So firefox holds 20% of the browser market share (at least it did the last time I checked). And what makes firefox a browser of choice of tech-savvy users and people who are sick of IE? Extensions. SO my choices are:

Blockers

Adblock Plus -Blocks ads. duh.

UPD: (Thanks to Apocrypha for that) : Adblock Plus subscriptions - Not exactly a Firefox extension, subscribe to these lists. It updates the ad filters of Adblock Plus every few days. You know, new banner networks etc. pop up every day, block’em all.

Flash Block - well, It blocks flash. On old comps it can be pretty tough with sites bloated with heavy flash. Or on old comps with *nix OS’s. (damn you, Adobe, give us a good flash plugin). And it doesn’t block it completely, it just adds a button on top of blocked flash, when u press it - flash plays.

Bug Me Not - An incredible time saver. Hate to register at some unknown site? Just use bug me not, it will automatically fetch a login and password from it’s user driven database and login for ya. You most likely won’t be able to login with it’s help on paid membership sites though.

Security

NoScript - a must have for your security if you’re using Windows.

WOT - Web Of Trust, warns you about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware or send spam. (thanks to Apocrypha for that)

Social Media

Social Browse -  a plugin for… emm, it’s a whole social network in a single plugin. My socialbrowse review. Kind of. ReadWriteWeb got a good review of this useful utility.

StumbleUpon Toolbar - StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more. You don’t actually have to install the toolbar to use Stumble Upon, but I still choose the toolbar, I don’t like some script toolbars hanging on top of sites.

Shareaholic - A must have for any Social Media Maven. It let’s you submit a page to all of the popular social media sites like digg, mixx, twitter and so on.

Delicious Bookmarks - syncs your firefox bookmarks with your delicious.com bookmarks. ’nuff said. Must have,

Minimalism

Tiny Menu - your main menu takes up too much space? Here’s the solution.

Faviconize Tab - personal favorite. It let’s you shrink tabs so that only their favicons are visible. sweet.

Downloads

Download StatusBar - Iit’s sweet, changes the default FF download manager.

DownThem All and FlashGot should also be considered a Ninja combo for downloads.

Development

Firebug - words are not enough to describe this power. Goddamn, gimme firebug and a notepad an I can make you a website in no time.

Developer Toolbar - a set of development tools in an easy to use toolbar.

SEOquake - the only SEO plugin I use. Shows the PR, backlinks, Index, Keyword Density etc. Very nice.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey - the king of the parade, lets you use scripts to enhance the browsing experience.

Better Youtube, Greader, GMail - all make these services.. ehmm, better. Trust me,  just install them.

Greasefire - let’s you search for greasemonkey scripts. There are literally thousands of ‘em.

As a SEO I very much enjoy a  no follow display script. It shows which links are no followed.

Uncategorized

FireGestures - adds mouse gestures to your browser. Very customizable and extremely handy.

Gmail manager - notifies you when you’ve got new mail, multiple account management etc.

Ubiquity - Revolutionary add on. still in alpha though. Just visit the link and watch the video. It’s the future.

Read It Later - Ever stumbled upon a very interesting article, but didn’t have the time to read it and the site wasn’t worth subscribing to? This add on is the ultimate solution to this problem ;)

What I’ve missed

IE Tab - It opens pages with the Internet Explorer engine inside FF. Useful for sites that don’t support Firefox (yeah, these still exist, what neanderthals) And for developers who want to test how their work look in IE. (Thanks for reminding me about that, Ici)

And here’s some pure link baiting almost useless list of  100 Firefox Extensions.

And here’s a pretty decent list of good FF add ons

And Lifehacker has a small, but nice list of experimental extensions.

And if you use social media a lot, i Totally recommend you to install the Flock Browser. It’s based on the same gecko engine as firefox and all of firefox’s add ons work for flock. Try it.

Did I miss some extremely awesome extension? Do you think that I’m a moron for including some extension that shouldn’t be on the list? Comments are below. Let’s make this list TEH BOMB! xD

Twitter is an incredible communication, marketing tool. Talk about 400%+ userbase growth in just a year. If you’re from the stone age and really don’t know what twitter is - read a nice twitter guide by Caroline Middlebrook. But I’m warning you, something like this might happen to you, it’s very addictive.

Anyway, my point is that the basic twitter interface may be fine when you don’t have hundreds of ppl you follow, but if it’s not that way filtering info is a pain in the neck. Thank God twitter has it’s API and developers can make applications to make your twitting easier.

A thing that I fell in love with recently is TweetDeck.

It’s still in Beta stage and might glitch from time to time, but the features that it brings to your twitter experience are priceless.

It requieres Adobe air (download) which means it’s multi platform (yes, There’s Adobe Air for Linux too )

Columns. Unlike most of the twitter clients  that list tweets in a sinlge column, TweetDeck offers a new solution - Multi Columns.(you can still switch to a single column view if you like) Multi column view means that you have access to all tweets, replies, direct messages and groups(more on that later) in the same window!

Groups. The juicy feature in tweetdeck, solves the problem with too many ppl you follow. You just group People into groups, one group for family, one for friends, one for social media, one for ice cream lovers or whatever.

Of course it supports ‘basic’ features of all twitter clients. And if you don’t happen to like it, here’s a Huge List of Twitter Apps

Got Any other Favorite twitter client? Share your experience in the comments below.

Titles and Descriptions

Titles are vital. Make sure every page on yor site/blog has a relevant, keyword rich and unique title.

So if the page is about, say, Real estate in Arizona make sure that the title looks like "Real Estate in Arizona. Best offers on real estate", notice that the "real estate" keyword is duplicated in the title, this is a very nice technique to optimize your titles.

Make descriptions informative and attention catching, keywords don’t really matter here. Try to fit a short overview of the page’s content in the description.

Urls

If your url looks like "http://bestsiteintheworld/sdkakfsjfk213kfjaksjf" it won’t do you no good.

• Try to make urls human understandable and make them keyword rich.
• Also keep in mind that search engines ignore word like "to, from, and" etc in the links.
• Don’t make urls too long, Google hates it.

Cross Linking

Make sure that the pages of your site are cross linked in every way possible with good keyword link anchor text.

Make search engines bot live’s easier :D try to cross link your content so when the bot hits the frontpage - it indexes every page of the site. Say, you have a news site, just add 2 links to the bottom of every article: previous: Name of article and Next: Name of article. Breadcrumbs are a good thing to have too.

Avoid duplicate content

There’s a real nasty thing @ Google called "Supplemental index",  where they put web pages that aren’t going to rank for anything important. I have unique content on my site, why would I worry about something like that, you might say. Wrong, there are convenient things for users such as tags, archives etc. which duplicate the content right at your site. Say, you have a "I am Awesome" article at your blog. You tag it with pure awesomeness tag, put it in  3 categories, and it goes to archives. Oh my, that’s hell lot of duplicates for Google’s bot. So it goes to the supplemental index and isn’t ranked the way you wanted it to.

Make sure you deny the search engine bots access to pages like these and you’ll do fine. It can be done either by adding the "nofollow" attribute to the link, or by denying these pages in the robots.txt file (this way is easier better).

Create a robots.txt file and put in the root folder of your site/blog. Read this robots.txt faq for more information how to disallow search engine bots from indexing content you don’t want it to index.

A neat checklist can be found at SeoMoz.

Know any other ways or special techniques of on site optimization? Comment.

Hey. A few days ago, I’ve stumbled upon socialbrowse.com FireFox addon. Seriously, I haven’t payed much attention to the text description of the service, I just saw a screenshot that looked like the People bar in Flock browser and with a thought "hell yeah, now I can get it for FireFox too" I just downloaded the plugin.

Well i was all "wtf?" after the browser restart, but I felt really lazy about uninstalling it and restarting my beloved browser again, so I just decided to take a closer look at socialbrowse.
I was surprised at first when I found out that It’s a new social media sharing service that operates through a firefox extension.

After a few minutes of toying around, registering an account at socialbrowse.com and trying it out I’ve decided to keep it an use it.

It gave me an impression of a Frankenstein that is made of parts of other social media :) Why?

• Flock-like "People" sidebar
• Digg-like categories
• Twitter-like following
• StumbleUpon-like review/comment system and the general mechanism of sharing.

But it seems like this is some good quality Frankenstein, the pieces are stitched together in perfect harmony.

Ok, so the extension consists of the bar and 3 lil buttons: 1 for the SocialBrowse bar, 1 for the sharing, and 1for the comments. You can share and comment pages without leaving the page. Go to socialbrowse.com and choose people to follow, just like you do with twitter etc. The social Bar shows you the shared stuff of people that u follow. A little not annoying popup at the right bottom corner of the screen appears when someone you follow shares something.

What really pisses me off is the moronic digg-like categorizing. It’s good for the general public, but hell, where in Gods name should i Submit a SEO article?  I guess reddit-like categorizing and customization would be really cool for the already not bad social utility.

Ok, so how do you install that plugin? Unfortunately, the developers decided to implement the retarded Invitation system that is ain’t doing them any good. I’ve still got 9 left, so if you’re interested  - contact me via the contact form, or by any of  these social networks.

Oh and Mashable are giving away 400 invitations. Pick one up here.

Automattic guys did a great job and created a theme that can turn your wordpress into a nifty group microblog.

Basically It’s your own group twitter! Why the hell would anyone want that functionality? Well, think about it, the possibilities are endless. The coolest thing is that you can post any media you want. The second great feature is that It is a cute minimalistic group blog. So what does it give us? Imagine, you and your friends working on a website or anything else. Everyone posts updates on the work in the microblog. Work collaboration. or you and your mates decide to make a quote, video, audio, link collection. Simple, fast, minimalistic, categorized and most importantly - your own, customizable in any way microblog.

And hey, It’s so simple to set up! Just install the worpress theme and a few plugins and you’re ready to go!

Download the theme. Here’s the  theme preview   It’s kind of bugged, a better preview can be found here.

Download the logreg plugin so that users can register from the frontpage. Or you can just make it a closed blog, so only you and your friends can post updates.

And download simple gravatars plugin so that users can use avatars.

That’s It! your mini-twitter is set up!

If you have any ideas, thoughts or need help managin your microblog, comment or contact me. ;) Happy blogging.

Are you my friend? If so. good. If not. why? Let’s be friends ^^ Add me up on the following:

• Facebook
• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Reddit
• Myspace
• Twitter

 I’m pretty sure our friendship will be good and productive for both of us ;)

Dividing them in categories, as usual.

• News Hunting.
• Bookmarking.
• Group blogs.
• Friends/Dating etc.
• Photo/Video sharing.

News Hunting Social Networks

The concept of these resources: You find something interesting in the web, submit it there and If people like It (there are many more factors, like friends, karma etc, later on that) your submission becomes popular. So, the content is submitted by the people and filtered by the people.

Digg is really something. You can "digg" articles you like and you have to "digg" through thousands of submissions to find something interesting for you. Power Users control most of the content on the site, so even if you submit revolutionary news, but don’t have any friends who you can shout to… well, it might be lost in the digg’s flow of submissions.

Reddit is what I like best from all of the newshunter sites. It’s minimalistic and highly customizable. You can filter the frontpage from the content you don’t want, or you can create your own "reddit", your own category of submissions.

Bookmarking.

Social bookmarks can be really helpful. Well, you can access your bookmark database from anywhere you want, when something happens to your system, your bookmarks that you’ve gathered for ages won’t be lost. I Use del.icio.us and Stumbleupon.

Del.icio.us - simply good for bookmarking. You can install a plugin for your browser and everytime you bookmark something, it’s automatically bookmarked at del.icio.us. You can arrange your bookmarks with tags, share them etc. very helpful.

Internet Explorer Del.icio.us Plugin

Firefox 3 del.icio.us Plugin

StumbleUpon. One of my favorites. Apart from bookmarking it brings you some really juicy features. Install Stumble toolbar (It’s really worth it), check the things you are interested in and start stumbling upon interesting stuff. So it works like this: when you like some site, just push the "thumbs up" button on the toolbar. That’s it, it’s added to your favorites. And when you just want to surf and find something interesting hit the "Stumble" button. You can also filter the content you want to stumble by its type (video, images, etc.) I just love it.

Group blogs/Micro blogs.

The group blog concept of these is similar to plain blogs. Articles, news, reviews etc. Except that a lot of people participate in the content creation, friend and rating systems are implemented etc. They are like ordinary blogs very niche specific. I read Mashable - social networking news. And Sphinn - Internet marketing, SEO, etc.  Some really good conent can be found on these sites.

The only Micro blog, as people like to call it, that  I use is  Twitter. You simply write what you are doing now and ‘followers’ ( the people who want to read your ‘twitts’) read your updates. Who the hell would need that informaton? you might ask. Well, your mother would like to know what you are doing, when you’re far away @ college, or your co-workers would find your ‘project progress’ (or whatever) twitts priceless. Too much has been said about twitter already, just check it out.

Friends/Dating

MySpace. A huge social network. You can basically do anything, you have your own MySpace profile page with your blog, bulletins, friends, groups, photos, videos etc. The good thing  about MySpace is that you can customize your profile the way you want to, i mean the appearance. MySpaceTV is pretty good. Try it.

Facebook. The Idea is similar to MySpace, but facebook offers much more "extendability" features. And no unique profile look. ;( But it’s, IMO, better than myspace in the terms of communicating with your friends, finding people you know etc.

(Why the hell am I writing about MySpace and Facebook? Everyone has an account at one of these :D)

Video/Picture sharing.

Youtube for videos, Flickr and Photobucket for photos. Really, If you haven’t seen any of these - just check’em out.

Blog boom is really something that you can not ignore. You can share your thoughts with the world, you can find new friends and perhaps even followers, you can recommend yourself as a specialist and you can make money by blogging. Ok, so you have 2 options:

• self hosted blog
• use a blog service like blogspot, livejournal etc.

Self hosted.

Choose a webhost and install wordpress there. What is wordpress? It’s a bloggin platform which is totally awesome, It’s very simple and beginner friendly, highly customizable and the most popular.. which gives you a strong community that can help you and answer your questions. However, minimum html/php knowledge is required to run a blog under this magnificent platform.   If you’re not into coding and the sight of php code makes you dizzy just get a webhost that allows you to install wordpress with a single click. Like PowWeb!, which offers an interesting unlimited disk space and traffic for 60$ a year. And you can host your blog @ HostGator. The prices are higher, but the quality and feedback are terrific.

Why self hosted? Because it rocks. You are free to do anything with your blog: maximum customization, thousands of plugins that extend functionality. More info @ Wordpress official website.

Blog hosting services.

Livejournal was the blogging pioneer and now It’s times of glory are over. It limits your freedom and it’s really incomparable to self hosted blog or even blogspot.

Blogspot.- Google’s bloghosting service. Well, it doesn’t suck as much as livejournal, it’s actually pretty good. Mostly because it’s owner - google is very tolerant towards it (blogspot hosts the majority of spam blogs). You can easily integrate Adsense ads, modify the theme of your blog etc. Not bad for starters, however it is totally inferior to self hosted wordpress ran blog. Lack of customization and extendability is the blogspots downside.

Self hosted or a hosting service? The choice is yours, self hosted is superb though.

Oh yeah, you’ll need a domain name for your blog. Register it at GoDaddy. Be sure to pick a domain name that describes your blog best. For SEO purposes, It’s pretty hard to come up with a good, catchy, unregistered domain name, but it’s important.

Remember to blog about you like so you don’t get bored. Productive blogging, guys. If you have any questions, feel free to comment or ContactMe.

I would like to start this post with a wonderful quote:

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction. (c) Bessie Stanley.

 The fundamental keys to success that are listed in this post apply to everything : relationship, career, and money.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. (c) Albert Schweizer.

You should live your dream and do what you love most. “You can only become truly accomplished at something you love… ..pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.” (c) Maya Angelou

Finding what you love, your calling can be a very difficult thing to do. Tips on how to do that can be found here

The feeling of great value, of great succes and happiness can come to you when you feel satisfied and accomplished. When you achieve what you desire, when you win, when you fall in love.. The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. So excel in your niche and specialty, improve your skills, learn and analyze, innovate or make better use of old good ideas.

The fundamental in success is having a goal. Knowing what you want can be really hard at times and this is a different topic, but having a goal is One of the keys to success and wealth.

Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I’ll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I’ll give you a stock clerk. J C Penney

Decide on your goals. Do everything for the sake of reaching them. It will not be easy, but hey, and what in this world is easy?

Never Give Up. If you fail at something, or it doesn’t go the way you wanted to - don’t give up at any cost. Donald Trump had a debt of 9 billion dollars. And? He didn’t despare and suicide :D  like many shallow people would :D, he didn’t give up, he thought of this debt as an unpleasant obstacle that must be passed to reach his goals. And what do you know, the debt was no more and he is as successful as ever. 9 billion bucks debt! Impossible is nothing.If somebody can manage to get rid of 9 billion dollar debts, then certainly whatever problem we face can be overcome too.

Common distractions:

Laziness. First of all, there are two types of laziness : Natural laziness. It happens to everyone, a feeling when you just want to relax, watch TV, surf the internet and do nothing. Rest is necessary for humans.

Plain laziness. That’s a tough thing to overcome, I, Myself am a lazy don’t wanna do nothing type. You have few options in this case: Fight your way out of this state with self motivation, or you can interpret  the term and turn laziness into a weapon. Here’s a nice article how to do this - how to make laziness work for you.

Anxiety. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Just like laziness a very tough quality to fight. Do not fear doing things, live with no regrets. There are 3 types of actions: the right one, the wrong one and no action at all. No action at all - is the only wrong type of action. Even when you take the risk and fail at something you will gain the invaluable experience.

Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.
Henry Ford

To summarize this post, three fundamentals to success:

1. Do what you love
2. Pursue your goals
3. Never Give Up

Apply these things to your business and you will be great. They sound really simple, but they are insanely hard in reality. Learn, Work, Create, be Strong and Triumph. Cheers, Mates! :D

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort (c) F. Roosevelt

• Advertisement campaign
• Search engine optimization (SEO in short)
• Social Media Optimization (SMO)
• Marketing and Promotion

Advertisement

You can either buy ad places on sites with similar thematics or you can build your contextual ad campaign.

Buying ad places. Good old fashioned way of advertising your stuff. Get a freelancer to draw you a cool banner and place it for a reasonable price at the desired site.
If you place your ads on a good trusted site, visitors will be interested and will probably click on the ad and will come to your site. However, you pay for the time your ads are placed on the site and there is no way you can control the incoming traffic. Example: You sell used cars on the net. You place an ad at a very large car forum. And what do you get?
Some buyers and just curious people that don’t buy nothing. They just clicked on your ad from curiosity and wanted to check out if you’re giving away free T-shirts. Lack of control and flexibility is a great downside of static ad places.
Targeted traffic is important as hell if you’re selling stuff. If not, If you’re an "Adsense addict" and just want your users to click the ads and go away.. well, any traffic will do ^^ But that’s not a right way to success. Anyways, I got carried away, The next ad method is:

Contextual ads. I recommend Google Adwords. It’s insanely flexible and effective. You control everything! The keywords that will trigger your ads to show, the time when your ads will be seen and very important for quite a bit of e-commerce sites - geography of visitors that will see the ad. Yeah, why the hell would you need visitors from Switzerland if you’re selling arms at the States? :D Picking the right keywords is the main thing in successful Context ad campaign and

SEO

He he, my favorite. Search Engine Optimization might sound very weird at first. Like, why should i "optimize" my website if it’s got lots of great content etc. The thing is, unique quality content is definitely priceless (or not, there are places where you can actually buy unique content, more on that later), but without SEO the results won’t be the best.
Ok, so what is SEO? You see, if you see a site with nice formating and images, the search engine robot sees this:

Optimizing your site for search engines is very important in this doggy-dog internet. More in depth review of SEO coming soon.

SMO

Social Media Optimization. Yeah, a real good way to promote your beloved site. Ever heard of the "Digg Effect"?
he he, This web 2.0 boom is really something. The quantity of social networks is insanely huge and every one wants to offer you something different and unique. You really must have accounts at least at one of these social networks: Myspace, Youtube, Digg, Livejournal, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter, del.icio.us, etc. Promoting your site at these services can grant you a huge flow of visitors. Getting on the front page of Digg gives you 60 000 (!) unique visitors at least. Every social network has it’s own ways of getting the maximum out of it. Stay tuned for more details on SMO. A thing very similar to this is

Marketing and promotion

Oh this one is some great stuff. Some killer virus marketing can make your site legendary. like The million dollar homepage. A British student came up with a ingenious idea. He created a site that is basically composed of advertisements! 1 pixel= 1 dollar, 1 million pixels overall = 1 million bucksters. And what do you know, he became a superstar on the web and sold all of the ad space like in a few months. I’ll add some reviews on marketing books later on.
Anyways, Dear friends, traffic is hard to get and if you get it right - all of your hard work will be rewarded. Peace.