Tag Archives: browser

Track Any Page Changes in Google Chrome

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We are pretty good at tracking page changes at FireFox already. I did a detailed overview of all the addons that track any page for changes and notify you in various ways. I also mentioned that those tools are awesome for various purposes: You can track Google SERPs (especially the newest results that change daily) and thus easily see your brand name mentions; You can track social media sites like Digg or Sphinn to get timely notified about new hot stories on any category page (or new search results); You can use page trackers instead of an RSS reader to monitor new front page stories, You name it! So while we can do that in FireFox, some (many?) of us may have switched to Google Chrome. So the good news is that they can do the same thing there as well! Page Monitor is a fun Google Chrome extension that allows your browser to monitor changes to web pages. The great features of the extension include: The ability to monitor any number of pages for changes. One-click adding of pages. Smart comparison system that ignores ads and code changes. Highlighting of changes that happened to a page since the last check. The ability to set separate check interval for each page. Get it installed in seconds and notice a tiny icon in the toolbar (next to the page address). The icon is used to add new pages to monitor as well as to notify you of the number of updated pages: So when on any page you want to monitor, click that icon and easily start tracking the page changes: Now whenever this page changes, the monitor icon will display a notification on its badge. Of course, you can repeat this for any number of pages. If you want to see the actual changes on the page, click “View changes” (see the screenshot above) and you will be able to see what has been added (green color) and what has been removed (red color): The tool offers to customize some settings as well. To access options, right-click on the icon and select “Options”. From there you can: Stop monitoring any page or rename any page record; See how long ago the tool checked the page; Set the checking interval; Set tracking changes to particular elements on the page (e.g. a price tag on a shopping site) by specifying a CSS/jQuery selector or regular expression to match against the page’s source code (the result of applying this selector/expression is compared). Of course, this feature requires that you know how to use selectors or regular expressions . Set some general look and feel (highlight color, sound alerts, sorting, etc); Import and export the list of pages to monitor: Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Track Any Page Changes in Google

A New Feature-Rich SEO FireFox Addon: SEO Doctor

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It looks like Vladimir Prelovac has become our SEJ featured developer. I have already shared his plugin for smart blog interlinking and mentioned another WordPress plugin by him called “Insights” . Today I am sharing his FireFox addon that has been developed for about a year. SEO Doctor is a newly launched FireFox addon that has tons of useful SEO features; I am looking at only a few of them below (to see the more detailed overview, check out Vladimir’s post). Status Bar

6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for the iPad

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The iPad is no Apple Newton. It truly is a revolutionary device. The whimsical blog of “Fake Steve Jobs” calls the iPad a “ life-changing, mind-altering product”. Although that may be an overstatement, the iPad is certainly important — to the computing industry, to computer users, and to online marketers. The launch of the iPad marks a significant step forward for mobile computing, and for computing in general: one’s productivity can finally be as high as when they are in front of their laptop or desktop computer. The iPad user can efficiently and effectively do their shopping, banking, email, YouTube video watching, and general web surfing. It is also surprisingly easy to use the iPad for more complex, input-intensive tasks, like writing term papers, building slide decks, and manipulating spreadsheets — particularly when also equipped with a Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, the iPad just may be versatile and powerful enough for the road warrior to travel with sans laptop. Conversely, smart phones and other handheld mobile devices, really only serve as a complement — rather than a practical replacement — for the user’s laptop or desktop machine. Technically speaking, the iPad’s operating system is the iPhoneOS, but practically the OS is the Internet. Just upload your documents into “the cloud” (e.g. MobileMe, Dropbox, Xythos) and you are off and running. For the multitude of Google Docs users this is an unnecessary step, as the documents already live in the Cloud, not on any local hard drive. The iPad will undoubtedly speed adoption of this trend towards Internet-based file storage. Overall, it looks like this launch is going to be a success and the iPad, like the iPod, iPhone, and the iMac before it, will gain significant distribution among consumers globally.  And, since it includes a browser with a different set of specifications from either the standard mobile devices, the question for advertisers becomes a practical one – “will my web pages come up on this browser?” With the iPad’s Safari browser, the Web generally looks and works like one would expect on any traditional laptop or desktop computer.  However, there are important differences in the browsing experience and these differences could thwart your web visitors, stopping them in their tracks. As a site owner, you must compensate for these differences, or risk losing the conversion, and more importantly, the customer. “Mobile-Friendly” Does Not Equal

Easier Annotate, Recap and Re-Blog Pages with Yooper (FireFox)

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If you are an active blogger, you must be reading and processing plenty of information daily. You save some of this information by copying-pasting to whichever notes you are managing or by bookmarking the page or saving the link. You go by most of the information to forget about it forever. With such flood of the information you should have plenty of hacks on how to process it quickly and efficiently. Today I am adding one more to your arsenal: a tool for fun web annotating. Yooper is a nice FireFox addon that lets you easily highlight text on the page and the easily save it online. The best features of the tool are those that allow to quickly copy all page highlights and also to easily search through all your previously made highlights. Lets see it in action. Install the addon here , re-start your browser and notice a new toolbar in your FireFox status bar: The first thing you want to do is to login to Yooper using your open ID (I was using Google). Once you are logged in, you will notice that the very first icon in the Yooper toolbar becomes green. Now, just go test it. Open any page and highlight key sentences and phrases as you read. You will see that parts of the text you highlight becomes yellow (you can change the default color if you want to): Once done, click the green icon in the toolbar and choose “View the summary”: You will be taken to the page summary where you can see all your previous highlights, copy any of them and share any of them: You can search the highlights (the feature runs pretty smoothly!): Some points you need to be aware of: The tool won’t highlight the text if you copy it (it is assumed that you selected the text for another purpose); You can disable automatic highlighting (Which is what I ended up doing because there was too much “extra” highlighting I didn’t need); The tool is highly customizable: you can change the color, disable auto-highlighting, etc. I wasn’t able to get some of the features work properly (for example, “Share by email” link doesn’t copy the highlights to email body) but overall the tool turned out quite useful. Let me know what you think! Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Easier Annotate, Recap and Re-Blog Pages with Yooper

When (Not) To Use Target=”_Blank” Link Attribute

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More and more sites are using target=”_blank” for links to make sure they will open the link in a new window and keep the visitor on the site. I confess, I am using them myself because I assume the visitors are using FireFox browser that opens those links in a new window. But is it really a wise thing to do? When Target=”_Blank” Can / Should Be