If you have a web site or blog, you probably rely on web analytics to understand about your visitors. It provides a way for you to know

1. How they found your site
2. The items on your site they find interesting and
3. Location information about your visitors.

The best known and most widely used web analytics tool is Google Analytics. There are over 80 reports that can be accessed to track and analyze the health of your web site/blog. Additionally, it also has an ad hoc reporting function that allows you to further tailor these 80 reports, or create your own from scratch. There are other tasks that allow you to monitor vistors’ paths on your site/blog, monitor your AdWords, group similar visits together, etc. What if you were able to extend the functions that Google Analytics offer? There is a Firefox add-on that will allow you to do that. It’s called the Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension.

Having a visual view of something is usually helpful to many people. It’s one of the reasons that charts, graphs, and mind maps are widely used as an aid to represent data that would just be numbers or text. Browsers (e.g. Chrome, Safari, and Opera) have started to have a way to visually view your most-visited web sites all on one page. However, Mozilla Firefox, which is one of the most used browsers, doesn’t have the functionality. What if it did? What if it also helped you view your entire web-searching history? This is where History Tree can help.

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey.

By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

Not too long ago I started looking around for an easy way to post to some of the blogs I write for. The first thing that came to mind, since I was already using it to write, was to use the publish option in Google Docs to post. If you use the free hosting sites like Blogger, Wordpress.com or Livejournal to name a few, this will do the trick. This is also a viable option if  you post to a site using that uses the Blogger, Metaweblog or Moveable Type API. Where Google falls short is if you need to post to multiple sites.

I went on a hunt and found a couple different choices. To be honest, I tried the Firefox add-on Scribefire first; I never quite got to the second one. The reason I didn’t go any further is it did what I needed it to do and it did it well. Scribefire lets me post to multiple blogs, storing of notes and uploads images. I can work on multiple posts at the same time by opening different tabs. This smart little Firefox add-on auto saves my progress while I work and also when I close the editing window.

Like many of you, I use a LOT of different computers. Some at home, some at work, some in between. Many of these computers have more than one operating system installed, and those operating systems may have more than one browser. All this leaves a LOT of places you may have saved your bookmarks. What’s saved on one might not be saved on another, or perhaps you reformatted your OS and forgot to backup your favorite websites. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to solve this problem, and today we’ll be covering some of them. Each of the programs/toolbars/extensions we’ll try out today can store your bookmarks outside your browser so that they can be accessed from anywhere.

If you keep up on tech news, you’ve doubtlessly seen all the hype surrounding Wolfram|Alpha, the new not-exactly-search-engine that’s making big waves in the web search industry. Your traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc all work on the same basic principle: finding web pages based on keywords. Wolfram|Alpha isn’t about bringing web pages to the user, it’s about bringing information to the user.

Let’s say you open up Google and enter a query like “Princess Bride Cast”. You’d get results linking to several pages with info on who was in that cinematic masterpiece. It would probably look something like this:

If you travel to foreign countries or are not from US, Firefox has the annoying habit of returning search results in a language based on the nationality of the service provider. When I was at home in France, it’d default to Google.fr, but at work in Switzerland it would default to Google.ch.

Here is a simple trick to default your search to Google.com, regardless of which country you are in.

A feature of Firefox that often gets overlooked is the keyword system. Firefox can be set up to accept keywords to do things like open a favorite page or search a particular website. Today we’ll try out some of the things you can do with keywords.

I like using the keyboard as much as possible because it makes me feel more productive. In my opinion, moving your hand over to the mouse is unnecessary the majority of the time because most applications provide very convenient keyboard shortcuts.  Today we will discuss the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to navigate the Internet faster, thus getting more work (or play) done.

iMacros is a nifty Firefox extension that allows you to save loads of time by letting you record repetitive tasks such as filling out forms, email, and more without the need of any sort of special skills!

End the terrible thought of having to manually conduct every task that requires your attention on the web and “employ” the use of a more effective, time saving, accurate app.