Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for May 11, 2007

Friday, May 11, 2007 4:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

This week: Text Size Toolbar and SearchStatus

Text Size Toolbar

Rating: 2/5

The Text Size Toolbar extension is a great utility for people reading web pages who have problems with authors of site creating tiny, tiny fonts for their articles. Oh, they are out there. Trust me.

I would recommend users who don't know of the Firefox trick to resize text to download this extension. If you are considered the hacker hotshot of family, you can install this extension on your families PC and tell them you just activated a feature in Firefox. :-)

When you install the Text Size Toolbar extension, you'll notice that it's nowhere to be found. This type of extension is a toolbar component, so you need to right-click on the toolbar and click Customize. For this extension, it's represented as three icons: an A+, an A-, and an A=. Click-and-drag this icon set to a toolbar location of your choice and you should be ready to go.

  • A+ makes the font larger.
  • A- makes the font smaller.
  • A= returns the font to the original size when you first visited the web page.

This type of extension/feature would've been great to attach to a Firefox release with the icons, but the Mozilla Foundation already added this hidden feature to Firefox.

The extension provides an easy way to increase and decrease the font on a web site and it's a great utility for web designers.

As a plug, the author of this extension has created various other extensions for use within Firefox.


SearchStatus

Rating: 4/5

There are a lot of SEO (Search Engine Optimizers) extensions out there to help you write the best post for your site. In my eyes, you can't have enough extensions to help with Search Engine Results.

SearchStatus is a fundamental statistic extension for determining the best keywords, keyword density, show meta tags, and other SEO functions that are truly helpful.

When you install the extension and restart Firefox, you'll notice the icon in your status bar looks similar to an "at" symbol (@), but contains a "q" instead of an "a." Left-clicking will get you nowhere, but right-clicking displays your menu.

The first thing that drew my attention was the "Enable PageRank" and "Enable Alexa Rank." Here's a quote from their site.

For every web page you visit while using SearchStatus (excluding secure domains and those you have configured as private), certain information, including your ip address, the url of the web page you visit, and general information about your browser and computer's operating system will be transmitted from your computer to Alexa. Some of the url's you visit, which are transmitted to Alexa, will contain information that is personally identifiable.

Hmmm...Nothing like helping someone's site stats out on Google or Alexa. ;-)

The one cool feature I did pay particular attention to was the Keyword Density. Enter in a keyword and it will scan the current web page for that keyword and tell you the percentage where it's used the most.

Keyword Density screenshot

The one drawback to that was that after I did a keyword density option, I walked out of the room for an hour and left the dialog box on the screen. When I came back later, I didn't know what keyword I entered. Minor cosmetic flaw, but easily fixed by adding it to the caption.

The SearchStatus extension also provides the indexed and backward links for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Very nice feature as well.

As I said before, you can never have too much help when it comes to SEO for your web site or you examining a client's web site for rank-ability.


Hope everyone liked this weeks reviews. I'll see ya next week.

If anyone has questions, please post them below or Contact me directly.

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