Who ever knew that Firefox could be so handy when you are lost? Well, let us not get lost before we get good use out of this Firefox extension. MapIt! highlights an address and gets a map and driving directions using your favorite online mapping Web site.

What mapping Web sites are included? Currently this extension supports MapQuest, Maps.com, Yahoo!, and more! Currently only maps via the United States are supported with this extension as well.

Using the MapIt! extension could not be any more simple. After you install it, all you need to do is right-click on any Web site and scroll down to the “MapIt!” option.

From there you can show a map, get diving directions to a location, get driving directions from a location or configure the options for the extension itself. From the options, you can set the map or directions to come up in a new tab, a new window or the same window you are in right now. It is just that easy.

So never find yourself lost or looking for directions again. As long as you have Firefox and MapIt! you should never find yourself not knowing where you are at or where you want to go.

There is another Web Hosting Show Video Tutorial just waiting for you to watch! This time around I tackle the world of bandwidth and try to explain it in a way that everybody can understand it. Everybody from Web hosting newbies to Web hosting gurus are welcome to watch, so check it out and be sure to let me know what you think.

I do a little Web design on the side for a few friend and a few of my own side projects here and there. Every so often, I visit a Web site that has a great color layout. All the colors are smooth and work so well with one another. Instead of hunting through a CSS file or trying to recreate the color myself, I use ColorZilla to point out the best colors that are inside my Firefox browser window.

Here is what the author of the Firefox extension has to say about it:

Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page.

If you are a Web site designer or work on graphics via your personal computer, this is the Firefox extension for you. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

Some of the new features with ColorZilla 0.8.3.1 are: fully compatible with Firefox 1.5, addded %url-full%, %url-path% and %url-file% status bar fields (useful for frames), added RGB percentage status bar field, added ‘Export palette’ option to palette manager, and more.

There really isn’t a better right hand man when it comes to color selection on your computer. ColorZilla has everything you could ever want or need and the best part is, it is totally free.

There should not be one writer out there today that doesn’t have this extension plugged into Firefox. ScrapBook is the perfect tool for any writers, both offline and online, who do a lot of research before they write. This extension isn’t just for the writers out there. Even non-writers will find this tool helpful and neat.

What does it do? The ScrapBook Firefox extension allows you to save Web pages in easily managed collections. So how is this diffrent from bookmarking a Web site? Well, when you bookmark something, you are saving the entire Web page. With ScrapBook, you are only saving the part of the Web page that you wanted to save.

Here is what the author of ScrapBook has to say about it:

ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support.

Some of the features include: the ability to save Web page, save snippet of Web page, save Web site (In-depth capture), organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks tree, highlighter, eraser and various page editing tools, full text search and quick filtering search, and text edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes.

Do you see why I love this extension yet? As I said before, this is the perfect companion when it comes to writing on the Web. It makes research for stories and ideas just that much easier. Try it out for yourself, and let me know what you think of it.

I recently got an E-mail from the folks at AlienHosts.com that told me, “Hello my name is Michael. I am the owner of Alien Hosts Web Hosting. I don’t want to be a bother so this is the last email I will send to you. I sent you an email about 12 days ago to ask if you be interested in trading links with me. I just wanted to let you know that we will be removing your link from our site in 2 days if decide not to do a link trade.”.

Now sure, exchanging links with Web sites is a good way to get yourself known to new folks. After investigating a little further into the E-mail though, the rest of it looked like it was very automated. I am guessing it was a script that took in my information and spit out a response to me via E-mail. I took a look at the “links” section of AlienHosts.com and I got the last piece of the puzzle. They set up a link farm.

Now why don’t I like link farms? It is too un-personalized. There are thousands of Web sites linked on this specific link farm at AlienHost.com. I’m guessing that they sent out the same response to hundreds of other Web sites and then they hope to fish in a few folks that will link back to them. There are better ways of doing this.

Don’t send me an automated script, just drop me an E-mail. Ask me one on one with a personal response and I’ll take you seriously. So AlienHosts.com, thanks… but no thanks.

Don’t you want to know how fast you are going today? The Bandwidth Tester extension for Firefox does just that. It gives you the bandwidth of your current Internet connection. This extension is about much more about bragging rights over your friends. Sometimes you need to know if you are getting exactly what you paid for from your Internet service provider.

Here is what the author has to say about this Firefox extension:

This tool is more accurate than many of the website testers because it downloads several files at different sizes to find your average connection speed. However, this is also dependant on where you are in relation to where the test files are being served from. You can change the test files used in the Bandwidth Tester options.

Now the Internet speeds that were advertised to you by your ISP are very rarly the speeds you travel through the Internet with. This Firefox extension should give you a better idea of the speeds you are getting though. The default test files are hosted by APlus.net located in New York, so that might be something to keep in mind as well.

One of the exciting new features that has been promised is active background bandwidth monitoring which will watch your bandwidth in the background and report it in the status bar at all times.

So there you have it. Testing your bandwidth has never been so much fun. Oh, and forget what I said earlier about not bragging. If your speeds are amazing to you, go ahead and brag a little to your friends.

It’s time to fry up some bacon, cook the morning eggs and turn on the one and only voice of the Web hosting world, the Web Hosting Show. This isn’t the time to mention that we are the number one Web hosting podcast across the nation. This is the time where I let you know what is going on in the wild and wacky world of Web hosting. Yep, it is Monday again so here is your weekly hosting tease and squeeze.

GoDaddy.com was hit with a denial-of-service attack Wednesday morning, prompting 600,000 of its customers’ hosted Web sites to go dark for roughly an hour. GoDaddy, which also is a domain registrar and reseller, said e-mail service was also disrupted for some of its 4 million customers.

Well, I’ll be telling you a little more about my own experiences with GoDaddy’s hosting on the Web Hosting Show podcast. All I have to say about this, is it was bound to happen sooner or later. GoDaddy does have a good track record of not going down that often though. That is probably one of the many reasons why it is number one.

The Web Host Magazine & Buyer’s Guide Editors’ Choice Award is a once a month event where we award Web Host industry companies for excellence above and beyond that of their peers. This month’s picks are: Peak 10, Expinion.net, Ratemyhost.com/, and WebReference.com. Congrats to all four companies!

Final approval for the .xxx domain has been put on hold after it was taken off the agenda at the ICANN meetings currently being held in Vancouver, British Columbia. As much as I don’t like making predictions in the Web hosting market, I will bet money on the fact that .xxx will never see the light of day. Now if that is a good thing or a bad thing, I’ll leave that all up to you.

Download the Web Hosting Show! (MP3) | Read the Show Notes!

Running Time: 17 minutes | File Size: 3.90 MB

Ever find yourself wanting to know more about the Web site that you are on? If you are one of these people, this is the Firefox extension for you. Maybe you own a few of your own Web sites and you want to track all there is to know about it out there Online. No mater what the reason is, just about everybody can use the About This Site extension.

About This Site is a Firefox extension by Gina Trapani which gives you one-click access to various services that provide information about the Web page you are viewing.

If you were to look up all the information they give you by hand, you would be working for hours. Here you have quick and easy access to a plethora of options.

What do you find out about a Web site after installing this extension? You can find more information about: Alexa traffic detail and related sites; Del.icio.us link backs; Google related pages, cache and link information; Kinja site readers; Netcraft reports; Open Directory site listing; Popdex search for citations; Technorati link cosmos; Wayback Machine archive; Whois query; and Yahoo linkdomain.

Personally I like using this extension to track some details about my own various Web sites I run. You could do the same, or just find out a little more information about one of your favorite places to visit on the Internet.

No mater what the reason is, I can promise you that this extension will save you a lot of time.

Well SB1Online.com has gotten an RSS feed! There is no good reason why just about every Web site out there today doesn’t take advantage of really simple syndication. Since it is kind of pointless right now to add any kind of “blogging” feature to the SB-1 Web site, I decided to go down a different road. I hand wrote the RSS 2.0 feed myself, then I linked that file up with FeedBurner.

How hard is it to hand write a RSS feed? Took me around 10 to 15 minutes, counting the validation time. I think SB-1 is just about the only pro wrestler now that even has an RSS feed, so that just makes it that much cooler.

Go check out my hard work on SB1Online.com, and feel free to subscribe to the new RSS feed!

Sorry, I have been on a real kick as far as PlayStation Portable content goes this week. I guess with everybody else tripping over Xbox 360 stories, I thought I’d talk about my favorite new gadget instead.

One thing that bugs me about RSS and the PSP is that it seems like some of Sony’s fan boys don’t really know what RSS is. I have seen a number of forum threads the past few days on the PSP’s forums saying, “What is a RSS Channel?” or “How Can I Get Good Stuff on my Channels?!”. Right now I’m not sure if this is a step forward for RSS or a step back.

As far as the future does with the PSP and RSS, I think it looks good.

The audio RSS content the PSP is able to deliver us now with the newest firmware update is nice. I’ve played around with it some (of course adding the Web Hosting Show to my list of feeds) and I have to say the experience is nice. I haven’t ran into a problem yet.

Now what would I like to see? I’d like to see video and text content in the same place. I’d love to be able to stream RocketBoom on my PSP to watch it there. I’d love to add some of my favorite RSS feeds as well to the PSP to do a little reading in my spare time. It shouldn’t be too hard to get working. So if Sony is waiting for users to tell them they want it, here I am and that is what I am doing.