This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz
by Douglas Clifton.
Original Post: Site Info Bookmarks Toolbar Folder
Feed Title: blogZero
Feed URL: http://loadaveragezero.com/app/s9y/index.php?/feeds/index.rss1
Feed Description: Web Development News, Culture and Opinion
Most site owners and bloggers are obsessed with checking their traffic stats. I suppose I'm no exception. Frankly, I'm getting my ass kicked by many of the places I haunt. I'm a proud member of the Long Tail club. Hey, the world needs D-listers too.
This led to another pastime—I found myself spending a considerable amount of it investigating other people's sites. How much traffic do they get? Who links to them? Of the folks who bookmark them, what other sites are they bookmarking using the same tags? Who blogs about them? Are they listed on DMOZ? And so on...
Being a lazy sort, I found myself filling up my bookmarks toolbar with one JavaScript link (aka favlet or bookmarklet) after another, until they finally spilled off the right side of the toolbar into one of those auto-generated dropdowns. At that point it was pretty obvious a pattern was emerging, so I created a folder, cleaned up the list, and stuck them all in there for easy access.
Today I figured I can't be alone in this pursuit, so I thought I'd share the list and show you how to create a Site Info folder of your own. Afterwards, from any site you're visiting, you can access all of them lickity-click. These instructions are for Firefox, although I suppose you could set-up something similar with other browsers. I'll leave that to you.
First, create the folder: right click on your bookmarks toolbar and select "New Folder..." You can name it whatever you want, Site Info made sense me. Next, one-by-one from the following list, drag and drop these links into the folder. You can always delete some of them later if you don't find them useful. Or dump the whole damn folder if you want to.
When you're done, you should have something similar to this:
And there you go, a whole plethora of information about any site, just by visiting it and selecting from the list. I've seen extensions that are similar in concept, but to be honest the last thing I need is another one chewing up resources, or adding any more context menu options for that matter. This is a nice solution, and you're not at the mercy of the extension author when it comes to what information you want access to.
To understand how the links work, just study the source. Most of them use simple encodeURIComponent(location) function calls tacked onto the end of another URI. Others, like the link to search ODP are a little more complicated, in that case because you only want to send the top-level domain to the search script. Another quick way to study these links is to right click on one of them from your Site Info folder and select "Properties..."
I actually built the list using PHP, so if you want a closer inspection without digging through all the markup created by this blog software then visit this prototype page. If I add any more, that's where you'll find them anyway. And that reminds me, if anyone out there has any good suggestions, then by all means don't be shy. A good place to poke around and learn more is Jesse Ruderman's bookmarklets list.
That's it, now you can go back to checking your stats...
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Most site owners and bloggers are obsessed with checking their traffic stats. I suppose I'm no exception. Frankly, I'm getting my ass kicked by many of the places I haunt. I'm a proud member of the Long Tail club. Hey, the world needs D-listers too.