Blazing Minds » firefox

Buffer – the no fuss way to queue your tweets

Leo Widrich — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 07:02:29 +0000

If you are a heavy Twitter user like I am you know them all. The Hootsuites, the SocialOomph or Tweetdeck scheduling functions. Even though their functions are golden if one isn’t neglecting to engage and participate in the conversation, it is quite a hassle to schedule each tweet individually I found.

So let me therefore introduce you to a new App, which will save you the hassle of time-setting and scheduling once and for all. It’s a very simple tool called Buffer.

The 3 Main Differences to other Apps:

- There is no need to schedule each tweet individually, you simply add to Buffer and your tweets are scheduled for your throughout the day

- You can add tweets to your Buffer from any page you are on with browser extensions (Chrome, Safari, Firefox)

- You receive detailed stats about how well your tweets sent via Buffer performed

Browser extension in action

Whenever you are reading an interesting article you can give it one click on the Buffer icon and add to your Buffer. For example I wanted to share Karen’s post, here is what happens:

Combine Buffer with your favourite Twitter Client

Buffer will enhance your experience on Twitter greatly, by giving you a consistent Twitter stream, which also doesn’t create an information overload for your followers.

In my case, teaming up Tweetdeck and Buffer works wonders, so I believe it is important to point out Buffer is not an “instead of your favourite Twitter client” tool.

Your Tweets Performance

Interested to learn how well your tweets did? Buffer will tell you with analytics for clicks, retweets and reach of your tweets. Here is a set of recent stats for my tweets.

How to best use Buffer

Buffer is a powerful time saver for me. So for example every morning I am searching my favourite blogs for new updates. Instead of putting my account on a blast, tweeting these great findings all at once, I simply add to Buffer.

The power lies that you can very easily add lots of tweets to your Buffer at one point and you will then be tweeting consistently for the whole day.

Timing your Tweets

By default Buffer will send out your tweets at Peak Twitter times, however you can of course always go back to your home account at www.bufferapp.com and change them to your needs. You can add more timeslots or delete some. Here are mine:

What do you think about Buffer? Would it be a good match for your existing Twitter Toolbox? I hope you will give it a go and let me know your views below.

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Buffer – the no fuss way to queue your tweets is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter

Blazing Minds Weekly Round Up – Google Chrome, FireFox, Google Pagerank

Karen — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 10:09:43 +0000

It’s that time of the week when, here on Blazing Minds I bring you some of the popular posts from the last week as well as some stats such as top searched terms, some blog posts that I’ve enjoyed reading over the last week and other stats that most stat junkies love to read So without further ado lets get on with this weeks statistical wonder ….

Blog Posts I’ve enjoyed reading:

23 Ways Blogging has Changed Me – Extreme John

Leveraging Influence via Blogging – Potpolitics

How To Use 301 Redirect To Hide Affiliate Link in Thesis 1.7? – ShoutMeLoud

How To Secure, Manage And Sync All Your Passwords – John Chow dot Com

Why Google PageRank is worthless and just another Certificate for Decoration – Famous Blogger

Top Visited Posts:

How To Select All Your Facebook Friends When Inviting Them to a Page or Group etc

Why I’m Currently Using Google Chrome over FireFox or IE8

Why adding videos to your post for effect is GOOD

Getting Your Music Released – Tunecore Vs CD Baby

A Typical Start to British Summer Time!

Top Referring Websites:

StumbleUpon

BlogEngage

CMF Ads

The DailyMeme

Twitter

Top Search Terms:

twitter websites

tunecore vs cdbaby

how to select all friends on facebook

rhyl

tunecore uk

Search Engines

Google – 356

Yahoo – 82

Bing – 16

AOL – 3

Ask – 2

Top Commentators for the Week

Anthony @ Innovatively Simple – 9 Comments

Ryan – 6 Comments

Ileane – 5 Comments

ZXT – 5 Comments

Dana @ Blogging Tips Blog – 4 Comments

Well there we are for another week, many thanks to the top 5 commentators

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Blazing Minds Weekly Round Up – Google Chrome, FireFox, Google Pagerank is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter

What Are The Top 5 FireFox Add-Ons to Help With Blogging and Commenting

Karen — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:30:47 +0000

I can quite honestly say that I’ve always been a big fan of FireFox, it’s quick, easy to use and it has a massive amount of add-ons that you can use to help you out with many a situation from simply browsing the internet to helping you out with your blogging, yes you read that right, there are several [intlink id="dont-chastise-bloggers-revenue-with-adblock" type="post"]FireFox Add-Ons[/intlink], that I personally use that you can use to help with your blogging.

So here in this post I bring you a list of the FireFox Add-Ons that I find useful, some at first you may not think they will help out you out with your blogging, but you will see that there is a method in my madness

SiteLauncher

Now this is a simple plugin that will allow you to create short cuts in Firefox and display a screen for you to get quick access to websites, I use this as a quick access to my blog as well as the blog that I [intlink id="413" type="category"]Guest Post[/intlink] on, it’s just so simple to hit CRTL + SPACE to launch the panel to access them, you can also creat hot keys to get to the sites you use a lot quickly.

CoLT

Every week I create a post that is my [intlink id="510" type="category"]Weekly Round-Up[/intlink] of my blogs stats as well as blogs I’ve read and enjoyed, using CoLT allows me to create a link to the blog in one very quick step, with this FireFox Add-On you when you click your right mouse button, you will be have an option of how copy a website URL plus information on the title of page, you can select HTML, Plain Text, BBCode, FuseTalk and Wikipedia style links. This allows me to quickly add the information straight into my blogs posts, quicker than typing it all in.

Copy Links

This is another plugin that will add a menu to your FireFox menus when clicking the right Mouse Button, but this one will enable you to copy all the links you may have selected, handy if there are a lot of links on a page that you want to transfer to your blog post..

Easy Comment

Now this is when you want to make that commenting on blogs that tad bit quicker, remember commenting on blogs helps your [intlink id="an-easy-way-to-check-a-dofollow-blog-in-a-simple-step" type="post"]backlinks[/intlink] etc, so commenting is a very important part of the blogging experience, with Easy Comment it will fill out the comment fields for you, once this FireFox Add-On is configured with your details, all you have to do is click the easyComent box on the bottom right of your [intlink id="firefox-browser-great-personas" type="post"]FireFox browser[/intlink] and your information is automatically added to the fields in the comment box, so Name, Email and Website will be filled in for you, you can also set easyComment to allow you to have a default in the comment box..

Dictionary

Now this isn’t so much as a single plugin, as there are so many FireFox Dictionary Add-Ons available, but for whatever language you speak, these come in extremely useful when typing out your blog, as the Dictionary Add-Ons will underline an incorrectly spelt word with a red wavy line, showing you that you have a misspelt word, hovering over the word and clicking on the right mouse button will give you a list of possible spellings for you to choose from, I’ve linked to the English one in this post, but if you search FireFox Add-Ons for “Dictionary” you will find a good choice.

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What Are The Top 5 FireFox Add-Ons to Help With Blogging and Commenting is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter

How to make your FireFox Browser look great with Personas

Karen — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:24:49 +0000

So the other day I got that little box in my browser saying that the new version of FireFox (version 3.6) was ready to update on my computer, so I opted to get the update and start using the latest version of FireFox, my prefered browser

Suffice to say that FireFox 3.6 runs a lot faster than the earlier version and my browsing has become quicker, but not only that but I discovered a FireFox Plugin called “Personas for FireFox”

So I decided to check them out and find out what they were and to put it simply they allow you to simply and quickly change the look of your FireFox browser or in other words change your browser theme.

But there is a difference between themes and Personas, a theme will change the look of your browser as well as change the buttons etc to the themes look, where as the Persona will only change the image behind the toolbar etc.

You can hover over the examples on the Personas website and your browser will update straight away, which is great, so you can see how it looks.

You do have to install the Firefox plugin for Personas, but this is quick and painless, you will then see a Fox icon on the bottom left of your browser which gives you a list of options, such as adding more Personas, your favourites, preferences etc.

Ok this isn’t a plugin that is a necessity but it certainly makes your browsing look better than just having a plain background.

With a large collection of Personas to choose from, at the time of writing this post it was at 41,626, plus a good choice of categories to choose from such as Abstract, fashion, film & TV, music, nature and loads more.

I like Personas, it just allows me to have my browser looking a little different from time to time, instead of the mundane look of FireFox, but all to their own and it’s a personal choice on if you would like to change the look of your FireFox.

Another plus side to all this is that Personas also has a step by step guide on how to create your own and then submit it to the gallery of other designs, so you could, in theory, design one for your website, company or if you are in a band design one for your fans to have on their browser.

So there we have it, that’s my opinion on Personas, what do you think?

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How to make your FireFox Browser look great with Personas is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter

StumbleUpon Sucks!!! Big Time!!!

Karen — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:43:14 +0000

Now recently on the advice from ExtremeJohn on his post about StumbleUpon I decided to join, downloaded the handy FireFox plugin and set on my merry way of Stumbling on sites, blogs etc that I was visiting and enjoying!

Then lo and behold the other day I had an email informing me that my account had been suspended, banned from Stumbleupon, don’t ask me why, I’ve no idea, I was clicking the “Thumbs Up” in the Toolbar of sites I like, not doing anything wrong there surely!

I even sent StumbleUpon a message via their feedback option, as mentioned in their email, but nothing, no response at all! So if this is the way that they treat users, then as far as I’m concerned then they do indeed suck big time, I have surfed today and found several bloggers that have had similar problems, my advice to anyone wanting to use StumbleUpon is DON’T, use BlogEngage instead, where you get a response when needed, not just ignored

There you go, rant over!

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StumbleUpon Sucks!!! Big Time!!! is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter

Firefox 3.5 is now out and ready to download. But Wait!

Karen — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:57:04 +0000

So the other day I noticed that my FireFox was letting me know that V3.5 was ready to download and upgrade, great I thought the next version which had been promised to be faster that previous incarnations of the browser.

Without any hesitation I updated my Firefox to 3.5 and found several thing straight away!

For starters a few plugin that I use were not compatible with 3.5 and were disabled, not too much of a fuss as there were only two that wouldn’t work one was the Microsoft .NET framework assistant and the other was the EntreCard Toolbar, now the toolbar is something that I do use, so not been able to use it has caused a drop in my EC, but I’ve had to resort to the original method of dropping, for now anyway.

The other thing I noticed after running Firefox 3.5 for the first time is that it’s faster, not turbo fast, but as least twice as fast as the earlier version which has made my browsing that bit faster.

So here’s a run down from the Firefox site on what’s new:

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the earlier version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)

Support for the HTML5 and elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)

Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.

Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)

Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage,

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

So far everything is running great, I have noticed an increase in speed on sites that I used to visit and this is great, if your not too fussy about your plugin and can wait for the updates to arrive then I would recommend updating now, if you are concerned with your plugins, then just give it a little longer and then upgrade, by which time those plugin should have upgrade

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Firefox 3.5 is now out and ready to download. But Wait! is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter

Some Handy Websites for all you SEO Fanatics Out There

Karen — Sat, 09 May 2009 06:00:57 +0000

I was going through my bookmarks recently on FireFox and noticed some handy sites that I would like to share with all my readers, you may already know about some of these already, but, for those that haven’t seen these sites then they are certainly worth checking out and may even help with your future endeavours with your websites SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Firstly a great little website, but not to take to seriously is PageRank Prediction the title says it all really, it’s a simple pagerank checker, just enter your website address and the site will try to give you your pagerank on the next Google PageRank update, I’ve found it to be around 80% accurate though, so give it a whirl!

Next is the first in the “Graders” websites, the Website Grader measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

The second “Grader” is one which is quite fun and is the Twitter Grader, will give you a grade out of 100, show followers, following, Summary of the Twitter, history and tweet cloud, all good fun and useful tool to see what a new follow is really doing!

Finally a website tool for those of you trying to improve your websites keywords, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, is a must, just type in the keywords that you would like to improve on and Google will search through it’s database and try to give you a good selection of keywords that may help improve your keyword on your post or website, I do find this very useful for some posts and it has improved my posts in the past, it may even help you with Google Adsense, but it is trial and error, so give it a go.
Technorati Tags: FireFox, Twitter, Website SEO, Pagerank, Google, Google AdWords, Google Adsense

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Some Handy Websites for all you SEO Fanatics Out There is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter

My Top FireFox plugins for Twitter

Karen — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:20:02 +0000

Following on from previous posts about using Twitter, I would like to introduce you to some of the plugins for FireFox that I use or have used that I may think you will find useful when using Twitter.

Not only can you install a player that will enable you to control you music that you are listening to, but also, by installing TwittyTunes you can post to your twitter via a handle plugin than adds an icon n the bottom right of your FireFox browser where you can post text and text with a url of the page/site you are currently browsing, also if you do have FoxyTunes installed as well you can post the track that you are currently listening to.

PowerTwitter – Now this is a plugin that I personally like, it will improve the look of the pages at Twitter.com by giving them a helping hand by adding the following to the Twitter web interface:

-search and recent searches
-search scoped to a specific user
-status history peeking on mouseover
-Facebook status updates
-inline YouTube, Flickr, TwitPic, Google Maps, song.ly, and more
-url expansion
-url translation to page titles
-open web update (news feed) mapping
-custom settings
-@mentions
-photo uploading
-link shrinking
-#hashtags

Twitbin – This will add a sidebar on to FireFox showing your conversations, so you can keep on top of what’s going on, it enables you to send messages, receive messages, share links, and more all from your browser, simple to use.

Twitzer – Ever get fed up of only having 140 characters to tweet with? Well with Twitzer you can, you can post your tweets longer than that limited 140 characters, but isn’t only having 140 characters part of the fun

Please follow me on Twitter (I follow back)
Technorati Tags: FireFox, plugin, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, TwitPic, Google

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My Top FireFox plugins for Twitter is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

If you enjoy reading my blog, then please support me with a donation and Follow @BlazingMinds on Twitter