Friday, September 28, 2007

Myspace Is The Microsoft Of Social Networks (The New CSS Skin)




This makeover of the user's 'home', dashboard, or whatever you call their interface might actually make the social-networking destination more organized, usable and allow the user to see more things at a glance; in essence it functions more like facebook. Like Microsoft they're merely copying others by ripping off facebook (I've never used facebook) The rest of the site outside the internal user's home area still has that awful blue look and. When will Myspace go AJAX? Probably never. Should they? Of course. Any internal, non-search engine facing web destination should be looking at going to AJAX, but still gracefully degrade for older browsers.

What do you think about this?

PS: Is my writing good or disjointed?

Friday, September 14, 2007

How To Quickly Access Yahoo SiteExplorer and DomainTools Using Firefox's Keyword Searches

It's quite easy to quickly access webmaster/SEO tools such as Yahoo! SiteExplorer and DomainTools whois as well as IMDB and Wikipedia by using Firefox's Keyword Search feature. There are many ready made Keyword Search shortcuts in the Firefox Bookmarks Quick Searches folder; for example, type 'wp bill clinton' and you will be brought to the Wikipedia search for Bill Clinton, which redirects to the right article. In some versions of Firefox there may not be a Wikipedia Keyword Search, so we'll have to make one.

First, go to Bookmarks, then Quick Searches, then right-click any bookmark (you have to because there isn't any empty area otherwise, also I recommend you right-click the topmost bookmark to find later for maintenance). For this example I will use toolhaus.org's ebay negs tool, but more are posted below. I chose the bookmarks name as "toolhaus.org ebay negs", the Location is http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs?User=%s&Dirn=Received+by, and the Keyword is "th", as seen in the image.
















Then, to access a person's negative eBay reviews and feedback you simply type 'th [username]', where [username] is the persons eBay username. Also, you may want to add a description in case later you might forget why you created that particular Keyword Search.
You can create your own Keyword Searches for any website that uses parameters in the URL, and replace the search term with %s. There's more Keyword Searches at the MozillaZine Wiki.
For searches which require forms the NeedleSearch toolbar can help in this regard. If you prefer to use browser based bookmarklets, there's two at smallbusinesssem and many, many more on JesseW's Wikipedia user page.
Here are some more searches which I've added:
Site Location Keyword
Google Groups http://groups.google.com/group/%s gg
Google's 1st 100 results http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&num=100&filter=0 g
Sourceforge Project page http://sourceforge.net/projects/%s sfp
Wiktionary Lookup http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%s wk
Google Books http://books.google.com/books?q=%s&btnG=Search+Books&hl=en b
Livejournal http://www.livejournal.com/users/%s/ lj
Myspace.com http://myspace.com/%s ms
Discogs Artist http://www.discogs.com/artist/%s da
Alexa Rankings http://alexa.com/data/details/main?url=%s alexa
Web.Archive.Org Wayback Machine (this one doesn't work) http://web.archive.org/*/%s wa
Google Addurl Quick (lol, this doesn't work) http://www.google.com/addurl?q=%s&hl=en&dqq= add
eBay Item Number http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=%s ebi
Amazon.com New&Used ASIN (asinf [asinf]) http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/%s/ref=dp_olp_2/002-4503523-3779261?ie=UTF8 asinf
Amazon ASIN Featured Seller (KW: asin) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%s/ref=olp_product_details/002-4503523-3779261?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=284507 asin
whois.domaintools.org http://whois.domaintools.com/%s wdt
Google Images http://images.google.com/images?q=%s gi
WikiSaurus http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikisaurus:%s ws