Category Archives: Helpful Tips & Tricks

Do You Firefox?

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Internet Business Blog PicI was reading through Mohamed Bhimji's internet business blog today where he did a short post about Firefox.  He noted that webpages load much quicker in Firefox than IE, which is true.  In fact, Firefox starts much quicker than IE as well.  I've been a Firefox user since way back in its beginnings.  Mohamed also had a great point about memory leaks, which was a downside of Firefox for a long time.  Considering the huge advantages over Internet Explorer, I always lived with the memory leaks by simply not leaving Firefox open for more than a day.  The latest version of Firefox doesn't have the memory leak problems of the past.  

I'd like to expand on Mohamed's post with other reasons that Firefox is a great choice of web browser.  Firstly, it is FREE and open source, which means that you have a world community of developers supporting it.  If there is some type of security vulnerability that crops up, it is likely to be addressed right away.  IE on the other hand is closed source (privately owned by Microsoft and part of the Windows OS) and security issues are only resolved by a dedicated core team of people that may not catch wind of it until the problem is wide spread.  It could be several months before it is actually addressed. 

Firefox has had tabbed browsing for years.  Internet Explorer just caught on in version 7.  Firefox remains an intuitive and easily navigable browser, while IE7 has gotten less intuitive and more confusing for the average end-user.  If you do a lot of surfing around the net, you're much more likely to pick up spyware infections with IE as opposed to Firefox. 

The other things that I like about Firefox is the cool add-ons that you can integrate into your browser.  I'm not talking clunky and intrusive toolbars, but useful, non-intrusive add-ons to enhance your internet experience.   New add-ons can easily be acquired online through the "tools", "Add-ons" menu and clicking "Get Extensions".

Here are some of the extensions that I like:

Search Status by Craig Raw - This is an "SEO" extension which allows you to monitor Google Page Rank, Alexa, and Compete ratings.  It resides down in the browser status bar (bottom) so it is out of the way and doesn't intrude into the space of your browsing window.  This add-on also allows you to to check keyword density, highlight keywords, check your google & yahoo back links and indexed pages.  There are other great features as well.  This is a must have plug-in if you are into internet business.

ColorZilla by Alex Sirota  – This is a color picker add-on which resides in the bottom left corner of your browser status bar.  You can use the color picker and click on any color in your browser window and it will instantly capture the color that you are looking for.  Now you will have the RGB and #Hex color values that you need to get that color scheme just right when tweaking your web pages.  This is a very handy tool that I use all the time.

Forcastfox by Jon Stritar & Richard Klein - Totally unrelated to web development, but I really like having a weather forecaster in my status bar showing the current temps as well as local radar.  The local radar is displayed as a small green icon which expands into a local doppler radar image when moused over.  The temperature readings include current and predicted temps into the next day.  Double click on any of these to open a webpage with more in-depth weather details.  It also has "weather alerts" which pop up when the National Weather Service issues a local weather watch or warning. 

Another cool thing I like about Firefox is its recovery capabilities.  If your computer happens to lock up or crash, and you had several tabs opened up in your browser, you will automatically be prompted to restore your session!  By clicking "Yes", you will get all your web pages back!  How cool is that?  Security, stability, better looking web pages, tons of features, I could go on and on why Firefox is my browser of choice.   If you haven't already added Firefox into your browsing experience, get it now.  It will automatically import all your IE Favorites, if you allow it to during the install.  Once you start using this, it's likely that you'll never go back to the blue "e" again!

Are You Ready For The Crash?

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As we use our computers or laptops from day to day, it's easy to become complacent with our security.  Technology is an amazing power when its working.  When something goes wrong, however, then your whole world  gets turned upside down.  "If only I would have backed up my ____ files", is usually the first thing that runs through most people's minds.  What would happen if 15 seconds from now your hard drive went into total meltdown?  

Most people don't realize this, but hard drives are a consumable item.  That means that they wear out after a certain number of hours!  A lot of hours, of course.  I think the average rating is around 100,000 hours mean time.  That's about 11 years!  Those are healthy ratings, but often times they fail long before that.  The point is, don't assume that your data is perfectly safe.  If you have critical data on your computer, you should get it moved (or at least copied) to an external storage media such as a USB drive.  Offline options are great too.  For example, xdrive.com offers 5 GB of free storage of your data files.  All you need to do is sign up for an AOL screen name.  You don't have to have any of the AOL junk including their internet service to use xdrive.  Just a screen name so that you can log into the service.  For $9.95 a month you can store 50 GB of stuff.  Using an offline solution will give you another way to access your files in case you are traveling somewhere and forgot your thumb drive.  You can simply log into xdrive from anywhere with an internet connection, such as an internet cafe.  When I was in China, I used the internet cafes nearly every day.

So how about avoiding down time on your computer?  I recommend Deep Freeze Standard. With Deep Freeze, you never have to worry about getting viruses, spyware, driver issues, and all the other horse crap that goes with the joys of everyday computer use.   Deep Freeze runs in the background on a parallel network on your computer.  The original configuration is never touched in any way, no matter what you do.  Surf the internet & pick up a virus?  Accidentally deleted a system file, or changed a driver setting?  No problem, just reboot your computer and everything is exactly the way it was.  You never have to worry about dealing with anti-virus, anti-spyware and all that other security software.  No need to worry about someone else using your computer and screwing it up with spyware infected games.   If you want to add new software, you can try it out first by installing it.  If it hoses your system, simply reboot.  Problem solved. If everything works ok, no meltdowns, etc, you can do a permanent install by pausing Deep Freeze and installing the application permanently.  Then re-activate Deep Freeze to keep everything protected.  Deep Freeze will even work across multiple drives & partitions if desired.

Having worked in an educational environment for the past 7 years, I've used a number of solutions to keep the number of problems to a minimum.  I've used other solutions such as Clean Slate which also works quite well.  Personally, I have found Deep Freeze to be easier to manage, plus Deep Freeze only runs around $45.  This is much less than you would shell out for Anti-Virus suites, Firewalls, and the myriad of other protection softwares out there. You can simply keep all your headaches away with one simple solution.  

I'm sure that you can easily think back at all the wasted hours that you had to spend at one time or another because some application or device stopped working.  Or because the computer became extremely slow and started locking up all the time.  Maybe you had to have it serviced and paid over $100 to have all the spyware garbage cleaned off.  Between time and money alone, this solution should be a no-brainer.

If your hard drive fails completely, all you have to do is get a new computer or have the hard drive replaced with a new Windows install.  Since all your data is on a separate media, all you have to do is reinstall the applications that you use including Deep Freeze.  You're instantly back in business.  Your "C" drive should never require anything more than these.

Put these solutions into action now and you will have much greater peace of mind and lots more time do invest into your internet business and family! 

A Useful Firefox Tool

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Every once in a while I come across a neat little gem while surfing the net. I like to share these with my readers, especially the free stuff! After all, you can't get a better price than that, right? I am a [tag]Firefox[/tag] user and rarely use Internet Explorer unless I'm testing a [tag]webpage[/tag] that I'm [tag]designing[/tag] or if I need to get on some backwards website that was designed for IE users only. One of the cool things you can do with firefox is that you can add many nice extensions to your browser. Some of my personal favorites are "Forcastfox", "Download Them All", and "[tag]StumbleUpon[/tag]". The newest member of my collection is "SEOpen", which has many useful tools for checking your page rank with [tag]Google[/tag], Yahoo, MSN, [tag]Alexa[/tag], etc. With the top 3 search engines, you can also check your [tag]backlinks[/tag], cache, indexed pages, pages that are related, and even translate too! On the Alexa button you can check your alexa rating, [tag]traffic[/tag], related sites, and backlinks. If that wasn't already cool enough, you also get an "Other Tools" button which allows you to Check DMOZ, analyze your links, check your [tag]keyword density[/tag], server headers, page size, robots.txt, archives, and whois info! Whew! that's quite a list and I didn't cover them all! If you value the importance of keeping your webpages optimized for the search engines, you might want to get this tool. It's free and you can also use it to check out your fellow marketers to see how you rank in comparison to them. [tags]SEO[/tags]