Building a Kickass Firefox Sidebar
The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
I spent a few minutes today rebuilding my sidebar in Firefox. I figured it was worth spending 20 minutes or so to save myself hours and hours over the next 12 months. My steps included:
- Adding/Removing/Organizing my folders into how I use the web
- Weeding out all the sites and links I never visit anymore (there were more than 3 dozen)
- Going through, folder by folder, and adding/moving the bookmarks around and changing the title tags to be short and sweet (that way, the sidebar takes up less horizontal space)
- Toughest part - sorting all the dozens of blogs I read by priority and importance/relevance to me
- Creating a few new bookmarklets (Graywolf's list was good, but I needed a few more)
- Going into all the admin sections of the tools I visit and bookmarking those (so I don't have to remember them all)
So now, I've got something cool like this:
And, since I'm the kind of guy who shares way, way, way too much (believe it or not, I actually wanted that for our tagline for a while), I figured I'd go overboard and give you a list of what's in all of my bookmark folders (well, OK, just the first 7):
I've actually taken the time to order these from most favorite to least (or most important to least) as well as categorize, but don't read too much into that - it's just my personal taste:
- Social Buzz
- Reddit - my favorite of the social media trackers, even if it is the hardest to market with.
- Del.icio.us/Popular
- StumbleUpon Buzz Tracker
- TechMeme (I know, I know.. technically, it's not social)
- Digg - least favorite (even though it's important for work, the content that shows up there is pretty "ugh" right now)
- PopURLs (for when I'm lazy)
- Blogs
- Search Engine Land (no surprise, right)
- SERoundtable
- Matt Cutts
- SEO Book
- Gray Wolf
- Marketing Pilgrim (poor Andy got trafficked to death)
- Threadwatch
- SE Journal
- Lee Odden
- The Lisa Barone Show
- SEO Scoop
- Cre8PC
- Google Blogoscoped
- Copyblogger (Brian made Digg's front page today, then got yoinked by the editors - poor Brian)
- Stuntdubl
- Creating Passionate Users
- Guy Kawasaki
- Webmaster Central Blog
- ProNet Advertising
- SEO by the Sea
- Jim Boykin
- Tim Converse
- John Battelle
- Yahoo! Search Blog
- Jon Mendez
- Shoemoney
- SEOPedia
- Eric Enge
- Sugarrae
- DaveN
- JenSense
- SEO Researcher
- MindValley Labs
- SEO Black Hat
- Traffick
- Link Building Blog
- PR Squared
- Jeremy Zawodny
- Scobleizer
- Search Engine Lowdown
- Daggle
- IR Thoughts
- Joe Morin
- Official Google Blog
- Ask.com Blog
- MSN Search Blog
- ClickZ Blog
- Pearsonified
- Cartoon Barry
- Greg Linden
- WebGuerrilla
- Mike Grehan
- LinkMoses
- Ian McAnerin
- Jarrod & Co.
- Mr. Hooley
- Brett Tabke
- Xan Porter
- SEW Blog (ha, ha... just kidding)
- Forums
- Cre8asite Forums (my personal fav)
- HighRankings
- SERoundtable
- SEW Forums
- DigitalPoint (talk about a high noise ratio)
- SitePoint
- SEORefugee (those guys are fun)
- WebProWorld
- V7N
- News
- Search
- Bookmarklets (this is the good one - drag these to your sidebar for the effect)
- Keyword Research
- Wordtracker
- Overture KW Selector
- KW Discovery
- MSN AdCenter
- Adwords KW Tool
- Overture View Bids (did I here they're getting rid of this?)
I'd love it if folks would share their own tips for sidebar/toolbar optimization in the browser. If you've got some great ideas or sites that I've foolishly overlooked in any of these categories, it would be very cool to list them below - feel free to link out, too.
p.s. Sorry I can't share my tools or articles stuff - even I have to draw the competitive advantage line somewhere :)
Update: Caydel created a downloadable version of all these so you can import them if you feel like sharing bookmarks with me :)
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