20 Must-try Firefox Add-Ons / Extensions

I have compiled here some of my favorite Firefox extensions or add-ons so you guys can also try them out. I gave out some general info about them so you can get an overview of what they are all about. Some can be useful for bloggers, some are for web developers, some are just for casual surfers so I made sure there's something for everybody.

1. ColorZilla - Advanced eyedropper, color picker, page zoomer and other colorful goodies. This is pretty useful for web designers. You can get the color code on areas of the webpage, much like the Photoshop eyedropper.


2. DownThemAll! - The mass downloader for Firefox. Very handy if you download lots of stuff from the Internet. Makes downloading faster and much more organized. A lot of options available for customizing your downloads.


3. Firebug - Web development evolved. I think the most comprehensive debugging tool for web developers. Analyze the internal code of a page (html, css, javascript, dom) and more useful developer tools.


4. FireFTP - FTP client for Mozilla Firefox. I personally use this. It has replaced my default FTP client.


5. Fission - Places the progress bar in the address bar, like Safari style.


6. FoxClocks - Displays local times around the world in the status/toolbar. Supports virtually all timezones.


7. FoxyProxy - Premiere proxy manager for Firefox. If you are a "stealthy" surfer and you usually change the proxies by going to the Options menu, this is a great add-on.


8. MeasureIt - Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.


9. PDF download - Allows you to choose what to do with a PDF file: download it, view it with an external viewer, or view it as HTML


10. RankChecker - Track where your site ranks in Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search using the free Firefox Rank Checker. From SeoBook.com


11. SiteLauncher - Opens websites using special keyboard shortcuts. This is specially useful if you want to remove the bookmarks toolbar to save screen real estate, but still want easy access to bookmarks. Pressing ctrl+space opens a pop-up of your set bookmarks.


12. StumbleUpon Toolbar - StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more. Clicking the StumbleIt! button is quite addicting!


13. Tab Mix Plus - Tab browsing with an added boost. If you are accustomed to using the ctrl+tab shortcut when changing tabs on other Windows applications, this will help you get the same effect on Firefox.


14. TinyMenu - Replaces the standard menu with a tiny menu popup.


15. Yet Another Smooth Scolling - Replaces scroll behavior with both mouse wheel and cursor key into fully customizable natural smooth one. This imitates the scrolling behavior of the Opera browser.


16. Personas - Personas are lightweight, easy to install and easy to change skins for your Firefox web browser. This one is really a must-try!


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


18. Cooliris - Full-Screen, 3D -- Cooliris is simply the fastest and most stunning way to browse photos and videos from the Web or your desktop. Effortlessly scroll a "3D Wall" of your content from Facebook, Google Images, YouTube, Flickr, and hundreds more. You'll be stunned with the 3d interface of this image gallery add-on.


19. GooglePreview - Inserts preview images (thumbnails) and popularity ranks of web sites into the Google and Yahoo search results pages. Very helpful when you do a lot of Googling!


20. FoxTab - FoxTab is a 3D tabbed browsing extension. With 5 attractive layouts to choose from, fliiping between opened tabs becomes easy and enjoyable than ever. Use the grouping and filtering features, and start experiencing tabbed-browsing in a whole new way.

Any other cool Firefox Add-ons you can suggest? Place them in the comments section so others can also benefit!

My Goals For MikeWagan.Net

They say you have to have a target or goal before you can succeed. I just started this blog and I am still learning things about SEO and blogging and I have also seen the success of other bloggers in this field. With that, I want to set for myself some goals that I want to achieve on this site. I know it will be a rough terrain to conquer, but motivation is the key to success. And a person can be motivated if he/she will set goals to himself. So here I list down the things I want to accomplish with my blog.

My short-term goals:

1. Earn my first $100 from Google Adsense.


2. Earn $500 in one month (with Adsense and other money generators).


3. Get my first 100 subscribers.


4. Make 100 blog entries.


5. Achieve at least 300 visitors per day.


6. Other short-term goals I might think of in the future.

My long-term goals:

1. Constantly pay our utility bills with the money I earn from blogging.


2. Buy something big (car, house?) with my online earnings.


3. Get my own private server.


4. Earn $1000 monthly or more from blogging.


5. Keep on earning online until I die (hehe).

I'm not an expert with SEO or blogging, but I hope to accomplish these goals in the future. What do you guys think? Any tips from the 'masters'?

MikeWagan.net is Alive!

May 01, 2009 is the date when this site got live. Labor Day in the Philippines. I got the hosting FREE for two years from the promo of DreamHost for the Geocities refugees (thanks to my lovely wife for informing me about the promo). Good thing I had my CMSC2 (introductory course for the Internet) project uploaded on Geocities back in 2005, and I was one of the lucky 1000 who got the free hosting. I was blogging on Blogger.com for quite a while and I was aiming at gaining some amount of SEO juice from it, but time passed and I gave up because I needed Wordpress to succeed. But at that time I lacked the resources to pursue 'money blogging', but this day changed all that.

I'd still be playing around with this fresh install of Wordpress and do some tweaks to make this site how I want it to be.

Goodluck to us in blogging! Aude et spera!

Blogging on a Free Webhost

I've started a Wordpress blog a few weeks ago on a free domain server and free web host provider to try out and see if I can achieve a certain level of SEO success from my Daddy Mike blog. So far, I've posted three entries already and everything is going well. I've started to optimize one post for the steve vai guitar keyword, and I'll see if I can get on top of Google for that keyword.

I also posted a how-to for those who also want to set-up a self-hosted Wordpress blog without spending a dime!

Here are some of my observations on the free WP blog I've created:

• no 404 not found errors so far
• the shared MySQL server timed-out a few times already
• reasonable connection times so far; no unfinished loading on pages
• few visitors already found the blog
• not yet tested on sudden surges of traffic
• support is hard to find, usually in community forums and other blogs

I'm not expecting my new blog to be capable of accomodating thousands of visitors everyday, since even dedicated web servers suffer overload on high traffic sites, but if I earn a reasonable amount from that blog, I'll have it hosted on a paid server so I can have an assurance of reliable service.

I'll be posting updates about the growth of my Daddy Mike blog. I'm hopeful I can achieve the least of my goals on it.

Jian's First Haircut

After his first birthday, we scheduled one weekend to take Jian to Festival Mall to have his first haircut at Hairplay. I am so glad as a father, seeing my baby turning into a young boy. His looks have changed when his long hair was cut shorter and we can see his cute face much better. I love his new look! Before we had to clip or "ponytail" (anu ba term dun?) his hair because it was so long and it covered his face, he can't see well and always scratches his head trying to take his blocking hair aside. When we go outside, people even mistake him as a girl, saying "ang ganda naman ng baby" and we'd go with a reply "pogi po". That was quite annoying for me, since I don't want my unico hijo to be mistaken as a girl. 

Here are some action shots of Jian's first haircut: 

We were strolling at the mall, and when we pass by the carousel (Festival mall has a 2-level carousel inside, for those who haven't been there yet), Jian would always point to it and shouts his little "I wanna go there" murmur. So we went there and treated Jian to the carousel ride. He was so jolly riding the carousel and we were also the ONLY riders at that time, so I had the luxury to position myself for a great video:

We strolled again some more and we saw these kiddie bicycles for sale. Jian, again, was pointing to them and acts like he wants to go down from my arms and ride a bike. I didn't let him ride, and good thing he didn't cry or turn into tantrums (hindi naman sya talaga tinotopak, hehe). But then we passed by another kiddie ride, the one where you ride animal-shaped electric motorized cute thingies and have to insert some tokens. After the ride was over, Jian didn't want to get out of it. Here is the shot with me trying to get Jian up:

Our baby is really turning into a kid now. It's really a pleasure to a parent seeing your child grow and being there and sharing with his milestones.

Before They Were Bigtime...

http://web.archive.org/web/20070116022405/http://www.macuha.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070809135024/http://www.jehzlau-concepts.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20060426010116/http://www.selaplana.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070213074226/http://www.carlocab.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20071117041000/http://www.batangyagit.com/

Achmed the Dead Terrorist

Achmed the Dead Terrorist

Although this video has been around at least one year, my wife just told me about it yesterday and described how funny it was. So I searched for it on Youtube and I thought of sharing it to everyone who haven't watched it yet. Its really hilarious, the guy is a master of his craft.

"I kill you!" - Achmed the Dead Terrorist

Smart Bro Hacks

Smart Bro: How to hack it?

I've recently been experiencing some problems with Smart Bro lately, specifically my internet connection is being disconnected. I don't know if other Smart Bro users have experienced the same problems as I do, but what I heard is that a lot of people are also disappointed with the Smart Bro service. That's why people are trying to hack the Smart Bro Wifi internet service. But how do they do it?


Some hacks to increase the speed of the Smart Bro internet is to change some settings with the canopy (if you still have the canopy antenna). Others use certain software to change the settings on how the antenna connects to the internet. I haven't tried out these things yet but you can search them, they're just around the net.

Does Smart Bro suck? For me, I've just been experiencing this problems now but Smart Bro here in our location seems to be a fairly good internet service provider. I just hope they have an upgrade to increase the speed of my internet.

You can try out my Top 10 Freewares to boost up your computer's performance.

Jian Ezekiel's First Birthday

Jian Ezekiel's First Birthday Preparations with Mommy Ianne

Our little angel, Jian, celebrated his first birthday last sunday, February 15, 2009 (although his actual birthday was on Feb 16, a day after). We were quite short of time with the preparation and giving away the invitations, so most of the expected guests did not arrive (most friends and relatives). But still it was really an enjoyable moment because the kids really enjoyed the party. More pictures after the jump...

food for the guest kids

loot bags and prizes for the kiddies

preparations for the party

Mommy Ianne and Jian overseeing the preparations

Me helping out arranging the balloons

This is where the food was served

Daddy and Mommy with Jian

Jian's first birthday cake

Kids having fun watching the clowns

Some funny parlor games... who's the winner?

Jian's Uncle RD and Auntie Tean with their friends dancing Waltz for the crowd 

Another dance number from the dancers

The girls wanted to have a solo number to strut their stuff 

Jian's piñata prepared and popped by his Lolo Uncle Jojo

Some more parlor games for the kids

Pictorial (from left to right): Lolo Cris, Lola Luz, Daddy Mike, Mommy Ianne, Mama Maris, Papa Hermie, Jian at the center, clowns at both ends, and some 'singit' kids

Tired Jian after the party

The party went well, and I'm really glad everyone was happy. I had a great time watching the kids laugh and enjoy the clowns. It was tiring, yes, but it was all worth it for our cute little angel. 

Thank you, Dear God, for bringing our little angel, Jian Ezekiel, into our lives.

Top 10 Geeky Gifts for Valentines

We're two days away from Valentines day! Do you have the perfect gift for your loved one already? In case your partner is of the geeky type, here is my Top 10 Geeky Gifts for Valentines for your significant other!


10. Geek love poem shirt - if your partner get the first two lines, he/she is mildly geeky, if the thrid and fourth lines are a snatch, they're spending too much time surfing the net already!

9. Holographic Candlelit Dinner Kit - Ok, this is a geek list right? Amaze yourself and your partner with a special holographic candlelit dinner. Light up the little candle, wear your holographic eyewear and you'll see hearts floating in front of your eyes.
8. LED Binary Watch - Mrs. Geek, this is the perfect gift for your man. Every man loves a masculine, bulky wrist watch. Take it a step further and challenge him to decode 8-bit characters when he looks at his Binary watch to check time.
7. The Ex Unique Knife Holder - Valentines is not only for happy couples. This gift is for your ex's. A very threatening knife holder, knives included! Wrap this extra special and leave it in front of your ex's door. Your ex would love it!
6. 3D Valentine's day Card - So you bought the Holographic Candlelit Dinner kit, why not do a follow-up and hand her over this 3D Valentine's day Card. You're geeky girlfriend might just give you a virtual kiss.
5. Mythbusters Knitted Dolls - Girls love cute things, geeky girls love cute and geeky things! What's gonna be geekier than the Mythbusters cuddly knitted dolls?
4. 8-Bit Dynamic Life Shirt - The closer you get, the more hearts light up. Proximity-based lovin'!
3. Firejewel - Love her for eternity like a glowing fire, and show it through the Firejewel! Just make sure you change the batteries every 60 hours or so.
2. USB Aromatheraphy Oil Burner - Have a calm and relaxing date with your partner by giving him/her a nice aromatheraphy powered by your USB port. Spread the WiFi love!
1. HTTPanties - For the naughty guys, this is a perfect gift for your internet-loving girl. Let the HTTP codes do the talking. The white one is a bit scary, though...

Have a happy and geek Valentines!

Sources: ThinkGeek.com for most of them, Mythbusters dolls and Firejewel which I StumbledUpon..