am

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I know one plugin still needed on this site ;)

I recently started using FF almost exclusively (except for poker but that’s a story)…does Flock really have more add-ons? I know it’s said to be the best for social media.

I’m really glad I saved this as an email…I’ll need to reference it more then once :)

9 | Miguel Wickert (9 comments.)

October 15th, 2008 at 12:19 pm

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I heard ya bro. A new wordpress upgrade, ye yes. I need to read up on the latest happenings. How do you feel about the Bloghology community site?

10 | Hugo Santos (1 comments.)

October 15th, 2008 at 4:20 pm

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hum, kaalga seems to be interesting.

DO you use all these plugins?
i mean, i use about 6-7 and i feel my firefox window is too overcrowded….

11 | Stephan Miller

October 16th, 2008 at 5:33 am

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@revenue
Thanks for the heads up on the other plugins.
@Dennis
Flock has some social media tools built in and uses most of the plugins that work with Firefox. It uses more memory but lately I have had more crashing issues with Firefox. And issues where I go to run it and it says it’s already running. I check my processes. No Firefox there. And all I can do if I want to run it is reboot. I would be the first to admit I f-ed up an installation, but if I did, it must have been easy to do so and I don’t want such a finicky browser as my main one.
@Miguel
I like how it is going so far. I will have a post soon.
@Hugo
I guess that’s just the way I roll. I have a good visual memory. So sometimes I just organize tools the way I want them and remember where everything is. Here is my desktop, for example:
My Cluttered Desktop

12 | videos gratis (1 comments.)

October 16th, 2008 at 4:06 pm

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Excellent blog, is my first visit, congratulations, greetings

13 | Mr Javo (3 comments.)

October 17th, 2008 at 3:06 pm

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Hey you have some great extensions here! I have installed Zemanta, Kaalga and others more.

I think I will need to uninstall some extensions, lately my Firefox has been a little slow, consuming 400~500 mb of ram! :|

14 | Entrex (1 comments.)

October 17th, 2008 at 3:39 pm

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There are a few I never heard about and sure sounds interesting. Thanks!

15 | Tudor (1 comments.)

October 18th, 2008 at 2:01 am

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from these firebug is by far the most useful…if you design your templates that it. Every time I need to find a layout but it helps me find the rogue css attribute that messes the whole display. I recommend it.

16 | Stephan Miller

October 18th, 2008 at 11:53 pm

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@Mr Javo Firefox will do that. I sometimes turn a lot of mine off and just leave them installed in case I do them some time.

@Entrex You’re welcome.

@Tudor Firebug has definitely helped me speed up dev time.

17 | Spreading Love - October 08 Week 3 | Mr Javo dot Com

October 19th, 2008 at 5:31 am

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[...] My Firefox Addons by Stephan on StephanMiller.com. [...]

18 | Sonya (1 comments.)

October 19th, 2008 at 11:44 pm

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Hi Stephan, cool addons.

I received a Butterfly Award For The Coolest Blog I Know and I’m passing it on to YOU.

Go to http://www.abstinence-is-sexy.com/abstinence-blog.html for further instructions, if you choose to accept this assignment, um, award and pass it on. Congrats!

19 | Gorgina (1 comments.)

October 21st, 2008 at 2:37 am

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Nice list indeed and very useful plugins i never heard of. Now they are added in my firefox plugin collection :). Thanks for sharing.

20 | Daisydaffodilia (1 comments.)

October 21st, 2008 at 10:31 pm

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The list is great! It has lots of usefull add-ons. Thanks for providing this good list of info. They will help me a lot.

21 | Copper Wire (1 comments.)

October 22nd, 2008 at 9:22 am

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Another great firefox web development add on is IE Tab, all the fun of cross-browser testing without having to open up nasty ole IE.

22 | Margie Canter (1 comments.)

November 1st, 2008 at 6:33 am

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One tip about using Firefox addons is don’t go over the top like a kid in a sweet shop grabbing everything that looks delicious.

Just try one third party plug-in at a time - there are a lot of badly written addons out there that leak memory and slow down your internet experience.

But as a web designer I always find the Web Developer Toolbar the most essential Firefox addon of them all.

24 | Ajith Edassery (3 comments.)

November 9th, 2008 at 11:16 am

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I use stumble add on basically to quickly do thumbs up/down. Not sure if one of your other add ons take care of that?

Great list anyway… I need to start using most of them ;)

Cheers,
Ajith

25 | Steve C @ MyWifeQuitHerJob.com (1 comments.)

November 9th, 2008 at 7:20 pm

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This is a great list of addons. Regarding the social media addon, is there an addon that will instantly tell me who has reviewed and stumbled a particular post? That would be useful to me because sometimes I’m always wondering and I don’t want to stumble my own stuff to find out.

26 | Stephan Miller

November 10th, 2008 at 7:44 am

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If you set it up to do it automatically, but then it slows down browsing a bit.

27 | Steve (1 comments.)

November 19th, 2008 at 2:52 am

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A couple of extensions you may be interested also:
nodofollow - to check what links are nofollow and what are not;
autofill_forms - to fill form fields automatically (eg, name, email, but not comment field! ).

28 | Stephan Miller

November 19th, 2008 at 6:57 am

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Thanks, I will have to try them.

29 | Cadence Hart (1 comments.)

December 1st, 2008 at 7:09 am

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Thank you Stephen for sharing this. The tools here are very helpful.

30 | Deca (4 comments.)

December 7th, 2008 at 6:59 pm

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I’ve used almost all general plugins above. My other favorites plugins are Adblock Plus, AutoCopy, Download Helper, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer.

31 | » How Many Hats You Wear? by Stephan Miller

December 8th, 2008 at 8:13 am

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[...] of software. It will save you time. Automate what  you can. Browse software, Wordpress plugins and Firefox addons regularly for new [...]

32 | Bruce (1 comments.)

December 30th, 2008 at 7:16 am

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Great list for me i like rankquest,stumble plug, and youtube viewer are my favorite :)

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