Optimize Your Web

Ever wondered what the purpose of User Agent settings were for?  Well it has changed over the years, and was used to determine what type of browser or service was accessing your website.  Mainly it is used by people to determine what browser their main subscription base is using in order to tailor their website to that viewing.  One thing that I have seen is that some people use a spoofed user agent setting are trying to see things that they only want a website crawler such as Google’s GoogleBot to view.  This may be taking advantage of if they are showing the crawler special files that they may try to SEO optimize in order to get better ranking.

If you are looking to see whether or not the GoogleBot that has visited your site is legit, visit this list to check and see.  Also, if you are looking to tweak your user agent settings (that I mentioned in my “Top Firefox Pluggins (Addons)”) through your Mozilla Firefox, download it here.

Make sure that you use the correctly formatted user agent information, which you can get a huge list here.  For more information, please feel free to contact me with questions or tips.

Many users, such as myself, enjoy the great addons to customize and enhance their internet experience for Mozilla Firefox. Well there’s more than a few add-ons out there and most are housed here. Here is a good list of add-ons that may interest you, especially for web development and design, along with blogging and search engine optimization (SEO).

• Aging Tabs – Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab.
  • Great for people who bog down their system with their endless tabbing and want a quick reference to see where they can free up some memory by closing an old tab.
• Better Gmail - Enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.
  • If you use Gmail and Firefox then you must try this addon and get the most out of your Google mail.
• ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
  • If you do any type of web design, photoshopping, or anything related, this addon will help you quickly grab any color from any picture or site.
• Delicious Bookmarks - Access your bookmarks whenever you go and keep them organized.
  • This is a great addon for anyone who uses delicious bookmarks, which if you bookmark on multiple computers or want to share bookmarks with peers or friends, this is a must.
• Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
  • If you are tired of having the default status window, this one is easily customizable to allow small notifications of downloads.
• FireFTP – FTP client.
  • Enough said. Since Firefox does not render FTP connections correctly, this will do it for you.
• IE Tab – Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox.
  • Great for those sites that were not optimized for Firefox or that require IE. I don’t enjoy those sites, but have this as a little work around. (An example is the stattracker program for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports).
• SEO For Firefox – SEO Information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results.
  • Enabling this addon in the bottom right of your browser and do a search on google. This gives you all sorts of great information about the sites along with a Keyword analyzer.
• User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
  • Can be used to hide your User Agent information that can be see in website analyzers such as Google Analytics. Also, you can pretend to be an indexing bot like GoogleBot and see if you can view some things only GoogleBot is supposed to see!
• Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
  • You can see more things than you probably want to with this addon, such as css, image properties and lots more.

MySpace users will often want to hide certain parts of their MySpace
profile. This is easy enough to do, but you do need to know the
correct MySpace code to enter into your profile.

These MySpace codes are readily available on different MySpace sites
around the internet. I’ve compiled a list of the most popular MySpace
Hide Codes here for your convenience. Be sure to follow the
instructions carefully. Enjoy!
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Who is better Firefox or Internet Explorer (IE)? Is it Internet Explorer or Firefox? Well a lot of people would like to think that Internet Explorer is/has caught up, but are wrong. Firefox is the more versatile browser and the reason is simple. Firefox is OPEN SOURCE! The amount of time it takes for things to be “fixed” in Internet Explorer or implement new ideas and deployed is much longer than Firefox. First let’s take a look at a few noticeable things, then get down to the some solid evidence.
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