Back and Better Than Ever, With Some of My Favorite Tools

Here are Some of My Favorite Tools To Make Your Online Life Easier

Firefox Logo

First off, if you are not using the Firefox browser, then you need to get it today! Click Here to Download your copy.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, it’s time to list my fav tools or as firefox calls them, Add-ons.

LastPass

Lastpass is a firefox add-on, that will keep all of your usernames and passwords in a secure sever online and they can be accessed from any computer.

LastPass is a free online password manager and Form Filler that makes your web browsing easier and more secure. Also for IE, Safari and Chrome. Your sensitive data is encrypted locally before upload so even LastPass cannot get access to it.

There are a few different ways you can get lastpass. The easiest way is to use the built-in tools that firefox has.

Open your firefox browser, click on the firefox tab in the top left of the screen. It looks like this

This will get you into the menu

Ok, now that you are in the menu, you will want to look for the Add-ons tab. (Hint It will have a blue puzzle piece next to it.)

From here it is pretty self-explanatory. Just search for the names of the add-ons I am going to give you and you will be on your way to simplifying your online life.

The List

One of my favs Firebug – This is a must have for any web designer or anyone who wants to learn how to work with HTML code, CSS and Javascript. This plugin allows you to change any element on any webpage and see what your changes do to the page. Let’s say you want to change the color of text using CSS, but you don’t know where to find the CSS rule to change. Firebug has a neat little feature that is called Inspect Element. Just click on the Inspect Element button and click on the element within the page. Firebug will give you it’s location in the code and show you all the CSS rules attached to it and even the particular stylesheet it is calling from. That’s powerful stuff!

I could talk about Firebug all day, but that’s not what this post is about, so here’s the next Add-on.

SearchStatus – This is another great tool for any blogger. SearchStatus puts a toolbar at the bottom of your screen and in this toolbar you have the PageRank and Alexa rank of any webpage you are on. You see why this is powerful for bloggers. We all try to get good backlinks to our blogs and with this add-on you can see if a blog is worth leaving a comment on, because the higher the PageRank and alexa rank, the better the backlink. You can also analyze keyword density on any page, by right-clicking your mouse

SEOQuake – This is a great tool for checking your own pages in the search engines. When you search in Google, SEOQuake will show up under each listing in the SERP’s. Giving you Pagerank, alexa rank, links, and too many other things to mention. It’s been a huge help for me.

YSlow – This is another great tool to help your search engine rankings, because we all know that google wants fast loading pages and YSlow will show you how to speed up you page load times and how fast or slow your pages are loading now.

There are a few others I wanted to mention in this post, but it is getting too long, so I will be back with another post about the rest of the add-ons I use on a daily basis.

I hope these add-ons help you as much as they have helped me and if you know of any other add-ons that help you, please share them with us in the comments section. Also make sure to share this post with anyone you think would benefit from it. I have provided many sharing buttons above, below and beside the post, so make sure to use them!