Top Ten Best Firefox Extensions

Firefox extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Mozilla applications. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the application to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while minimizing the size of the application itself (from the official Firefox Extensions site). Here are my picks for the Top Ten Best Firefox Extensions:

Adblock Plus - Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.

Video DownloadHelper - The easy way to download Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites. This works also for audio and picture galleries.

Greasemonkey - Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

Web Developer - Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

Firebug - Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Delicious Bookmarks - The Official Delicious Add-on seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us, the leading social bookmarking service on the Web.

FlashGot - Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page together at the maximum speed with a single click, using the most popular, lightweight and reliable external download managers.

IE Tab - An extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox.

StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.

wmlbrowser - Simulate WAP browsing by viewing WML (Wireless Markup Language) pages.

Gmail Manager - Allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts and receive new mail notifications. Displays your account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.

And last, here is a couple more of my favorite Firefox extensions ONLY for Chinese users:

Access Flickr! - Bypasses the flickr.com filter in Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, China and other banned countries and places...

FoxyProxy - FoxyProxy is an advanced proxy management tool that completely replaces Firefox's limited proxying capabilities. It offers more features than SwitchProxy, ProxyButton, QuickProxy, xyzproxy, ProxyTex, TorButton, etc.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Launch

Firefox download day is here! With more than 15,000 improvements, Firefox 3 is faster, safer and smarter than ever before. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 months. This new platform includes more than 15,000 changes to improve performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 is built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

Mozilla has finally launched the highly waited version 3 of their Firefox Web Browser.With their servers flooded with traffic ,they got an hour or 2 late to launch it,but it is now finally up.

You can download Firefox 3.0 by click the Download Day buttons.

Google Translation Gadget

Google released a translation gadget which can translate blog or website easily from one language to another. According to wikipedia only 35.2% of the internet users are English, so it makes sense to add translation widgets for your blog to increase the reach for your blog.

Google Translator widget supports lots of languages as of now if your primary language is English. This widget also served through Javascript and carries a link Google Translator and Google Gadgets.

Add the Google Translate gadget to your webpage is quick and easy. Its offer instant access to automatic translations of that page. Go to Google Translate gadget, select the language of your webpage, copy and paste the HTML to include the gadget on your webpage.

Top Ten China Mobile Site

Opera released a State of the Mobile Web: First Quarter, 2008 report recently. The report listed the top 10 Chinese mobile sites based on the statistics of Opera Mini.

Web portal content and search engine access is extremely popular in China, accounting for nearly 55% of the traffic.

E-commerce and e-mail are not yet as popular in China as in other parts of the world. Together, these two categories combine to create less than 2% of overall Opera Mini traffic in China.

Top 10 sites in China

www.sina.com.cn
www.baidu.com
www.google.cn
www.ko.cn
news.sohu.com
www.xiaonei.com
www.3g.cn
www.paojiao.com
www.188bet.com
www.feiku.com

Install WordPress MU On IIS With Url Rewrite

I have successfully installed WordPress MU on my Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6. To be honest, I know that WPMU is not full compatible with IIS right out of the box. It relies heavily on apaches mod_rewrite, which IIS isn't capable of. The only IIS fix for permalinks I've seen have either been via a special filter named ISAPI_Rewrite.

ISAPI_Rewrite is Apache mod_rewrite compatible URL rewriter for Microsoft IIS server. It is compatible with Apache mod_rewrite making it possible to move configurations from Apache to IIS and vice versa just by copying .htaccess files. I have tested with Wordpress 2.x or Wordpress MU 1.3.x, it's work. This is also works in IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro, but IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro have no free version.

To enable Clean Permalinks on Wordpress MU on IIS, follow these steps:

• Install PHP and MySQL following the vendor's instructions.


• Install ISAPI_Rewrite.


• Install Wordpress according to the vendor's instructions.


• Open with a text editor the file wp-settings.php, located in Wordpress root directory. Add the code line

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_URL'];

• Log on to Wordpress as administrator, go to admin panel, open the "Permalinks" settings page, and set the permalink structure of your choice. Apply your changes.


• Wordpress is supposed to automatically create a file with name ".htaccess" in its root directory. Open with a text editor the file .htaccess, copy it and paste into httpd.conf in ISAPI_Rewrite directory.

Now we have a WordPress MU with clean permalinks on Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6.

Free Online Translation Tools

Google Translate - Google's free online language translation service instantly translate text and web pages. This translator supports: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese.

Windows Live Translator - Microsoft Windows Live Translator is a free online language translation service for text and web pages. This translator supports more than 25 translation languages.

Babelfish - Yahoo Babel Fish provides free online text and web page language translation tools. You can use this site to translate words, phrases, or entire web sites into 19 pairs of languages, including to and from English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Systran - Systran is a leader in providing language translation software products and solutions for the desktop, enterprise and Internet. With Systran products or solutions you can instantly translate and understand foreign language content into 52 language pairs.

Disable Directory Listings in WordPress

By default when accessing any directory which does not contain an index file, a directory listing will be shown displaying a list of the files in that folder. Web servers can be configured to automatically display the listings of the contents of a web site's file directory if no index file (i.e. index.html or index.php) is present. This can expose files and information to visitors.

Simply adding a blank/ 0 byte text file named "index.html" will prevent this directory list from being displayed, however another way to disable directory listing is by adding the following line to the .htaccess file in your public_html folder of your web hosting account :

Options -Indexes

That’s it, with this line in place, folders which do not contain index files will no longer show the default directory list.