I thought I’d write a random post with some of what’s on my mind this weekend.

• I’m now running Firefox 3 betas thanks to MultiFireFox.
• MidnightFox was updated the other day with incorrect buttons.  Oops.  That has been re-uploaded and should be made public soon.
• yExplore and GA? have been updated for Firefox 3. Actually, for the beats not the official release.  That’ll happen when the final release comes out.
• Now that I am running Firefox 3, I can start theming it.
• Just started to watch Entourage.  It seems like a pretty cool show.

It shouldn’t bother me, and it really doesn’t, but I’ve been #3 in Google for Thomas McMahon for years now. I’m being beat out by a dead guy; twice.

Granted, I think that even being dead, he’s got better link love. He’s a Harvard grad that has written eighty scientific papers, two scientific books, had six inventions patented, and published three novels. Yea, well I’ve created like eight Firefox themes.

If you’d like to help me beat out Thomas McMahon (Harvard guy) in Google searches, link back to this post (or www.twistermc.com) with ‘Thomas McMahon’ as your link text. If you want to vote for the other guy, well that’s just rude.

Google Analytics recently updated their tracking code. In doing so, my GA? Firefox extension didn’t recognize the newer code. However, with a few new lines of code, the GA? Firefox extension works with the old and new Google tracking code.

Thanks to those who wrote in requesting the update. It really helps me get a feel for who’s using it.

It seems that almost every Google search shows Wikipedia in the top ten. Wikipedia is the best result for almost everything according to Google. Well now Apple’s jumped on the Wikipedia bandwagon too.

In the latest version of MacOSX, Wikipedia has it’s own tab in the dictionary. It’ll connect up to the internet and do your Wikipedia search for you.

I kind of have mixed feelings on this. Wikipedia is a good source for information, but is it really worthy of beign added into the OS? We never added any other type of encyclopedia service in the past. On the other hand, Wikipedia is very nice for researching topics. They seem to have all the facts and a good community driven site. So I guess it’s not a bad thing.

The new version of GA? has been released. The Google Analytics detector now re-checks each page as you switch between tabs to ensure the status bar icon is kept up to date. This was a big enhancement for me as I’ve always got multiple tabs open.

However, with advancements comes a few more bug reports.

1. GA? doesn’t update the status bar icon when switching between windows . Actually this may be a non issue. I’m still thinking that one over.

If you use yExplore, you may have noticed that it’s stopped working properly lately. This is due to a change made by Yahoo Site Explorer. The good news is it’s been fixed!

yExplore 1.6.1 has been updated and released!

The new version updates the domain URL structure to work correctly with the updated Yahoo Site Explorer. It also adds in support for newer versions of Flock and adds Netscape 9.0 support.

Enjoy!

Link building is hard work. I know, I’ve done it. However, it’s the quality of the message and targeting the individual that matters the most.

Now, lets forget the basics of personalization here and just focus on the message I received:

At what point would you pitch a blogger who has got a design background when you can’t even get your fonts to match?! There are bold, italic, all caps, and more than one font in use in this email. My first impression of comes from your email and that’s definitely not a good one.

Google Analytics is a great program, but add in Adobe AIR and it becomes even better with the Google Analytics Reporting Suite module. It’s a stand alone application that gives you direct access into your Google Analytics account with a few great features thrown in.

The first thing I love is the ability to have multiple profiles.

I have a handful of profiles and where as switching between each one isn’t to difficult in Google Analytics, it is a bit tedious. With Google Analytics Reporting Suite, I can save profiles (aka bookmarks) for each account I want to access. Then I just double click and I’m in. No more having to load the GA website, enter a password, choose a profile then a site and then getting to the stats. This is just so much simpler.

YouTube has long been the goto place to find anything you missed from TV, or just to watch things you’d never see on TV. However, lately, it just seems like it’s being spammed more and more.

In this example, I searched for Carrie Underwood and got a bit of spam instead.

Since YouTube is owned by Google, you’d think they could detect this. Tons of keywords strung together should be pretty easy to detect. Or what about noticing that a video is tagged with nude or porn but it’s not marked as adult? How hard would it be to detect that? Or what about videos that have the same title, same description, same running time and that were uploaded at the same time? Can we say duplicate content? It seems Google’s SEO rules are not in play at YouTube.

If you’ve tried out GA? or Google Personalized Search Switch, please take a moment to either add a comment over at the extension’s page on the Mozilla Addon site (they are in the sandbox) or on the individual blog posts. The reviews will help me get them onto the public Addon site faster and out to the general public. They’ll also help me find out if there are any bugs that need to be fixed up.

Each extension will be undergoing some updates as I work towards version 1.0, but testing is a big part.

Thanks