I loved del.icio.us for its introduction of bookmarking ala social networking.  I loved its implementation of tag clouds, and badges for marketing your account.  I've always thought it was cool to have all bookmarks in one place and easy accessible from anywhere at all.  Sharing and linking up is a lot easier.

With my RSS reader, on the other hand, I find it easy to mark which items I'd like to review further, or simply put it to note and read more about it later on.  This is where Google Reader's starring system works best for me.  This way, not every worthwhile link ends up in del.icio.us.  Most of the time, what I put in del.icio.us are pages that I stumble upon by random and not those sites that I often visit.

Since I also have my Firefox browser (which I always use–in fact, I use IE only for testing sites), I am more into customizing how my browser can work wonders for me.  In my Firefox Add-Ons post, I've enumerated the top add ons that I use.  Later on, I've come across a few others, like:

  • the GMail Manager, which allows me to keep track of all GMail accounts that I want to (in my case, I also track my mom's account for new mails).  It can show you a snippet of the latest mail that has arrived (for each open GMail accounts), your space usage, and the count of other mails in your Drafts and Spam folders.
  • the GSpace Tool, which empowers your GMail space and turns it into a file storage!  Great huh?  If you suddenly forgot your flashdrive or is simply in a hurry to save some files and wanna make it instantly available for access online, you'd no longer need your flashdrives for this.  Just use your GMail account!  (Maybe, they've notice the trend of saving files as attachments, and then moving the mails into Drafts.. lolz)  IF you wanna do something more with your Google account, check this page out: GMail craze.
  • the IETab, its actually good only for those running in windows and whose primary browser is the Firefox.  If you're a web developer, of course, your main concern is to render a site which is completely W3C compliant, whether it be HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML Strict; have a valid CSS 2.0 stylesheet, and whose interface is completely tested on the most popularly used browsers.  With this, you should be thinking about testing it in Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera.  Some could still contest using the Netscape browser , but only to a minimum.  With this add-on (if you're using Windows), you can just right click the icon that sits on your lower right screen, and it will open a new tab which calls on IE browser rendering.  Viola! No need to open an IE browser instance at all!
  • the W3C Offline Validator, is very important for me, since I check the validity of all pages that I create.  This is helpful because I don't need to go to the site itself to have the source validated.
  • an Extended Copy Menu, sometimes, when I'm too lazy to have a snippet converted to HTML, this is very useful.  I'd only have to select it, then copy as HTML, so that I can readily paste it in like I've manually typed its HTML code.  hehe..
  • Dummy Lipsum, Lorem Ipsum what?? :P Some of you might have seen some site that looked as if it's one big chant or a garbled page perhaps.  But there is actually a reason why the Lorem Ipsum text is used for creating pages that do not have useful text yet.  Quoting from Lipsum.com, "It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English".  This addon can generate for me the amount of text that I need to put in my site while testing it for the layout and usability.
  • and last but not the least is Measure It, though I'm not a good creative person, I am also into accuracy for the site.  If I need quick measurements, instead of right clicking to view a certain image, or to save the image itself, or even worse, open the source code.. just to check its dimensions, I could just turn on the measuring add on for Firefox and begin getting measurements.  Its very easy.  I love it so much!
But, just recently, as I was breezing through my IT RSSes, I've come across an intriguing post from LifeHacker again.  Its title was " Power up Firefox with Keywords".  Being the Firefox/Google lover that I am, I was quick to inspect what it was all about.  True, as he says, one of the most underutilized of Firefox's native features is the Bookmarking.  You can actually have a bookmark set with a keyword (this is cool for your most visited sites).  All you have to do is put a shortcut in the keyword space and you can now access your bookmark by pressing Ctrl+ L + {keyword}.

Great! Now, all I have to do, is put in one letter of the alphabet for each of my most visited sites.  (I must prioritize my links for it to fit 26.. :P )

I wonder.. what else I have to know about Firefox.. hmmm.. everyday seems to be a surprise.  :)