For those of you that haven’t seen much of fluffanutta’s work, he has several tools that are absolutely essential for managing lenses and getting the most out of squidoo.

I use all of these tools, and all are currently free to use.

• Firefox Add-on for Squidoo – This extension uses Greasemonkey to show some cool summaries, graphs, shortcuts and more on your dashboard, workshop, and individual lens stat pages. It consumes almost no system resources and saves me tons of time on a regular basis. If you haven’t updated your version of the addon recently, click over real quick and get the latest version, it’s fantastic!
• Squidoo Toolbar - Can you say one-click login into each of your accounts? This toolbar does this and more. Note: I’m currently working with fluffanutta to bring even more little tools and tricks to the toolbar so make sure and grab it so you are ready to roll when we release some of this stuff!
• SquidUtils – You can’t forget where it all begins. SquidUtils has everything from table makers, amazon links and stat tracking, ping services, and TONS of other good stuff. If you haven’t been by in a while, it’s definitely worth spending some time looking around there as there is a ton of new squidoo tools there.

Squidoo Lens Editing

Greasemonkey – This lets you add little mini scripts to your browser (don’t worry you have to push one button and that’s it). In a less frightening description, it makes web pages look and work cooler. As a corollary, you must download The Fluffanutta’s script that soups up your Squidoo Dashboard and Workshop. (It only works for FF right now, IE support is supposedly on the way..)

Scribefire - I’ve written about Scribefire before and what I said then still holds true. I use it all the time when flipping between tabs in FireFox and I want to keep data or content in one place.

Squidoo Plugin – The official plugin released by HQ. It allows you to add your current page as a link on any one of your lenses, placing it in either a link list or a link plexo. This is incredibly useful if you remember you have it available..

SEO / Analysis -

SEO For FireFox – Awesome plugin by Aaron Wall at SEO Book. Shows backlinks and other relevent data on top of your search results as well as lets you easily see which links are no-followed on the page.

SEO RankChecker - Part two of SEO Book’s must have plugins is the SEO Rank Checker. Use it to monitor your search engine rankings for specific terms on all three search engines by domain and by keyword. Awesome Tool.

Compete.com Toolbar (aff.)- Shows you estimated people counts and site rankings for whatever site you are on, also adds more cool information to your search results. This is a good one to check out if sites you are looking to submit links or content too actually get any traffic.

Bookmarking / Networking -

StumbleUpon Toolbar – I use this a lot for doing market research with StumbleUpon as well as for reviewing and tagging sites (and lenses). Don’t go ‘thumbing’ all of your lenses at once, but when used judiciously it can pack a punch. Oh yea, and it’s a great fix for when you are feeling burnt out.

I usually have another toolbar of whatever social bookmarking site I’m hot on at the moment, but the only one I’ve consistently used over the last year is StumbleUpon.

I would also advise getting a Google/Yahoo/MSN toolbar just for easy searching and bookmark management as well.

This isn’t a comprehensive count of all the plugins I use, but these are the ones I use most often. Try a few of them out and see if they improve your performance or researching for Squidoo.

Got a plugin I’ve clearly missed? Let me know!

Essentially, you can create a firefox bookmark that allows you to type ‘tag search+tag+here‘ into your Firefox address bar and instantly pull up the related squidoo tag page for that search term.

This is a great way to avoid having ’stranded’ tag pages that your lens links to.

Thanks for the great tip Drew!