Fire fox is the preferred browser of millions round the world.

And one of the reason of its vast popularity, specially amongst the high internet usage group, is its open source nature, which allows it to integrate the third party created software pieces in the forms of Fire fox addons.

These fire fox addons are generally tested by the Mozilla community and made available via a secured connection through Mozilla Add-ons site. But sometimes these addons are also provided by the third party directly. Some of these developers provide you the direct link, which install the installs firefox addon in your firefox browser, but sometimes the addon developer provide you a download link, which just downloads the addon to your PC without installing it. This downloaded file is in the form of an .xpi file (for firefox extension) and .jar file (for firefox themes).

How to install .xpi or .jar files

There are three methods.

1. Use File > Open and then browse the .xpi / .jar file.
2. Go to Tools menu > Addon, which will open the Addon window. Now drag the icon of the .xpi / .jar file in this window. This will start the installation procedure.
3. Create an install button in your Add-on manager window.

• Open a new tab.
• Enter about:config in the address
• Search for extensions.hideInstallButton and Double click it to change it to false
• This will make a Install button available to you in your Add-on window, which you can use to install any .xpi or .jar file.

Backlinks are the lifeline of blogs and websites. They give you traffic, they give you exposure and more importantly, they give you the much needed Google Juice, which is so important to rank up in SERP.

Given the importance of Backlinks, they are probably hardest thing to gain. People follow all sorts of practices to get Backlinks including link exchange, buying links etc.
I have recently written a guest post for CourtneyTurtle.com, which was well received. In this post I have aired my way of link exchanges.

Yet another popular method of getting backlinks to your blog is by commenting on blogs, which have rel=”nofollow” attribute removed from their comments section. There are lots and lots of them, and this method is an easy one to get some crucial backlinks to your blog.

But, how to find good dofollow blogs

There are many ways, read on. But the best one is probably the last one.

1. Use DoFollow lists: Web Tools and tips is also a dofollow blog and it also shows some link love to the fellow dofollow blogs by maintaining a list of dofollow blogs. You can use that list, or similar lists on other blogs.

2. Use CommentKahuna: This is a small downloadable program, which I found from John Cow’s blog. After download, you have to enter a keyword into it, and it claims to search for the blog posts for that keyword from the dofollow blogs. Then you can choose, where to comment and thus earn a backlink. The benefit is that, the backlink you earned is from a blog which is in the related niche as you, and so it is more important.

But, when I used it, I found that the many of the blogs, which were found by CommentKahuna for me, were actually carrying a rel=”external nofollow” attribute, which is as good as nofollow. So it was useless for me, although many of the John Cow visitors have praised it highly.

3. Use DoFollo.com: This is a website, which is acting just perfect for me. It finds quality dofollow blogs, for the keyword of your choice and you can easily comment on them. Certainly a website worth considering, if you don’t think it to be an unethical method of earning backlinks for your blog.

What is your take, let us know.

Firefox, misspelled many times as fire fox, foxfire etc. is known for its addons. These are in the form of Firefox extensions, firefox dictionaries, firefox plugins and firefox search engines. They give the much desired flexibility to the Firefox and make it a truly unique web browser.

However, now Microsoft has provided the facility of integration of addons to the Internet Explorer. These addons can be downloaded and installed in your Internet Explorer. However, many of these addons are paid, but some of them are free also.

One such useful Internet Explorer addon, which is free, is IESpell. This addon provides the much needed spell checking facility to the IE7 and thus overcomes an important disadvantage of Internet Explorer vis-a-vis Firefox. There are practically three ways to activate the spell-checker.

• You can activate it from the tools menu

• You can activate it from its own top-level menu

• And, it is also available to your from the contextual menu (right-click).

Gmail and other similar services use cookies to detect your online presence and automatically login you, if you so desire, to let you avoid the hassles of entering the username and passwords. This saves you couple of minutes and is very useful, if you are using the computer, which is not shared with others.

But, in many case, you want to have more than one such email accounts. But since, Gmail is saving cookies in your computer, it becomes difficult to use different accounts from the same computer, and you have to logout and login each time, you want to switch from one user to the other user. Once you get used to automatic login, it looks very cumbersome.

However, with CookiePie Extension, you can do it very easily.

What is CookiePie?

CookiePie is a Firefox extension, which enables you to maintain different cookies storage in different tabs and windows. After the download and installation of CookiePie, you have to use the tab’s context menu to enable CookiePie.

Blogging today has become a very powerful medium of fast communication of information on the web. There are millions of blogs today on the web, thousands of blogs are being created every hour, and most of them are on on the free platforms, Blogspot being one of them. The popularity of blogspot originates from the fact that blogspot allows bloggers to modify the template and thus the blogger is in a position to serve Adsense and other ads on their blogs. And this is where the problem starts for the genuine bloggers.

Earning money online by serving ads on blogs seem to an easy solution, and so it lures many of them, who just copy the content created by others on these blogs, also sometimes synonymous with the term splogs, and try to make money. These splogs are sometimes able to make serious money, out of the content created by others.

This has two pronged effects on the genuine blog. First, it is depriving the original blogger from the benefits due to him, and more importantly, the process is also creating a web page, which has a duplicate content on the web. Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Although Google is smart enough to judge, which is duplicate and which is original, by the indexing dates and other methods, but still there are chances that the original content is downgraded by Google just because a rogue has copied and pasted it elsewhere.

So what do you do in such a case.

If the splog is a Blogspot blog, which is the case in most of the Splogs, Blogger provides a easy solution for that. Simply Flag the splog, on the navigation bar, which blogspot provides on the top of their blogs.

However, if the splog has hid the navigation bar, which requires a simple hack of the blogspot template, then you can report the splog to Blogger by following following link.

Blogger/Blogspot abuse reporter tool

It has been reported that although it takes some time to Blogger to take action, but action has been taken.

Lorelle, has written two excellent articles on applaud those who warn you your blog’s content theft and What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content. Check them out.

[This is the second part of the two post series on how to speed up your Windows XP computer run faster. See the first part here.]

In the previous post we have suggested following tips for speeding up your XP computer.

• Use Defragmentation
• Disable file indexing
• Use NTFS file system
• Run Disk Clean
• Empty Windows Prefetch folder
• Run Spyware Removal

Going further, following are the additional tips, which will further improve the speed of your PC.

Remove unwanted software from your PC: After running your PC for few months / years, you may find that you have loaded a few software just for testing purpose or fun, and they are no longer in use. Some of them may be consuming a lot of your precious hard disk space, and some of them may even be residing in your RAM. You gotta remove them. You can do so from Control Panel > Add Remove programs.

Remove unwanted programs from Start up: There will also be many programs, which gets start up during the booting process. Most of them are memory resident programs, and consume your precious RAM space. Some of them you may find to be sitting in your system tray. Get rid of them. This can be done by clicking Start > Run and entering msconfig. In the resulting window, you can manage the services to be run at the start up. Besides increasing the speed, it will also reduce the Start up time of your PC considerably.

Turn off the fancy Windows XP graphics: If you love the cool and fancy look of Windows XP, then this tip is not for you. But if you are ready to sacrifice it for speed, then go ahead.

• Click Start > Control Panel > System.
• lick on the Advanced tab > Click the Settings button under Performance.
• Select the ‘Adjust for best performance’ radio button, then Apply, and OK.

Clear Browsing History and Temporary files: If you are a consistent user of your web browser, then over a period, many unwanted Temporary Internet files, cookies, browsing history, your passwords etc. get accumulated in the memory, and is a drain on the PC resources. You can selectively delete them, specially the Temporary Internet files.

Following these tips, will surely improve your PC performance.

Thoughts aside:
One can experiment with web design to his hearts fill if he has the assurance of having the best image hosting. Not every cheap web hosting offers this. Thanks to information imparted by internet marketers, the general ton is aware of this concept. People now look if internet phones are compatible with the host. Issues of email hosting are much more important now. And a host that does not offer free backup is not considered an option anymore.

Windows XP is arguably the most popular Operating System today. Even with the launch of Windows Vista few months back, most of the PCs still run on Windows XP.

But many of the regular users of the Windows XP complain about it getting slower in speed and performance with time. They think of various spywares, viruses, background running programs to be the main reason behind that.

Although this is partially true. But there is also much more behind the story. The fact is, just like any mechanical machine, software components also require regular upkeep and maintenance. There are certain tasks, which you require to carry out on daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis, so as to get the maximum speed from your PC. It is best to make a schedule of the activities to be carried out, and follow that schedule strictly, without fail.

Speeding up your PC

Although the title of this post relates to speeding up of Windows XP, we will share few tips with you beyond that also, which will speed up the overall performance of your PC. So here we go…

Use Defragmentation: Defragentation rearranges your disk drives so that the related files are stored in vicinity. Do it once in a month. This increases the speed. Without wasting money on purchasing any third party defragmentation program, you can use the built-in Windows defragmenter. It works equally fine.

Disable file indexing: If you do not need to search your files and folders often, then you can easily disable it. Windows XP indexes files and folders, which enables it to search them faster. Windows built-in Search function can still work fine, even if you disable this feature, only thing is that it will take a bit more time. So, this is a trade-off. If you don’t search your files more often, then you should definitely disable it.

For disabling it open My Computer. Right-click on C: Drive > select Properties. Uncheck “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching.” Click Apply and OK.

Use NTFS file system: NTFS file system is more secure, more reliable and more efficient as compared to the FAT32 file system. You can check the file system used by your PC in the Properties windows of C: drive, which was just described above.

If you have FAT32 file system, then you can change it to NTFS through Command Prompt. Go to Start > Run and type cmd, click OK. A new window will open up. In the command prompt, type CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS and hit Enter. Be sure to backup your important data, before attempting it.

Run Disk Clean: This can be done once in two months or so. A button for starting the Disk Clean Up utility is also available on Properties windows of C: drive, as described previously.

Empty Windows Prefetch folder: Prefetching is a process, which is used by Windows XP to load often used files and folders fast. But after consistent use, the prefetch folder get loaded with pointers related to those files and folders, which are not being used by you at present. At this moment, it is wasting a lot of resources and it is better to clean it up.

Run Spyware Removal: No need to elaborate. They are the programs, specially designed to hide within your PC and send the information to the third parties. You need to block them for two reasons. First they are intruding your privacy and second, they are wasting your resources. For removing them, you can use any good spyware removing progrgam. There are many of those, which are free and easy to use.

[Watch out for the next part of tips to speed up your Windows XP PC]

See the second lot of tips here.