Brandon Buttars

Well by now most of know all about web browser toolbars. Google has one, Yahoo has one, there are a lot of big companies that have them. It makes you look like you are serious and know what you’re doing when you have one. Well the topic of this post is a company that I found that will let you set up your own browser toolbar. This can help you create more return visits to your site and also make you look a little big bigger in your market.

Effective Brand is the company that does it and there are some great features that can be added. One other aspect to this toolbar too is that the toolbars are compatable with IE and Firefox. To set the toolbar up you have to use IE though. They are working on that.

You can first customize the toolbar by putting your logo on it or even a text title if you would like. Then there is a search box. You can also make specific links that install by default on the toolbar. RSS Feeds are built in also and you can make the toolbar automatically subscribed to those feeds.

Here is a quote that Effective Brand sent me when I requested one from them:

In fact, EffectiveBrand has a huge fan following of over 3million users and over 110,000 businesses who have created and deployed their own custom toolbar.

These site owners tell us that visitors who downloaded their toolbar doubled their visits and increased the interaction with their Web site using the toolbar! Clearly offering a custom toolbar establish a new communication channel between you & your visitors beyond the boundaries of your Web site. Since the toolbar is free, easy to create, maintain and launch (you even get your own banners), the question is not should you do it but why wouldn’t you do it?

There are a lot of advantages to the toolbars, but the best thing that you can do is to just check it out.

Flock Browser

Well if you haven’t checked it out yet, you better check it out now. What am I talking about? The Flock Browser. It is a lot like Firefox but with a lot more bells and whistles and hella features by default. If you are a blogger, the Flock Browser is definately for you. You can write new posts in the Flock Browser, and if you use Flickr, you can easily drag and drop your images to and from your Flickr account within a very awesome menu bar that appears up top. The Flock Browser also has the best RSS Reader system that I have seen built into a browser. The latest update even has what is called a Code Snippet that allows you to drag and drop code and/or images and save them for later.

It not only functions real well and has a lot of browsing features, it also looks pretty dang tight.

It’s free and still in development so it’s only getting better. One of my favorite things is the Favorite system. You can actually save all of your web favorites in Del.icio.us and you can also share your favorites among all your different computers. Syncronizing your favorites list.

The Flock Browser is the ultimate web browser and I would dare to say going to be the best internet browser that you can get. To hell with IE. If you didn’t know there were other web browsers out there, get off you ignorant mouse and go download the best internet browser on the web, the Flock Browser.

From it’s jammed packed features and the Web 2.0 feel, to the synchronization of all your favorites and the ease of using Flickr and your blog, you got to try this web browser out.

Once you’ve checked it out, let me know what you think. Comment and give me your opinion. Flock Browser being the best internet browser on the web is my opinion. I want to hear yours.

Download Flock Browser

I first discovered ALLofMP3 from TechCrunch and I thought I would give it a look. You might say that it’s dirt cheap marketplace for music. You can also pick the format you want to download the file in, MP3 or whatever. The pricing is insane. After paying $0.99 a song many other places, you can pick up a song for around $0.10 a song and you can pick up an entire album for under $2.00. Tell me you aren’t turned on by that offer. Every format has a different cost, but for example I downloaded the best quality MP3 format I could and it cost me $0.18. Check it out. When you sign up you automatically get a $0.20 credit to purchase one song. Good way to test things and check how it works.

Along with AllofMP3, there is a program called AllTunes you can download much like the other popular programs out there. You can do your direct purchasing through AllTunes program.

Download AllTunes

Visit AllofMP3

So my website JoomlaStyle! has been out for quite some time and I have been so busy lately that it’s been very hard to focus a lot of my design efforts over to it. I have finally stopped accepting a lot of web design lately so that I can focus my efforts on it. I have recently acquired quite a bit of CSS knowledge and tips and tricks so I will be developing some top secret Joomla templates that should be great because there will be multiple versions of the template all from one template. I’m sure I will create some forum buzz once everything is ready to go.

JoomlaStyle!

For those of you reading this that don’t know what Joomla is, it’s the best CMS ever created. It’s a great way to manage your website. It has an easy to use back end administrator. It’s not for the average person. You have to be able to figure out things yourself by searching for answers in the Joomla Forum. So I don’t recommend it for the beginner, but those of you with a little more experience I highly recommend it.

Joomla is the bomb!

So I saw a commercial on TV today and it was advertising a company called Instant Media. Their web address was www.im.com so I thought I would go check it out. Geez am I glad I did. It does tons of great things and has some really great features.I don’t know if most of you know what a podcast is, but since you are reading my blog I’m going to assume that you know what a blog is. Well a podcast is pretty much a blog in audio format. It is attached to an RSS Feed which means you can subscribe to it. When you subscribe to an RSS Feed whether it be a normal blog or a podcast, the blogs content will be delivered to your desktop to a program called an aggregator or a reader. But enough education on that. Maybe I’ll post on that topic. For now I am going to help you understand why Instant Media is such the bomb program.

Instant Media is more or less an RSS Reader or Aggregator, but it takes it to the next level. We have normal RSS Feed that just deliver content and we have RSS Feeds that will deliver PodCasts, which is audio that can be downloaded. Well Instant Media takes it to the next level of a VideoCast. We know that video is the next wave of technology. Since internet connections are getting faster and video creation is getting easier it’s a no brainer that sooner or later this would be something that we ran into.

You can subscribe to any type of an RSS Feed with Instant Media and you can also subscribe to different channels and buy movies through Instant Media. It claims that a lot of the videos are delivered in High Definition. Mix that with a Media Center PC or any type of a computer that you could use with your home entertainment and instantly only watch what you want and read only the news you want.

I contacted Instant Media just to see what type of a response I got. I told them that I was doing a review. I even asked them throw me a quick blurb of how they would describe their product. They emailed me back within 10 minutes. With a response like that, why wouldn’t you want to check out their product. This is what they said in reply:

Andy Leak, CEO of Instant Media

Thanks Brandon,

Instant Media (I’M) offers a free, breakthrough software that delivers high-definition shows over the Internet. Unlike traditional streaming video, I’M’s patent-pending caching technology enables the highest quality, full-screen viewing experience on the market today. I’M’s free software can be downloaded at www.im.com

I recommend that you download it today. It’s FREE and you may as well jump on the bandwagon before it gets too crowded.

TechCrunch

Well I don’t know if many of you have been paying much attention to what’s happening on the internet now a days, but it’s becoming very interactive and very dynamic.  Often times you’ll here things referred to as Web 2.0.  There are a lot of new technologies that make the new and remodeled web a lot more interactive like AJAX and a few others.  If you haven’t already subscribed the the RSS feed on TechCrunch.com, I highly recommend it.  It always posts the latest and greatest in Web 2.0.  You can find a lot of often times free solutions for some of the things that you may be trying to do with your website.  There’s a great index on the site that tells you about all the companies that post their products on TechCrunch.

There’s always something new and unique on TechCrunch so I recommend checking it out often.  A lot of my technology reviews will most likely be inspired by TechCrunch.