Archive for December, 2005
· December 15, 2005 at 11:00 am · Odds & Ends
Have you visited LinkedIn lately? How about at all? LinkedIn has become one of my favorite places to visit Online. It is a great resources for professionals like myself to find new and interesting business contacts. I like to think of it as MySpace for adults. Now you can bring some of LinkedIn’s functionality to your Firefox browser with the LinkedIn Companion.
Here is what the author of the extension has to say about it:
Take advantage of this network every day with the LinkedIn Companion for Firefox. Use the Firefox Companion to easily search for professionals or jobs on LinkedIn and bookmark the most interesting results in a clear and organized format. Our powerful JobsInsider feature instantly shows you the inside connections you have at the companies you’re interested in while you browse job listings on the major job boards.
LinkedIn is an online social network of more than 4 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries. LinkedIn helps you be more effective in your daily work and opens doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.
The LinkedIn Companion extension is for Firefox versions 1.0 through 1.5. If you are a LinkedIn expert or you haven’t tried it before, give it a shot and feel free to look me up if you need a few contacts to get you started.
· December 14, 2005 at 5:41 pm · Odds & Ends
Doesn’t anybody else find this a little creepy? I mean, I am all for adoption and all that, but could you imagine yourself growing up in a data center? Maybe this will be one more way to raise super Web hosting gurus that by the time they are adults will rule the world of Web hosting.
This gives “get ‘em while they’re young” a whole new meaning.
New York web hosting provider Weblinkhosting has announced its intention to adopt a boy (rather than a girl) under its company name.
As you may remember, Weblinkhosting circulated a press release suggesting it intended to legally adopt a child to ‘live at the company’s data center and be provided with food, clothing, shelter and love from the owner and employees’. Weblinkhosting.com’s latest circulation suggests progress has been made with the objective and, “the newly adopted orphan which will live in the web hosting data center will be a male. His name has yet to be determined.”
You want something even stranger?
The company also originally suggested their intention to make the adopted child their official logo.
I’d love to see how the public feels about this one. I’ll be sure to touch on this subject a little deeper on next week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show podcast as well.
· December 14, 2005 at 11:00 am · Odds & Ends
It seems like just about every company out there today has an extension written for Firefox. When I heard that there was now a PayPal Firefox extension, I had to raise my eyebrows and think. What could you really add to Firefox that has to do with PayPal? Well, how about an easier process of making payments with the PayPal Send Money Firefox extension.
Here is what the author of the work has to say about this Firefox extension:
The PayPal Send Money extension provides a quick way to send money to anyone with an email address. Enter the recipient’s email address and the extension opens a quick link to PayPal’s Website Payments Standard checkout page so you can log in and make a quick payment to a friend.
When sending money to a friend’s Personal Account, use your PayPal funds or a bank account and avoid any fees.
With the holiday season upon us, don’t we all need an easier way to send a few bucks to our favorite people and our favorite Web sites? Since I do most of my professional work Online, I have to deal with PayPal a lot. Anything that makes that experience better, quicker and easier is perfectly OK in my book.
So check out the PayPal Firefox extension. It is compatible with Firefox versions 1.0 - 1.5 and really does make it easier to combine your browsing and PayPal experiences.
· December 13, 2005 at 11:00 am · Odds & Ends
With the 1.5 Firefox release, maybe there wasn’t too many improvements to the search bar in the upper right of your browser window. They have made advancements by leaps and bounds by making it easier to add a search engine to your browser.
The new search engines Web page is welcome change from the look of MyCroft site. The choices haven’t been improved any on the new Web page. That isn’t the exciting part. The exciting part is I am now not afraid to send somebody to that page to get a few new search engines without being afraid they would get lost.
Some of the front page included searches are: A9, Flickr tags, MSN, AOL, WebMD, Market Watch, and Wikipedia. Now if they could only make the rest of the search engine experience more friendly for the rest of the folks who might be scared of the trip down Mozilla Lane.
Another nice feature of this new Web page is they link to a Firefox extension that makes it really easy to remove search engines from the drop down menu. It allows uninstalling search plugins - just right click on a search plugin and choose “Delete”. I’d like for that to be something built into Firefox 2.0, but I know they might have more important things to worry about right now.
So give the new search engine Web page a shot and try out the Search Plugin Hacks extension. You’ll be searching various places like a pro in no time at all.
· December 12, 2005 at 12:31 pm · Odds & Ends
Everybody’s favorite Web hosting podcast is back on the air again. On podcast 41 of the Web Hosting Show we tackle what to do with .htaccess files, hyphenated domains as well as the usual hosting fun and information we tackle week in and week out. I thought it would be interesting though to share with you some of the biggest hosting headlines from the past week.
SWsoft, a recognized leader in server automation and virtualization software, today announced the availability of SiteBuilder 2.0 for Windows, an upgraded release of the next generation, browser-based application designed to quickly and easily create and edit websites. The new version 2.0 adds ecommerce and blog capabilities, plan and site management, several new modules and reseller support for the fastest-growing hosting platform. First announced in September 2005, the SiteBuilder for Windows promotion will last through September 30, 2006.
SWsoft’s SiteBuilder tool is one of the best the Web hosting industry has to offer. I like to see that they are keeping it up to date and adding more and more features along the way.
According to reports by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a 19-year-old Winnipeg man is trying to clear his name after his Netgo Web Hosting business unknowingly hosted al-Qaeda terrorist related content.
Well, taking the terrorism aspect out of the picture of the moment, this just proves that Web hosts should always pay attention to the content they are hosting. Keeping records on every Web site is almost impossible, but you never know when you might get hit like this or with something else of this nature.
Web hosting provider AIT said on Thursday that it had taken over as the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit that accuses Google of breach of contract and unfair business practices. AIT’s motion was filed on Wednesday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. AIT takes over as lead plaintiff from ClickDefense, which filed suit on June 24, 2005.
If they can prove the case, I say more power to AIT. In my opinion this will be a hard case to fight. You will have to prove that these clicks were not real. Who is right? Who is wrong? I guess we’ll have to see what comes of the case.
Download the Web Hosting Show! (MP3) | Read the Show Notes!
Running Time: 15 minutes | File Size: 3.40 MB
· December 12, 2005 at 11:00 am · Odds & Ends
We all like using the find bar in Firefox right? It makes it simple to find a string of text or maybe even just a word on a Web site. It is clean and simple. I love how it just comes up at the bottom of the screen when I need it as well. Is there a way to make the find bar experience any better? Findbar Basics tries to do just that.
The Findbar Basics extension does a few things. Some of these include: a status bar button that opens the find toolbar; a clear button inside the find toolbar for clearing all text from the input box, an optional toolbar button that opens the Find Toolbar, Ctrl-F toggle to switch the Find Toolbar on and off.
There is something to be said about the ease of use of the find bar. Since it was moved down to the bottom of the screen, it has become one of my favorite Firefox features. Any windows that pop up at me make me angry. Why pop up a box in front of the text I am trying to search through?
Many other programs could learn from Firefox in that department.
This extension is compatible with Firefox versions 1.0 through 1.6. Download it today and find what it is you are really looking for.
