All Posts Tagged With: "148"

It has been a couple years now since Yahoo! purchased the popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us. Unfortunately, the service has not really seen any improvements in the time since Yahoo! acquired them, so some people have taken it into their own hands to improve the appearance and performance of the site with the use of Greasemonkey scripts.

Before we get started, you’ll want to make sure that you are using the Firefox web browser and already have the Greasemonkey extension installed. Once you’ve got that done, you can install any of the following Del.icio.us scripts that sound useful:

Del.icio.us Improved Appearance Greasemonkey Scripts

• Del.icio.us Prettifier - Changes font family and link colors on Del.icio.us.
• Del.icio.us.ness - Popular skin for Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us Improved Functionality Greasemonkey Scripts

• AutoDel.icio.us - Adds auto-complete capabilities to the Del.icio.us posting page.
• Deja.licio.us - Show whether you have a del.icio.us bookmark for the current page. Uses a cache to reduce Del.icio.us hits. Adds ‘(+)’ to the title for bookmarked sites.
• Del.icio.us Alpha Sort - Allows you to toggle between chronological or alphabetical sorting of links on a Del.icio.us page. Places a “sort by” control at the top of the page.
• Del.icio.us Delete Now - Removes the delete-bookmark-confirmation functionality from Del.icio.us.
• Delicio.us Duplicate Monster II - Removes all duplicate links on Del.icio.us.
• Delicious Ego - Highlights your bookmarks in http://del.icio.us/url.
• Del.icio.us Graph a Tag Cloud - Adds a “Graph this item’s Tag Cloud” image link while viewing Del.icio.us.
• Del.icio.us Sort - Sort Del.icio.us items by number of bookmarkers.
• Fav.icio.us2 - Add favicons next to posted links on Del.icio.us.
• Snap.icio.us - Add thumbnails previews to the links posted on Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us Web 2.0 Greasemonkey Scripts

• Del.icio.us Stumbles - Adds a link to Del.icio.us that submits all links on the page to StumbleUpon.
• Digg.licio.us - Adds links to save a Digg story to Del.icio.us.
• Googlelicious - Places a link to Del.icio.us search result above Google’s results.

Know of one I missed? Let me know in the comments below!

It has been a busy weekend around the blogosphere. Here are a few links I enjoyed:

• Mashable continues their toolbox series, this time with 180+ Del.icio.us tools and resources. Many of their toolbox posts are not necessary to read, but I recommend people bookmark them if they use the service covered in the toolbox.
• Mashable has also provided a nice post of 20 WordPress 4-Column Themes that is worth checking out. I do think there are situations where 4-column themes can work for certain sites, and it certainly allows people to have a lot of content above the fold.
• Keith at Techie Buzz covers 5 free tools to upload content to your website. I’m a FireFTP user, but I’ve heard good things about Firezilla from many people I trust, so I may be making the switch here shortly.
• Tech has a post up about a 75 year old pensioner that has the fastest broadband connection in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg enjoys a 40Gbps connection, which is several thousand times faster than the average connection.
• CyberNet has the latest features and videos regarding the alpha version of Opera 9.5, which is due to be available this Tuesday. Among other things, for those of you that don’t like Opera because it doesn’t work with a lot of sites (including many Google sites), there is now a right-click open to open with IE or Firefox.
• Vnunet has posted that the next generation iPods (due out shortly) will include digital radio. It is also believed that while listening to music on the digital radio, you will be able to click a button to purchase the song you are listening to if it is available on iTunes. Also, iPod Nanos should now include video.
• Thilak of TechBuzz talks a bit about Pownce’s new features. On a side note, I have 7 Pownce invites available if anyone is interested. Just comment below with an e-mail address.
• Wikipedia now has a timeline of web browsers available. Its not very readable, but is good for a quick reminder of what order things came in.

Have you ever put a lot of really hard work into a post, then sat back and waited for the traffic to come pooring in, only to be disappointed with your relatively unnoticed post? Or maybe some of your best work goes unnoticed, while a post you spent 5-10 minutes writing gets dugg and bookmarked into oblivion. This seems to be the nature of blogging (especially at the beginning), but there are a few things you can do to help promote your content.

• Social Buttons - For Wordpress users, these are very easy to add. Simply grab a social bookmarking plugin (Share This, Sociable, and Notable will all work) and you’re done! For other bloggers, or Wordpress users that want to create a custom look for the social buttons, refer to my post entitled How to: Add Social Bookmarking Links with Icons. Having these buttons serve two purposes. The first, is to remind your readers that they have the option of recommending this post to others, or to save it for future reference. The second purpose is to make it really easy for your readers to do so. If you only go with a few, the three most important are Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These 3 will be used the most and bring you the most traffic.
• Feedburner’s Feedflare - This has a similar effect to the social buttons, except it applies to your site’s feed. If you use a Feedburner feed, you can enable the feedflare feature in your control panel and select which services you would like promote in your feed. Dosh Dosh has created two great posts to help with this, covering 15 Feedburner Feedflares You Should Use and How to Create Your Own Feedflare. Once set up and running, this will allow those that never visit your website to also help promote your content.

If you use both of these approaches to promote your content, you should see a significant improvement over time with the number of referrals from social bookmarking sites and services.

Any I missed? Feel free to add them in the comments below!