I am a Firefox fan. Not a faith based one, but a rational one. I tried most browsers out there, including all the versions of Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Flock and Konqueror. Some were as fast as Firefox, but none had as many plugins and add-on.

Truth be told, I do have some memory leak problems with Firefox 2, resulting in frozen screens once in a while. But it looks like they manage to fix it in the third version of the software.

Anyway all this browser thinking got me curious about what browser you guys use. I know that many of you will need to use more than for work purposes (cross browser testing, Internet Explorer applications, etc), but what is your favorite browser for surfing the web, blogging and similar? Below you will find a poll, but feel free to drop a comment explaining why you like a certain browser over the other as well.

Both worked with a pyramid scheme, and both had a particular smell coming out, if you know what I mean. I knew it, but I went on and promoted them anyway. Why? Because I thought that perhaps I would be able to gain something out of the deal. Not by actually using the products, but by getting people signed under my referral.

AGLOCO was promising money, while BlogRush was promising traffic.

Sure, my readers would be able to sign up and refer other people in turn as well, possibly reaping some benefits as well. But overall it was a selfish motivation, I won’t deny. Here is what I wrote about AGLOCO:

Overall I can say that I am a little bit skeptical about the real opportunities behind this deal. I decided to join nonetheless because it is free and because I was curious. Also since the Viewbar has not been released yet this could be good time to build your referral network. If you want to try it out and join my network, click here.

I did mention that I was a bit skeptical, but I encouraged people to try it out anyway. Have I had more cojones (and less greed) back in the day, I would just have said that the whole deal looked like a scam.

It did teach me a lesson nonetheless: do not put the possibility to earn some bucks, traffic or links above your real opinion and thoughts about things. If you think something is not really useful, do not promote it on your blog just because it has an affiliate scheme and because you could gain something out of it.

It is not easy to follow such path, and I am not here to preach anyone. Regardless, I think it is worth to try it. Your credibility is at the stake, after all.

Update: Sorry if I gave a wrong idea about BlogRush. I don’t think it is at the same level as AGLOCO in any way, which was almost a scam. BlogRush is an actual product, and works for some people. I don’t have anything against traffic exchange widgets, my only issue with it back then was the fact that it was structured under a pyramid scheme.

For me, the idea notebook is the cure to blogger’s block, and I know many other bloggers use the same approach, or at least a similar one. If you don’t already use a notebook or a journal to keep track of your ideas, I highly suggest that you start one as soon as you finish reading this post. If you do already keep a notebook, here are some keys that I have found for maximizing its effectiveness.

1 – Available When You Need It

The main reason for having an idea journal is to get your ideas on paper before you forget them. Most of us have plenty of ideas, they just don’t come at the most convenient times. With an idea journal you can write down your ideas as they come, and then when you have time to write you can refer to the journal for possible post ideas. If you just leave your journal next to your computer it will not be very effective.

2 – Organized

In just a short amount of time your idea journal can become a cluttered mess if there isn’t some organization. At that point it becomes a headache to find the right ideas when you go back through the journal. How you organize it is not so important, it just needs to be organized in a way that will work for you. Personally, I like to keep lists of ideas in different categories. I have a list for blogging-related topics, web design, marketing and social media, and even for linkbait posts. I have found that the categorized list also works well for coming up with more ideas through brainstorming.

3 – More Ideas Than Posts

Regardless of what topics you cover at your blog, you’ll probably not want to post about every idea that comes to you. While my idea journal is flowing with potential posts, I know that many of them will never develop into posts that are worthy of being published. I write down ideas that are lonshots because they may lead to other ideas or they may develop into something more significant with time. Hopefully, your idea journal will lead to a huge number of ideas, then you can choose the best ones and turn them into posts that get published on your blog.

4 – Ongoing

The idea journal should always be a work in progress. Add new ideas whenever possible. If it sits for a long period of time without any new additions you’ll see a lack of fresh ideas and your results will suffer.

5 – Free Flowing

With an idea journal you don’t want to judge your ideas right away. If you have an idea for a post, even if it doesn’t seem that great, write it down. Later you can go back and find the gems that lead to your best posts, but try to avoid judging ideas too early. Let them flow freely.

6 – Experimental

Personally, I like to experiment with outlines of potential posts in my idea journal before devoting my time to writing the post. The outline will help me to create a structure for the post that will make the writing process much easier, plus I can quickly see if the idea just isn’t developing into a strong post. This way I don’t waste time writing posts that have little chance of being published. By the time I get to writing the post I’m convinced that it’s a fairly strong idea.

7 – Individualized

Your idea journal should be your idea journal. Whatever methods work best for you should be used. We all have different ways of learning and working most effectively, so don’t try to force someone else’s habits on yourself. If some of my points here simply won’t work for you, adjust them or replace them with other methods that will work.

8 – Updated

Because of the large number of things you’ll have written in your idea journal, try to keep it up-to-date. When you have used an idea and published a post, cross it off or get rid of it somehow. It can be frustrating to flip through your ideas and see only things you have already published in recent weeks. I like to cross off ideas as soon as they’re done and through out my pages with outlines of published posts. This helps me to keep the journal to a manageable size.

9 – Prioritized

Some of your ideas will be better than others. Some will be more time-sensitive than others. For these reasons, it’s helpful to have some system for prioritizing your ideas. I simply put a star next to the ones that I want to focus on in the very near future. That way the quickly stand out to me and I can get them developed as soon as I have some time.

What’s Your Experience?

Do you keep an idea journal? What have you found to be the keys to success with managing your ideas?

Here comes the second one. It is a much shorter video talking about a simple rule of web usability: let your users perform what they are trying to in as few clicks as possible.

If you would like to subscribe to my channel on YouTube, here is the link.

Here is a rough transcript:

Hello guys, today I want to talk about a simple yet often overlooked rule of web usability.

The rule is: you should let your user perform whatever tasks hey are trying to, or find whatever information they are looking for, in as few clicks as possible.

This point came into my mind when I was checking my email another day.

At yahoo mail you will notice that right after you log into your account you will be presented with a screen that looks like this one.

The problem I see here is the fact that is does not let me access my email
messages straight away,

Instead I am forced to make one extra click before i can actually see them.

It might appear like a small detail, but this extra click basically represents a 100% increase on the number of clicks that i need to access my email messages.

Sure, we are talking about seconds, but over the the time they can add up, apart from the fact that it is also pretty annoying for the user.

So how does this rule apply to blogs?

Well you should keep in mind in all the navigation structures that you have around.

For example, check the archives section of this blog, you will notice that I need to click
on “Archives,” then on the desired category, and then on the post I am looking for, so I
need 3 clicks to access an archived post on this blog.

I think one could do better; if you take a look at my archives page, for instance, you will see that all posts ever published in this blog are 2 clicks away, from all the other pages.

Same thing for the categories, right after the first click you can already see all the posts filed there.

So that is, whenever you are designing a blog or website, remember that you should let the user perform whatever he is trying to in a few clicks as possible.

If for some reason you can’t see the video player, here is the YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8OKcNGbjmk

This made me curious and went to check for myself. The first thing I wanted to know was if my post was indexed already by Google or not. I copied one sentence from the post and search it in Google, with quotation marks to find only exact matches. The result was pretty surprising: Google had already indexed 2 scraper sites, but my original post was not on their index yet, as the image below illustrates:

I repeated the search query today, and my post is now showing on the first position. Regardless, I find it pretty weird that Google would index first scraping material and only afterwards the original source. The same thing was happening to the indexation of the backlinks.

Anyone know what could be the cause for this flaw?